Explain the cause of change in social order of European society during the 19th and 20th centuries of Europe
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Modifications in social structure
Developments in technology and organization reshaped social structure. A recognizable peasantry continued to exist in western Europe, but it increasingly had to adapt to new methods. In many areas (most notably, the Netherlands and Denmark) a cooperative movement spread to allow peasants to market dairy goods and other specialties to the growing urban areas without abandoning individual landownership. Many peasants began to achieve new levels of education and to adopt innovations such as new crops, better seeds, and fertilizers; they also began to innovate politically, learning to press governments to protect their agricultural interests.
In the cities the working classes continued to expand, and distinctions between artisans and factory workers, though real, began to fade. A new urban class emerged as sales outlets proliferated and growing managerial bureaucracies (both private and public) created the need for secretaries, bank tellers, and other clerical workers. A lower middle class, composed of salaried personnel who could boast a certain level of education—indeed, whose jobs depended on literacy—and who worked in conditions different from manufacturing labourers, added an important ingredient to European society and politics. Though their material conditions differed little from those of some factory workers, though they too were subject to bosses and to challenging new technologies such as typewriters and cash registers, most white-collar workers shunned association with blue-collar ranks. Big business employers encouraged this separation by setting up separate payment systems and benefit programs, for they were eager to avoid a union of interests that might augment labour unrest.
At the top of European society a new upper class formed as big business took shape, representing a partial amalgam of aristocratic landowners and corporate magnates. This upper class wielded immense political influence, for example, in supporting government armaments buildups that provided markets for heavy industrial goods and jobs for aristocratic military officers.
The 19th century saw large amounts of social change; slavery was abolished, and the First and Second Industrial Revolutions (which also overlap with the 18th and 20th centuries, respectively) led to massive urbanization and much higher levels of productivity, profit and prosperity.