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Difino
| • | Before the Industrial Revolution, the gentry was located between the yeomanry and the nobility. Unlike the yeomen, the gentry did not work the land themselves; instead, they hired tenant farmers. Unlike the nobility, they lacked hereditary titles and privileges.
In English history, landed gentry were the smaller landowners, and generally had no titles (it was not clear-cut whether baronets were members of the aristocracy or the gentry). They played an important role in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The term is still occasionally employed, for example, by the publishers of Burke's Landed Gentry, though they explain that their continued use of that term is elastic and stems, in part, from the adoption of that short title for a series first entitled Burke's Commoners (as opposed to Burke's Peerage and Baronetage). The term county family is commonly deemed to be co-terminous with the terms gentry and landed gentry. See Walford's County Families and gentleman.
Continental Europe never developed gentry because unlike the English system of peerage, all legitimate (and sometimes illegitimate) children of nobles acquired titles. Their noble classes grew larger than Britain's few hundred. In the case of Poland, a tenth of the population were nobles.
The Chinese gentry has a specific meaning and refers to the shen-shi or the class of landowners that had passed the bureaucratic examinations. They rose to power during the Tang dynasty when meritocracy triumphed over the nine-rank system which favored the Chinese nobility. The gentry were retired scholar-officials and their descendents who lived in large landed estates due to Confucianism's affinity to agriculture and hostility to commerce.
In American society, gentry refers loosely to a highly-educated professional upper-middle class, though this is inaccurate in sociological terminology. However, antebellum Southern planters mimicked the culture of British gentry though they grew cash crops and used chattel slavery. Attitudes stemming from the phenomenon of a historic American gentry inform the current use
Source: [wikipedia: gentry]
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