ABSTRACT
Most accounts of the ‘transition to capitalism’ and the ‘rise of the welfare state’ have centered on the experience of Northwestern Europe. Therefore, this region remains an important testing ground, even for revisionist history that hopes to escape the limitations of traditional Eurocentrism. Many factors help to explain why the countries of Northwestern Europe followed a unique trajectory of economic growth that built upon and contributed to their strong international position in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among these were distinctive gender-and age-based structures of constraint. Changes in European families may well have contributed to some aspects of European economic success, but they also created certain problems that social welfare policies sought to address.
