Many cultures – particularly European cultures – tended to see the “day” as beginning with sunset. We have vestiges of this with Halloween (the evening before All Saints Day), Christmas Eve (the evening before Christmas) and New Year’s Eve (The evening before the New Year). The following is a text excerpted from my Introduction to Folklore, which I compiled for my students when I taught folklore at university:

The preoccupation with time, the division of the day into precisely defined hours, minutes and seconds, and the idea of changing the day at midnight are all modern practices associated with an industrial world. European peasants described time much differently. They separated the day into forenoon and afternoon. Europeans divided the night into watches, of which there were four, accounting for the time it took a night watchman in a town or a large village to make the rounds by walking around the community.

Before industrialization, most languages did not have the concept of a twenty-four-hour day, which includes both daylight and night. Words referred either to the time of daylight or night. In modern English, the word “day” is in fact used to include the time of darkness, to which it makes no literal reference. The German word Volltag literally means “full day,” but it is a recent term that suits the need to describe the entire period of time.

For most pre-industrial people, day and night were separate, distinct terms. Time was typically counted in either “days” or “nights” or in “suns” or “sleeps.” Homeric literature counts time with eos, the word for dawn. The English term “fortnight” refers to fourteen nights. Arabic uses a term meaning “three night,” and Sanskrit has a “ten night.”

Referring to a day as the time of daylight made each day longer or shorter according to the time of the year. Each successive forenoon and afternoon, consequently, were different from the previous ones. Traditionally, Europeans regarded the night before the day as being linked to it. Holidays and other days of importance consequently began the ceremony of ritual on the evening before the day. The Jewish Sabbath and holidays begin at sunset for this reason. Similarly, Halloween (the evening before All Hallows Day), Christmas Eve (the evening before Christmas), and New Year’s Eve (the evening before the first day of the year) were originally tied to the day of celebration just as they are today. To the mind of the modern industrial world these evenings anticipate the day of celebration, but they were originally the beginning of the holiday.

The "change" did not occur as part of the process of industrialization at all. It's the product of sundials, which were finally entirely phased out by industrialization. I'm willing to buy into the idea that the European peasantry kept their old system of time, but to the nobility and the educated classes they always used the time system we use today, even before industrialisation. I can only comment on how it came to Europe. I don't know if other cultures independently developed the same system of time keeping, or if it was a colonial export.

The actual answer is that it comes from the Ancient Egyptians. Whereas the Semitic cultures and the Babylonians started the day at sundown, which makes social sense, the Ancient Egyptians organised the "day" around how the sundial worked. When the sun rises a shadow appears on the sundial telling a reader the time. As it reaches its highest point in the day, roughly 6 hours later, there is no shadow at all on the dial, every part of it is lit up. This is noon. Then the sun begins its descent for 6 hours until the sundial goes dark again and we enter into "night" for another 12-hour period. The Egyptians saw "noon" as the end of the day/beginning of the evening. Sure the sun is still out, but its going down. The day is already over, and the sun is simply taking its time to go out.

The Ancient Egyptians conceptualised that the night should be broken down to the same parts as the day, and the 'period of shadow' should be seen as a direct composite in all things to the 'period of light' - so where there is a noon in the day there must also be a noon in the night (midnight). If the noon signifies the end of day, then midnight must also signify the end of night, and the time of shadow after midnight is actually early morning not late evening. So then the question just becomes "when do you end the calendar day". At noon or midnight? The Egyptians chose midnight, and are the earliest known (and likely the first) culture to do so.

That we use midnight today is largely a historical coincidence. Most societies used sunset. The Hebrews (which meant starting at sunset had religious importance to Christian Europe to understand 'days' in the Bible), and the ancient Greeks both used sunset as the beginning of the day. If European peasants did, then they likely got it from their ancestors, so perhaps we could also say "the masses of antiquity" used sunset too. The Early Romans, perhaps for the function it served in the Legions, began the day at sunrise.

And yet we still went with the modern system anyway. This is because the later Romans, for whatever reason, adopted the Egyptian time system of starting the calendar at 'Solar Midnight'. It might coincide with their adoption of the sundial, we're not 100% sure. We are sure that by the end of the republic they were already starting the day at solar midnight. For a long time the legions maintained the old system, so they called the day beginning at midnight a "civil day" (dies civilis) and the day beginning at sunrise a "natural day" (dies naturalis) - distinguishing between the day used by the law and the cities, from the day used by the military. If the agricultural workers used a third day beginning at sunset I'm not aware of it - but I won't rule it out. This is why "am" means ante meridiem and "pm" means post meridiem, and not some French or English term. Because the time system dates back to Rome.

The Roman Empire enforced a standard of time on the most of Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and the Christian Church. The Christian Church then enforced it on everyone outside the Roman Empire to enforce consistency with Church feast days. When the Empire fell in the West the Christian West conquered the rest of non-Christian Europe (e.g. Charlemagne and the subsequent European crusades) and enforced their time system on their new subjects. In Eastern Europe the Byzantine Empire brought the Roman calendar system to the countries they converted.

Perhaps its true that this was not standardised until industrialisation, I don't know anything about that, but it was not a product of industrialisation - it was a product of the Ancient Egyptians which somehow made its way to Rome which then made its way to the Church long before Industrialisation.