From Introduction: The Rise and Fall of Class? It was only as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum from the 1770s and 1780s that Britain's social and political structure was more drastically and more permanently transformed. As new non-landed wealth was created in unprecedented abundance, the aristocracy began to enter a second and much longer era of decline, which this time was indeed terminal. The middle class, by contrast, became more vigorous, more numerous and more ambitious, largely thanks to the advent of a new breed of heroic entrepreneur - part creator, part beneficiary of the economic developments which were rapidly changing Britain into the first industrial nation and the workshop of the world. And in turn, the growth of manufacturing meant that the first industrial proletariat also came into being - an exploited working class, crowded in cities and slums, subjected to stern factory discipline, and often degraded, disoriented and discontented as a result. Inevitably, the workers and their employers were locked in conflict which was bitter and violent, and which the factory owners almost invariably won. Moreover, the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832 confirmed that the middle classes had superseded the aristocracy as the chief power in the state, dominating the economy, politics and ideology of the nineteenth century as surely and securely as the landowners had previously dominated the eighteenth.