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Eighteenth Century Social Structure

 

            The social structure of the eighteenth cerntury was not so different from the one which we live in today.
             By 1775 2.5 million people inhabited the thirteen colonies of whom about half a million were black. White immigrants made up nearly 400,000 of the increased number, and "forced immigrants" accounted for almost as many. The colonist were doubling every twenty-five years.
             The majority of people in colonial america looked to farming as a way of supporting themselves. Most white americans and even some free blacks were small farmers. In cities, however, there was a small class of skilled artisans as well as a few shopkeepers and tradesmen. Also there was a handful of unskilled casual laborers. The colonial social pyramid consisted of slaves(at the very bottom), indentured servants, and jailbirds. Next to last were the lesser tradesmen, farmers, lesser professional men, and at the very top of the pyramid were the leading planters, lawyers, officials, and clergymen.
             Unlike the poor and more less important people the aristocrats of colonial america lived very well and healthy lives. The sported imported clothing and dined at tables laid with English china and gleaming silverware. Prominent individuals come to be seated in churches and schools according to their social rank.
             Unfortunetly then the poorer class was treated unfairly, while the rich aristocrates of society lived in the lap of luxury. Even today the middle class society has to look up to those who are "superior". In conclusion we can see that sometimes things never change and the history can and will eventually repeat itself.
            


Essays Related to Eighteenth Century Social Structure

1. History

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2. Life In Colonial America

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3. Pamela

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4. The Need To Believe

Racial superiority reified and assimilated into folk culture because of American racial ideologies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the later part of the eighteenth century, "race" not only appeared as a subdivision of interacting populations, but also described human differences and power relations while playing a significant role in structuring social position. The idea of race differences had become an instrumental part of American social structure. ... The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" racial ideologies consisted of the degradation of other peoples an...

  • Word Count: 1439
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5. William Blake

Suspended between the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century and the early phases of Romanticism, William Blake belongs to no single poetic age. ... Blake employs the voices of "black" children to undermine the ideology and embedded structures of racial oppression operative in England in the late eighteenth century, but at the same time these voices also reinscribe traditionally accepted ideas of the time (slavery) through the innocent acceptance of oppression. ... Blake's personal audiences of eighteenth century England would not have recognised this, as the exact causes of the lit...

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6. Globalization and the Industrial Revolution

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7. The Monk

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8. Rebellious Offspring

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9. Women and the American Experience

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