Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of an agricultural-feudal society.  Improvements in navigation and the growth of trade, commerce and industry opened the way for the bourgeois revolution with its rapid growth of cities and the parallel increase of wealth, income, and living standards among the newly-enriched businessmen and their associates and dependents.

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.

Most Europeans, satisfied with the axiom “old fashions please me best” were stand-patters in the early stages of this transformation.  As the conversion of Europe from feudal status to urban dynamism continued, however, an ever larger part of the population became aware of the change through which their society was passing.  With the Renaissance and the Enlightenment inert unawareness gave place to enthusiastic propaganda in the writings of pamphleteers, essayists, poets, novelists and social reformers who set the intellectual tone for the new society.