This inquiry began with the continued puzzlement among scholars about Western Europe's singular role in ushering in the modern world. More precisely, it began by asking why that region was home to major changes that, from about 1500 to 1800, launched the first “models for modernity.” While debate persists, interpreters have usually aligned themselves with one of two camps. The first contends that the dynamism of western Europe at this time, and the “gap” that emerged between European-based societies and others around the world, was owing to the invention there of a vigorous new system of national states. The second argues instead that the energy of early modern western European societies owed far more to their early creation of worldwide capitalist structures.

This book has maintained that what set this region apart, leading to transformation that continues even now to make its way around the globe, was neither of these so-called master processes of political or economic change. Each was obviously important; but both have been presented here as dependent upon the prior evolution within northwestern Europe of a distinctive family and household system whose most crucial feature, late marriage for women, appeared in the manorial regions of northwestern Europe at the end of the Roman Empire. Other elements of the system – that is, nuclear households, significant numbers of persons who never married, a pattern of life-cycle service, and increasingly equal sex ratios at marriageable ages – evolved in the medieval era and were in place throughout the region by the turn of the sixteenth century.