ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution is described by economists Robert L. Heilbroner and William Milberg as a great turning period in history, during which manufacturing and industrial activity became primary forms of social production. A number of important economic and technological developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries caused many historians to see this period as a Second Industrial Revolution. The traditional European class system, rooted in feudalism and manorialism, did not disappear overnight, but wherever the Industrial Revolution took hold, it transformed the social class system. Just as industrialization transformed production, transportation, the class system, and the nature of work, it profoundly altered the natural and human-made environments. As industrialization increased, it brought with it a great wave of urbanization. The Industrial Revolution caused a veritable reordering of the global economic system. Western nations, especially those that industrialized earliest and most thoroughly, became far wealthier relative to the rest of the world than they had ever been.
