The essays in this book examine how the West modernized and what that modernization meant to human society, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. Within that frame are several distinct subthemes: the process of industrialization in Europe and elsewhere; social mobility, class structures, and class differences; social unrest and the stresses of modernization and industrialization; economic and social equality and inequality and their markers; the role of women in modernization; and the origins of nationalism. The book's chapters discuss these issues from medieval times through the twentieth century, with particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Contributors
John Bohstedt, Gregory Clark, Theodore Evergates, Claudia Goldin, David Herlihy, Raymond Jonas, Michael Katz, Gloria Main, Franklin Mendels, Joel Mokyr, Gale Stokes, Louis Tilly, Dale Williams, E. A. Wrigley