Social changes in feudal Europe had been gradual. The dynamism implicit
in the bourgeois revolution escalated the rate of social change with
corresponding modifications in the pattern of European political,
economic and cultural institutions and practices.
In the early stages of the transformation the awareness of change was
limited to a minority of city dwellers. To the rural illiterate
majority, change was a closed book. A great social gulf separated the
feudal countryside from the growing centers of trade, commerce and
industry. Bourgeois life processes narrowed and gradually bridged the
gulf. Differences between city and country living persisted, but the
stark contrast between city abundance of goods and services and their
virtual absence from the common life of the countryside grew less and
less marked as the proportion of the total population living in the
countryside declined with the trek to cities and their suburbs.
Europeans living for the most part in a pre-civilized rural environment
passed through generations of illiterate unawareness of the social
process through which European life was expanding. The rapid extension
of industry and commerce after 1750 (the bourgeois revolution) completed
the transformation of a rural, semi-feudal west and central Europe into
a continent of town and city dwellers devoting their lives to pursuits
unknown to their immediate forebears. In this new Europe the countryside
played a decreasing role, as food supplies and raw materials came
increasingly from less developed parts of eastern Europe or from the
colonies which were opened up by the planet-wide trade and commerce
promoted by the aggressive expansion of the European empires.
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