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Industrialization in the Atlantic changed the entire course of the region. The rise of industry and capitalism in the area changed the lives of people of all levels of the economic ladder on both sides of the Atlantic. Two concepts that I found to be the most interesting where: industry helped to shrink the Atlantic and that the Industrial Revolution had a large effect on gender roles.
The Atlantic up until this point had felt like several distant areas with minimal contact. It seemed as though the path from Europe to the Americas was a one way street in a lot of ways. The rise of machine in Europe made Europe demand new levels of raw resources that had yet to be seen. Over the course of 40 years the demand for raw cotton went from 2.5 million pounds to 22 million pounds (Egerton et al, 429). The new demand for cotton in Europe made the flow of traffic reverse course and saw a huge influx of American goods enter the European market. The created an interconnected Atlantic not yet seen on a scale like this. Danny shares a perspective that the Europeans created their captialist society and exported it to the Americas, and I think that shows just how these actions shrunk the Atlantic. The Atlantic had become such an interconnected space that these ideas were able to be shared across the ocean with relative ease.
We have spent a majority of the last 2 weeks discussing the way gender roles were changed in the early modern Atlantic world. The Industrial Revolution was not particularly kind to the women of the time period. The authors explain how women would help the household by spinning cotton. This was work that could be done from within the home to bring in some extra money in a time period where people in Europe were struggling. Once the industrialization took place, it took this work out of the home. It did not remove the woman from the economy, because they could work in the factories, but it did make women unable to contribute to the household financially while still being home with in their domestic roles.