The middle class

A new professional and managerial class also expanded: shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, clerks, government officials. The middle class generally supported liberal politics (constitutional government, free trade, free press) and would become the political base for many nineteenth-century reform movements.

The Marxist framing: Karl Marx famously argued that the entire history of industrial society could be understood as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (workers who sell their labor). Maria does not need to accept Marx's analysis, but she does need to know how he framed the situation, because his framing shaped twentieth-century history.