Industrialization was a powerful social force in the historical development of the Anglo-American economies; economic power was diffused throughout a new, individualistic, and independent economic class that successfully broke the political and cultural monopoly of a traditional, landowning elite. Recognizing the importance of industrialization in social change, conventional economic theory, as taught in the United States and Great Britain, implicitly relied on it to give dynamism to static equilibrium models of resource allocation and income distribution, while Marxist analysis placed it in the very center of a dynamic growth theory.