Dark Ages of localism, with landlords, priests and soldiers directing public affairs led to the concentration of wealth and power in the landed aristocracy and the church. But traders in the countryside and merchants in the centers of commerce held a talisman that opened before them ever increasing sources of wealth. Country dwellers harvested one crop a year. When crops were poor they starved. At best the margin of profit was thin. Traders and merchants made a profit every time they found a customer. The countryside lived on a use economy supplemented by barter. As money increased in quantity it was loaned at rates of interest by merchants and bankers who owned it and used it for their purposes. Accumulating wealth and money enabled the traders, merchants, bankers and manufacturers to out-buy and out-point landlords and churchmen. Politically, these changes reduced the authority of absolute monarchies. In their places representative governments made their appearance.
The third force that surfaced in Europe after the end of the Dark Ages was the industrial revolution, which led to fundamental changes in the means of production at the same time that advances in natural and social science produced their practical counterpart—an explosive expansion of technology.
Science, representative government and the industrial revolution led to a rapid and extensive transformation of western society sometimes referred to as the bourgeois revolution. As the bourgeois revolution worked its way into the structure and function of European society, the developing class of businessmen and professionals who had begun to challenge the power-monopoly of the "lords spiritual and temporal" ended by establishing a higher power monopoly under the control of business, military, public relations oligarchy. This revolutionary transformation of modern society took place during the thousand years that elapsed between the crusades and the closing years of the nineteenth century. The resulting social transformation had its geographical homeland in Europe from which it spread around the planet. Politically, these forces found expression through the commerce-dominated, profit-seeking, colonizing empires, with the nation-state as nucleus. Colonizing empires became the dominant force in Europe and in the non-European segments of the planet which were gradually brought under European imperial control.
In the course of voyaging, "discovery" and the establishment of trade, Europeans set up military outposts and maintained increasingly large naval forces. The avowed object of these military and naval build-ups was to defend and promote Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French and British imperial interests. Actually military and naval installations were marking out and maintaining the defense perimeters of their respective colonial empires. One of the widely accepted axioms of the period equated colonies with national prosperity. The more successful colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries became the strongholds of nineteenth century monopoly capitalism.
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. As a result of this lead European empire builders were able to establish and maintain their authority in India and Indonesia, dismember the Turkish and Chinese empires and partition Africa among themselves. Their only potential rivals were the lumbering, isolationist United States of North America and the newly awakened Island Kingdom of Japan. 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. European banks and business houses dominated planetary financing, insuring and investing.
Viewed from outside, the ascendancy of Europe seemed to be complete. Europe held the strategic strong points: productivity, wealth, the means of transportation, mobile fire-power. By the end of the nineteenth century Europe was the monopoly-capitalist motherland. The rest of the planet was made up of actual or potential dependents under European authority. From these outsiders living at subsistence levels, Europeans could get their supplies of food and raw materials at low prices and to them Europeans could sell their surplus manufactures, their commercial services, and their investment capital at high prices. The resulting European prosperity was expected to continue indefinitely into the future.
This planetary structure, with Europe as the center of wealth, power, art, science, free business enterprise and wage slavery, progress and poverty, left the majority of mankind living as dependents and colonials. The situation embodied several confrontations:
1. The masters of Europe might quarrel among themselves.
2. Non-Europeans might set up rival wealth power centers and challenge Europe's world hegemony.
3. Colonials and other dependants might demand independence, and equal status in the family of nations.