How did traditional social and class systems change with the rise of industrialism and the broadening of the gap between those with growing wealth and power and those without?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Traditional resentments—of merchants by aristocrats, of profiteers by peasants—grew with growing wealth gaps. Little new wealth reached the workers who cultivated or mined raw materials in the unindustrialized world. And it took a long time even for industrial workers to obtain a substantial share in the new prosperity. As the pace of commerce and industrialization speeded up, so did the numbers of people worldwide who were left behind or left out. Even in unindustrialized societies, economic status rivaled age-old ways of determining people's place in society—parentage, ancestry, birthplace, learning, strength, sanctity. Where industry flourished, social change was even more convulsive. Instead of identifying with communities—neighborhoods, cities, provinces, sects, families, clans, big households, ethnic groups—that embraced all levels of rank and prosperity, uprooted people in industrial centers regrouped in what they increasingly called classes. It was a common assumption of nineteenth-century observers in the West that the world was being redrawn along class lines. Some governments even adopted class as a way to categorize their populations. Everyone had a place in the world as a noble, a bourgeois, a peasant, or a worker. In Europe, Karl Marx (1818–1883) championed a new theory of history: that all change was part and product of inevitable class struggles that pitted the rich against those whom they exploited. Marx's view was exaggerated, but it helps to show how people at the time perceived the often traumatic social changes that accompanied the economic changes of the nineteenth century.