ABSTRACT
Social classes which have played a crucial part in transformations of human society inevitably attract the attention of historians, who, more than most practitioners of the social sciences, are primarily concerned with the analysis of change. Consequently studies, at any rate by European historians, have tended to cluster around the problems connected with the feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie and the industrial working class. The feudal nobility created institutions and a social ethos in the tenth and eleventh centuries which set a stamp on medieval and early modern societies long outlasting the original conditions which gave rise to them. The bourgeoisie, once it had grown out of the subservient role it had played in feudal society, that is when it became an industrial rather than purely a commercial capitalist class, contributed to Europe its first genuine revolutions. The industrial proletariat has subsequently been the necessary social basis for the revolutionary socialist movement of modern times, though the peculiar nature of modern imperialism led to the staging of successful proletarian revolutions in relatively backward sectors of the now worldwide economy.
