StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...

The middle class in urban Britain 1780-1900 - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
The Middle Class in Urban Britain 1780-1900 Name: Institution: Introduction The urban middle class for a long time had been shortchanged and disregarded by regimes. This could comprised of doctors, lawyers, accountants among others. The irony of this is that they formed a significant percentage of the population although they were disregarded…
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER95.2% of users find it useful
The middle class in urban Britain 1780-1900
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "The middle class in urban Britain 1780-1900"

Download file to see previous pages

However, they lacked the modalities to effect the change. It was not until the early nineteenth century that need for change was more strongly expressed by the lower class and the middle class. It is of importance to note that the people who took part and spearheaded this change were the middle class and were the cream in terms of their intellect (Scull, 2005).. Political changes The political arena in Britain was secluded to the mighty and wealthy for a long time, which also refers to the upper class.

It was solely the rich who could rule while the middle class neither had a chance nor could raise their voices to be heard. This is evident even from the governance structure since that it is documented that even from the law making organs, the House of Lords could overrule any law passed by House of Commons. The ugly political face was worse in some areas like old Sarum and Dunwich where the middle class could not vote and a number of legislators were re-elected unjustly. The women were also not allowed to vote, which expressed how democracy was indeed a nightmare to the people being ruled.

This did not quite add up since lawyers were also in the category of the urban middle class (Mitchell, 2002). At that particular time, out of an estimated population of thirty million only about two million were allowed to vote. Inspired by the French protester refugees who moved in at around 1700, there were efforts by the middle class to spearhead their liberation. Several uprisings came up and the continuous pressure led to The Great Reform Act that was landmarked a political change in centuries.

This Act brought political sanity to Britain and many other positive changes.. The imagery constituencies done away with and the members of parliament representation rationally and equitably restructured. Moreover, the most relevant to our discussion is that the middle class were allowed to vote with the exception of women (Scull, 2005). Economical changes Despite being despised, the middle class were relatively wealthy. Most of them had their wealth on land possession. It was just until in the late nineteenth century that he urban middle class began engaging in forms of wealth holdings like the stock market.

In the urban areas in this period, a majority began being wealthy by manufacturing and creating employment. This gave rise to several merchants across Europe at the time and this can attribute to the steady rise in the number of the middle class (Mitchell, 2002). There are some cities that their economical growth was attributed solely to the middle class. An exquisite example is the city of Manchester, which at this period had many projects running in the event of industrial revolution. During the industrial revolution, the whole of Europe had a majority of entrepreneurs comprising of the middle class.

The middle class prompted women to get employment. It important to have in mind that women were considered as housewives for some pretty long time in Britain. This had a large impact to the economy of the middle class, since majority-hired house cleaners to help in the daily domestic chores and this amounted to about forty percent of the female workers (Mitchell, 2002).

...Download file to see next pages Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“The middle class in urban Britain 1780-1900 Essay”, n.d.)
The middle class in urban Britain 1780-1900 Essay. Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/history/1435469-the-middle-class-in-urban-britain
(The Middle Class in Urban Britain 1780-1900 Essay)
The Middle Class in Urban Britain 1780-1900 Essay. https://studentshare.org/history/1435469-the-middle-class-in-urban-britain.
“The Middle Class in Urban Britain 1780-1900 Essay”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/history/1435469-the-middle-class-in-urban-britain.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF The middle class in urban Britain 1780-1900

How Open was the Landed elite during the era 1780 - 1888

Throughout the era 1780-1888, the changing modes of production and political imperatives of different states, shaped not only the extent of powers conferred on the landed elite, but also molded how landed elite responded to the changes.... … Throughout history, there has been interplay between land and power....
18 Pages (4500 words) Essay

England's Policy of Transportation

The harshness of britain's reaction to crime is understandable as upper class citizens feared the pickpockets and thieves and demanded action from the government.... he years of practising a Policy of Transportation did little to impact or reduce britain's criminal population.... hellip; As the industrial revolution took hold in Europe, factories sprung up in the cities and England was rapidly transformed from a rural to an urban society.... As the population of the cities swelled, unemployment rose and low wages created a class of petty criminals whose acts were often aimed at securing food or a meagre subsistence....
5 Pages (1250 words) Essay

The Atlantic Economys Contribution to the Industrial Revolution

The introduction of maize from the Americas would have no substantial impact on the English diet until the middle 19th century after the Industrial Revolution had been under way for some decades (O'Brien, 11).... Joshua Child, writing in A New Discourse of Trade at turn of the 17th century speculated on the labor multiplier effect of slavery within the Americas and noted that each farmer in the Americas created as many as 4 additional jobs in britain (qtd.... Certainly trade was important for britain during this period for raw materials as well as exports of goods to the slave driven plantation system....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

Where does the thoroughbred come from

The paper will then trace the history of horse racing and how… It will detail how the many millions of Thoroughbreds in the world today descend from just three Arabian stallions imported into britain in the seventeenth and This paper will also show how the creation of British “Classic” races late in the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth century changed the nature of racing and thus changed the way Thoroughbreds were being bred....
20 Pages (5000 words) Essay

History (access to humanities and social science)

By examining various cultures and civilizations of the globe, it becomes crystal clear that no human society has ever been classless or… There may be only few primitive communities so small that no class strata exist in them, the social organization resting almost entirely on age, sex and kinship; but even here chieftain individual prowess and clan or family appropriately introduces an embryonic (Davis & Moore, 1945: quoted in Zaidi, 1999) The most important factor of social stratification includes the division of society in three main classes i....
4 Pages (1000 words) Essay

Three Phase Models of the English Family

he Industrial Revolution of 1750 not only brought about marvellous changes in the economic and political structure of England and paved the way towards financial boom, but also it modified the whole scenario of the lifestyle of the masses from urban to rural areas of the country....
8 Pages (2000 words) Coursework

In Economic History of London

Nineteenth-century London was the capital of the first industrial nation, Great britain.... britain was the first country to experience that shift, and London became the largest and wealthiest city in the world with housing over a fifth of England's population by 1900 (Briggs, 1968).... The cause, of course, was associated with the development of modern capitalist societies - a process in which britain took the initial lead.... London was the largest and richest urban agglomeration in the world....
15 Pages (3750 words) Assignment

Why and How Capitalism and the Preconditions for Industrialization Emerge

hellip; Europe emerged from the middle Ages with a lot of challenges in the area of infrastructure and development.... The paper contains a critical examination of the core patterns in the industrialization of britain and the rest of the World and a review of the earliest philosophical elements of Capitalism in Europe.... In the 1700s, a spate of inventions in britain and the identification of new markets around the world laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s....
10 Pages (2500 words) Term Paper
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us