Work Place Violence

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Industrial Revolution and the Boom of Middle Class

[Name of the Author]

[Name of the Institution]

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Industrial Revolution and the Boom of Middle Class

Introduction

It is argued that it was the industrial Revolution's

social and economic changes that brought about the middle

class. This paper is intended to expand upon this argument

and try to reach a conclusion.

There have been distinct periods of interpretation,

each shaped by the contemporary conditions experienced by

the historians who developed them. Late nineteenth-century

British commentators saw the Industrial Revolution as a

sharp technological break with the past, a break that was

not only big but heavy with cataclysmic consequences for

ordinary people.

In this paper it is argued that middle class was came

into existence due to the industrial revolution.

Industrial Revolution and the Boom of the Middle Class

The new paradigm was, like the first, influenced by

contemporary problems, this time those of the "Third World"

and its "underdeveloped" countries.1 Its proponents analyzed

the Industrial Revolution as the first example of successful

economic development; they focused on the long-run rise of

1 Rose, Sonya O., Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Glass in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1992), pp. 8, 9, 13, 16.

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the standard of living for the majority in developed

economies. As the passage of time demonstrated the limited

results of "development policy" for Third World countries

and the late 1970s and early 1980s revealed the

unanticipated fragility of western economies during that

period's international economic restructuring, economic

historians began to look with different eyes at the past.

Important also in this regard was the accumulating evidence

from comparative histories of industrialization in national

states other than Britain. Today's themes are evolutionary

change rather than revolution, uneven development, and

limits to growth; economic and social historians challenge

technological determinist arguments and again acknowledge

losses as well as gains in the process.

If capitalist industrialization occurred gradually, if

it involved demographic and socio-cultural as well as

technological factors, if it meant regional or sectoral

decline as well as progress, then a sociological approach,

one that links changes in ordinary people's lives (and

variation among groups) with those on the level of changing

economic structures, can broaden our understanding of the

process. Enter the social history of women; here, studies of

the factors that contributed to slow change, capital

accumulation, and class formation have been important.

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Women's history, in its focus on the small scale context of

large scale change, suggests mechanisms which mediated

change, moderating the discontinuities involved. Like the

late Victorian studies of the Industrial Revolution, it

again emphasizes human costs as well as long-term benefits.

Basis of Middle Class Formation

The concept of a consumer society is integral to

thinking about links among women, gender, and

industrialization. Consumer society, like the rising

bourgeoisie, had a long gestation. Joan Thirsk places its

beginnings in early modern England; by the early seventeenth

century, "project" had become a key word. Projects

("practical scheme[s] for exploiting material things; [a

project] was capable of being realized through industry and

ingenuity") were developed to make money, to give work to

the poor, to trade with distant countries, or to substitute

for imports. They ranged from new methods of iron founding,

weaving worsted woolen fabrics, and growing woad, to making

pins, paper, lace, or thread (Thirsk, 1978, p. 1).

"The goods which