Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on developments from about 1500 to 1900, deals with a period of growing international contact, commercial development and ultimately the emergence of the first industrial societies—a key time in which patriarchal traditions were diversely challenged but often reaffirmed. It deals with the establishment of patriarchal frameworks, and basic causes and results and with the affirmation of patriarchy in the early civilizations. The book also focuses on the impact of agriculture in creating the new system of inequality, usually summed up as patriarchalism, and the expansion of interregional contacts from tentative and sporadic levels to more systematic importance. It details, gender patterns in the West itself were changing in complex ways under the impact of increasingly commercial economies and then the first phases of the industrial revolution.