A key component of the new social structure and city dwellers were increasingly prosperous merchants. A fusion between the growing middle class and nobility occurred as merchants with money increasingly bought noble titles and military commissioners or ensured that their daughters possessed a large dowry to marry into the ranks of the hereditary elite.

Entirely new businesses developed, such as Lloyds of London, for insuring ships at sea, where almost one-third of ships disappeared. Stock exchanges developed from joint-stock, which was trading in commodity prices and the idea of a future market (betting on the future price of a good). Amsterdam was a key country, followed by London. Ways to create new wealth allowed for the development of a middle-class. The middle-class was not nobility and not work-class. People in this class increasingly required some education but also consumed more goods.

These business owners met in public and helped further develop the idea of a public sphere. These merchants and middle sort also wanted some checks on the arbitrary seizure of their wealth. In their minds, they made their money (not inherited it and could not pass tax increases onto the peasants). While they were happy to pay taxes, they wanted some political power that equaled their rising economic status and power.

Over the second half of the 1700s, Western European cities developed as people moved to the urban centers for work or for basic survival. London had a population of almost one million, Paris had 550,000 people, and Naples had a population of 430,000. All of these cities continued to grow. New cities, like Manchester, began to develop as manufacturing centers, attracting new residents. The cities offered those with recreational resources, such as access to theaters, concert halls, and clubs. New, more elegant houses in elite and fashionable districts that were developing from the land of the nobility. Still, the vast majority of people lived in small villages under two thousand people, and Britain would become the first urbanized country in the following century.

Despite more manufactured goods filtering down to the working classes and poor, many people continued to struggle to survive. The poor — often divided between the deserving and undeserving — comprised upwards of thirty percent of the population. Peasants in Eastern Europe were often a poor harvest away from starvation, ate an incredibly poor diet that lacked protein or variety, and continued to be exploited. Charity remained a local issue and, despite some help from religious organizations, was inadequate. The French government worked to confine as many of the poor as possible in workshouses and highlighted the occasional campaign of government assistance.

Figure 7: Europe in 1815