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Updated: May 20, 2025
The feudal code has, through centuries, bred a high type of men, and constituted a caste. The mercantile code has not yet done so, but the wealthy class has attempted to merge itself in or to imitate the feudal class. The consequence is, that the wealth-power has been developed, while the moral and social sanctions by which that power ought to be controlled have not yet been developed.
The countryside accepts city leadership including a higher wealth-power per capita ratio for the city. Cities, with their accumulations of population and wealth, are walled or otherwise defended. When danger threatens, countrymen often move inside the walls until the danger abates. Cities and city life increase and expand with the growth and expansion of civilization.
Where the discrepancy was very great it resulted in a relation of master and vassal or even master and slave. An empire or a civilization, consisting of a wealth-power center and a periphery of associated and dependent territories and peoples, led to a living-standard differential in favor of the center.
Both of these non-European nations began playing serious wealth-power roles in the same period from 1895 to 1910. Up to that point Europe continued to be the homeland of monopoly capitalism. The chief centers of heavy industry, commerce and finance were in Europe. European merchant fleets and European navies sailed the seas.
Industrial revolution, flowering in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gave the European commercial empires a lead over potential rivals based on Asian wealth-power centres.
Ideological and sociological inspiration resulted in domestic cultural changes and the extension of economic, cultural and ideological activities into foreign lands, thus pushing the frontiers of nations, empires, and civilizations farther from the chief wealth-power centers. Thomas Carlyle wrote that history is the lengthened shadows of a few great men.
The result was an increasing conflict for survival, for expansion and for local supremacy. Each experiment expanded along lines that led the more successful to build traditional empires consisting of wealth-power centers and peripheries of associates and dependents. Each experiment produced a competitive survival struggle between rival empires that would determine eventual supremacy.
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