The very process of capitalist expansion was such that it created major upheavals in the social life of mankind. Industrial production required the mobilization and concentration of potential workers at one place.
This and the requirement of a market led to huge migrations from rural areas into the cities. Those who left the villages did not just leave their places, they left their whole world behind, which was eventually irretrievably lost to them. Their natural ties (of family, caste, clan, village, religion, community, language) began to be loosened and eroded.
The community lives that these men and women shared were gradually replaced by a different type of life in which they lived not as members of the old community but as individuals-members of an atomized, anonymous mass society.
Most of the social changes that we mentioned (urbanization and creation of large cities, emergence of new social classes, emergence of an anonymous mass society, increasing individualization and atomization and populations, decline of religion etc.) were related to this process.
Even in the advanced agrarian societies more than 90 per cent of the people lived in villages. This picture changes in industrial societies where the majority lives in the urban centers. In advanced industrial societies as much as 90 per cent of the population consists of city dwellers.
There has also been a growth of very large cities as well as an increase in their numbers. Cities of more than one million people in the world numbered only 16 in 1900. This figure had gone up to 250 by 1985.
