s, with their
personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and
equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.

Two centuries of the great revolution have given present-day industrial
society a capital plant the like of which has never existed on the
planet in any historical period. After two hundred years of meteoric
development, it exists today on a planet-wide scale and at a level of
all-pervasive dominance undreamed of even up to the middle of the last
century.

Modern industry "plants"--steel plants, cement plants, open pit mines,
textile plants, machine tool plants, auto plants, rubber factories, oil
refineries--not only occupy extensive acreage per plant, but the same
interests and corporate managements operate dozens of plants in widely
separated geographical areas and produce a great variety of goods and
services. An experienced observer feels entirely at home in any
industrial center, on any continent. In Detroit, in Dusseldorf, in
Osaka, in Shanghai, in Bombay, the architecture of the plants is
essentially the same, the machines in the widely separated plants bear
a striking resemblance to one another, and the problems of management
are similar.

Unit plants and their coordinated managements in the aggregate compose
the present-day world economy. They are the essence of its being. They
occupy the skyline and dominate the economic life of modern industrial
society. They are the units which make up the sum-total of modern
industry which, in its turn, is the bony structure around which have
grown the sinews and muscle of present-day planetary economy.

Modern state structure goes back through the half dozen centuries during
which it has been developing. Its ancestors may be met with in the
history of previous civilizations.

Modern industrial structure on the other hand is something essentially
new under the sun--newly imagined, designed, constructed, productive. It
has no ancestry before 1750 because its essential building unit--the
modern machine--did not exist previous to that date.

In the last chapter we dealt with the growth of states into empires and
the aggregation of empires into civilizations with the possibility that
the existing states could be welded into a world federation. One of the
chief obstacles to such a development is the centuries of conflict
during which modern nations have been built up and the strong bonds of
nationalism have been established as a