ABSTRACT
Though the pace of change was slow, often even imperceptible, European society in the mid-eighteenth century was somehow different from what it had been at the beginning of the seventeenth century. More wealth was accumulating in the hands of a wider band of urban and rural commoners, who were gaining a new self-confidence in their position. Some towns that had been very important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became economic backwaters, while new, virtually unknown towns grew dramatically. In the mid-eighteenth century, these slow changes began to accelerate into an entirely new phenomenon, known as the industrial revolution. The eighteenth century witnessed a transportation revolution, an agricultural revolution, and a democratic revolution, as well as the more famous industrial revolution. Throughout the eighteenth century, the true arbiter of high culture was aristocratic society, who set the style for the rest of the cultured world. Low culture was aimed at the middling sorts who flocked to theaters and pleasure gardens.
