The Industrial Revolution helped create and solidify the class divide in Europe and wealth divide between Western Europe and the rest of the world. Increasingly, those who benefited from the changes, justified their wealth through notions of self-help and hard work, ignoring any systemic help they might have enjoyed. This helped the rising middle class justify their position in society and their exploitation of the poor. For the poor, their time and labor was increasingly treated a commodity which could be bought and sold on the open market.

Over the course of the Industrial Revolution, a growing gap existed between the middle class (along with the upper working class whose lives began to improve after 1876) and the poor who continued to suffer in near silence into the 20th century. Still, class became a marker of people’s identities and to that of their nation-state as well.