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How did the industrial revolution change the power of the British aristocracy? Why? Who made up the middle class and what were its defining characteristics?

How did the industrial revolution change the power of the British aristocracy? Why? Who made up the middle class and what were its defining characteristics?

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How did the industrial revolution change the power of the British aristocracy? Why? Who made up the middle class and what were its defining characteristics?
The middle class: Those who benefited most from industrialization were members of the middle class. At its upper levels, the middle class contained extremely wealthy factory and mine owners, bankers, and merchants. Such rising businessmen readily assimilated into aristocratic life, buying country houses, obtaining seats in parliament, sending their sons to elite universities, and gratefully accepting titles of nobility from Queen Victoria. Far more numerous were the smaller businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, scientists, and other professionals required in any industrial society. Politically they were liberals, favoring constitutional government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits. Their protest resulted in the Reform Bill of 1832, which broadened the right to vote to many men of the middle class, but not to middle-class women. Ideas of thrift and hard work, a rigid morality, and cleanliness characterized middle-class culture. Women in such middle-class families were increasingly expected to be homemakers, wives, and mothers, charged with creating an emotional haven for their men and a safe place from a heartless and cutthroat capitalist world. They were also the moral center of family life and the educators of "respectability" as well as the managers of consumption as "shopping," a new concept in eighteenth-century Britain, became a central activity. This consumerism became a defining feature of industrial societies.
Transcribed Image Text:The middle class: Those who benefited most from industrialization were members of the middle class. At its upper levels, the middle class contained extremely wealthy factory and mine owners, bankers, and merchants. Such rising businessmen readily assimilated into aristocratic life, buying country houses, obtaining seats in parliament, sending their sons to elite universities, and gratefully accepting titles of nobility from Queen Victoria. Far more numerous were the smaller businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, scientists, and other professionals required in any industrial society. Politically they were liberals, favoring constitutional government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits. Their protest resulted in the Reform Bill of 1832, which broadened the right to vote to many men of the middle class, but not to middle-class women. Ideas of thrift and hard work, a rigid morality, and cleanliness characterized middle-class culture. Women in such middle-class families were increasingly expected to be homemakers, wives, and mothers, charged with creating an emotional haven for their men and a safe place from a heartless and cutthroat capitalist world. They were also the moral center of family life and the educators of "respectability" as well as the managers of consumption as "shopping," a new concept in eighteenth-century Britain, became a central activity. This consumerism became a defining feature of industrial societies.
Industrial Societies The social transformation of the Industrial Revolution both destroyed and created. For many people, it was an enormously painful, even traumatic process, full of social conflict, insecurity, and false starts as well as new opportunities, an eventually higher standard of living, and greater participation in public life. The British Aristocracy: Individual landowning aristocrats, long the dominant class in Britain, suffered little in material terms from the Industrial Revolution. In the mid- nineteenth century, a few thousand families still owned more than half of the cultivated land in Britain, most of it leased to tenant farmers, who in turn employed agricultural wage laborers to work it. Rapidly growing population and urbanization sustained a demand for food products grown on that land. For most of the nineteenth century, landowners continued to dominate the British parliament. As a class, however, the British aristocracy declined. As urban wealth became more important, landed aristocrats had to make way for the up-and-coming businessmen, manufacturers, and bankers who had been newly enriched by the Industrial Revolution.
Transcribed Image Text:Industrial Societies The social transformation of the Industrial Revolution both destroyed and created. For many people, it was an enormously painful, even traumatic process, full of social conflict, insecurity, and false starts as well as new opportunities, an eventually higher standard of living, and greater participation in public life. The British Aristocracy: Individual landowning aristocrats, long the dominant class in Britain, suffered little in material terms from the Industrial Revolution. In the mid- nineteenth century, a few thousand families still owned more than half of the cultivated land in Britain, most of it leased to tenant farmers, who in turn employed agricultural wage laborers to work it. Rapidly growing population and urbanization sustained a demand for food products grown on that land. For most of the nineteenth century, landowners continued to dominate the British parliament. As a class, however, the British aristocracy declined. As urban wealth became more important, landed aristocrats had to make way for the up-and-coming businessmen, manufacturers, and bankers who had been newly enriched by the Industrial Revolution.
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