Historical Analysis is needed - first feudalism:
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Essential background changes:
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Class change and sources: Britain was first:
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There were traders in the feudal system, and they were called mercantilists. Traders became richer as well as the landed, and more semi-independent people became involved in an increasing non-agricultural economy. |
Specifically England/ Britain:
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These resulted in a new industrial class who took risk, added value made money and passed it on to their sons. In this country they were politically under-represented. Urban areas grew and were overpowering a feudal system based on the countryside. |
Many of the new industrialists and traders, owning their own sources of wealth, attached themselves to Protestantism in one form of another, inside and outside the Church of England, and there were expulsions too. |
The new indvidualist capitalist Protestants emphasised:
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Some rich capitalists joined the Church of England to become repectable or get a country seat like a new gentry (and gained political power by joining the moribund feudal system). Others agitated. |
The new rich agitated for religious freedom for independent Protestant churches, for Catholics and Jews because they knew that this would break the back of the old feudal Church of England and its monopoly political system. |
Our parliamentary tradition coped: the 1832 Reform Act took place, the vote was extended uniformly to those with property. And with political reform they received power, in local government and nationally. The feudal system was in effect overtaken, whilst some of its symbolism lived on. Other European countries had bourgeois violence and disturbance, confusion and conflict. |
Capitalists were thus in primary control making key social and economic decisions. |
A rural workforce that lived in isolated communities was replaced by:
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When the economic cycle turned nasty capitalists did not want hordes of the mass low paid and unemployed threatening their system. They knew that with organisation, especially through trade unions, workers united could be a political threat. Workers could, in the end, take capitalists' property from them and become the new owners of capital. Marx advocated exactly this action. It never happened in the developed West. |