The phrase middle class first appeared in a 1745 pamphlet about Irish wool
The earliest known use of middle class turns up in James Bradshaw's 1745 pamphlet on stopping the smuggling of Irish wool to France. Before that, early modern Europeans spoke of the middling sort. The modern statistical meaning arrived much later, in a 1913 British government report.
That report, by the statistician T. H. C. Stevenson for the UK Registrar-General, placed the middle class between the upper and working classes and included professionals, managers and senior civil servants. On this view the group's defining trait is holding significant human capital while remaining beneath an elite that controls most financial and legal capital. Earlier, Friedrich Engels had described a middle layer between nobles and peasants in late feudal society, a town-based bourgeoisie that in France helped drive the Revolution and became the new ruling class.
Definitions still vary widely. Some count the middle fifth of a nation's income ladder, others everyone except the poorest and richest 20 percent. The OECD uses households earning between 75 and 200 percent of median national income. In February 2009, The Economist claimed over half the world had become middle class thanks to growth in emerging economies, defining the threshold as having about a third of income left after basic food and shelter. Americans use the label for people others would call working class.
Money is only part of it. Professional qualifications, home ownership, delayed gratification and secure jobs are often cited. In Britain status has historically depended less on wealth than in America, judged instead by accent, manners, schooling and the class of one's family and friends. By the late twentieth century most Americans called themselves middle class, and Britain's Labour Party, born from organised labour, rebranded as New Labour when Tony Blair led it during the 1990s.
Political theorists have long valued a large middle. Aristotle argued that the best community is formed by middle-class citizens, whose weight tips the balance and stops either extreme from dominating. Modern scholars echo him, describing a broad middle class as a stabilising buffer against authoritarianism and oligarchy. Economic booms and busts, meanwhile, can push small business owners back and forth between middle and working-class status.
Source: Middle class
