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History vocabulary · Social History

Social class

Meaning in history, with examples

nounCommon term

In history, social class means: A group of people in a society who share a similar economic position, such as wealth, occupation or education, and often similar status and opportunities.

In Turkish: toplumsal sınıf, sosyal sınıf

How it is used

Social historians study the working, middle and upper classes, class conflict and class consciousness. Marxist historians made class central to explaining change. For pre-industrial societies, historians often prefer words such as estate, order or status group.

Example sentences

  1. The Industrial Revolution created a new social class of factory workers.

  2. Her research looks at how social class shaped access to education in the 1920s.

Common collocations

  • the working class
  • the middle class
  • class conflict
  • class consciousness
  • social mobility
  • aristocracyThe highest social class in many societies, made up of noble families who usually held inherited titles, land and political influence.
  • peasantA person who lives in the countryside and farms a small piece of land with family labour, often paying rent, taxes or labour services to a landowner or the state.
  • Industrial RevolutionThe shift from hand production to machines, factories and new energy sources such as coal and steam, which began in Britain in the late eighteenth century.
  • slaveryA system in which people are legally owned by others, forced to work without pay and denied basic freedoms, or the condition of being enslaved.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Social History

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