The changes that undermined the Old Regime were most evident in western Europe. They were in some respects economic revolutions.
In the eighteenth century the pace of economic change was slower than it would be in the nineteenth or twentieth, and it provided less drama than such political upheavals as the American and French revolutions.
Yet in the long run the consequences of the economic “revolutions” were fully as revolutionary as were the political and social ones of 1776 and 1789.
