| Resumo: | This chapter focuses on three aspects of pre-industrial European economic history and the possible relationships between them. The first, based on a growing body of recent studies, concerns the long-term growth experienced by the European economy over the two and a half centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, or, at least, by important parts of it. It was an unequal process, in terms of time and space, which had as one of its consequences the emergence, by the eighteenth century, of significant differences of income per capita that may have helped to shape the course of industrialization over the next century or so. The second is a correlate of the first and refers to the probable rise in the standard of living over the same period. Once again, it was an uneven evolution, with a very diverse impact on social groups, gender, and the rural/urban divide, as well as on nations and the regions within them. The third aspect has to do with the remarkable increase in human capital that accompanied these other two processes and, especially, the unprecedented rise in literacy that was a part of it. This too was hardly a homogeneous or linear development, either spatially or temporally, and its causes and consequences have yet to be clearly understood.
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