eculation, experiment, discovery and the formulation and spread of
ideas. The product of these forces was science, which had had a long
period of gestation in North Africa and Asia.

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 do