The Changing Middle Class

Before the Industrial Revolution, traders around the world had formed a middle class, sandwiched between the aristocrats and the peasants and serfs. Now most factory owners joined this middle class, although some aristocrats invested in industry without losing their privileged class status. Early industrial innovators often led frugal lives full of hard work, and they tried to ensure that their children and others did too. The Tagore family in India thrived on hard work, leading Dwarkanath Tagore’s son to refuse charity to a beggar-priest: “I shan’t give you money. . . . you are able to work, and earn your bread.”16 While early businessmen directed the factories or went on distant sales trips, their wives often tended the accounts, dealt with subcontractors, supervised workers (especially if they were female), and organized shipments of finished goods. As factories grew and their owners became prosperous, they became society’s leaders, rising far above the humble status of their workers. Leaders of industry built large houses and began to consume more goods, including luxuries. They removed their wives from factory supervision and from the working world, beginning what historians term a “cult of domesticity” for women that signaled a family’s prosperity. These economic leaders have collectively been called the bourgeoisie, a French term for the middle-class groups at the center of the Industrial Revolution.

The Middle Class Promotes Progress

As we have seen, with the march of industry, scientists and engineers in research laboratories and universities replaced amateur tinkerers as industrial innovators. As part of the state’s commitment to building national wealth, public monies often funded scientific research, which was increasingly expensive. The middle class grew to include those whose empirical and scientific knowledge benefited industrial society, and professionalization occurred in other fields as well. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and journalists—all of whom drew on the scientific method and objective analysis in their work—gained prestige as they served the wider population of industrial society.

Such prosperous men of the evolving middle class founded a range of societies and clubs to create solidarity and foster the exchange of knowledge. In Japan in 1876, the city fathers of Kanazawa opened an industrial museum to spread technical knowledge more widely among the public. Wealthy citizens around the world founded art, history, and science museums

During these industrial years and worked to improve city life. “Reserve large areas for football, hockey, and parks,” Indian industrialist Jamsetji Tata advised urban renovators. “Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques, and Christian churches.”17 Well-to-do women banded together to provide baby clothes for newborn children and other goods to impoverished workers. Indian reformer Savithribai Phule, married at age nine, joined her husband in aiding the lowest-caste “Untouchables,” despite mounting criticism and threats of violence against her. She founded schools for the girls of the Untouchable caste, claiming to feel “immeasurably happy” with her volunteer work. “Besides, it also demonstrates the horizons to which a human being can reach out,” she wrote.18 As industrialization and rapid urban growth disturbed centuries-old ways of life, these institutions, in the words of one English official, promoted “the protection of their [industrialists’] property” by reducing worker misery. Good works also helped to unite the middle classes in the face of challenges from those with “anti-social and revolutionary principles.”19

An East Indian Middle-Class Family

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, this middle-class family donned their best clothes and sat for this formal portrait. The father may have worked for the British government or been an independent merchant or factory owner. Nevertheless, the British dominated the subcontinent politically, economically, and culturally. This family wore fashionable Western clothing, although some of the women adapted their outfits by adding elements of the traditional sari to their dress. (Dinodia Photos.)