This volume has two concluding chapters. This, the first one, begins where Chapter 7 left off, generalizing about the rise of the two major actors of modern times – classes and nation-states – then about the four sources of social power during the period. Because the five countries covered (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia-Germany, and the United States) all differed, I must strike a balance between generalization and acknowledgment of uniqueness. But because history passed its own conclusion on the long nineteenth century, in the form of World War I, the final chapter will analyze the causes of that war, exemplifying and justifying the theory underlying this volume.

As we have seen, states were entwined with both classes and nations. I shall not once again summarize my research on states; rather, I refer the reader to the conclusion of Chapter 14. Here I repeat only the essential point: As the state became more socially significant through late eighteenth-century military and late nineteenth-century industrial capitalist expansion, it partially “naturalized” the West and its classes.

Classes and states

By the time of World War I, the entire West was becoming industrial. Britain and Belgium already were so, most countries were evenly balanced between industry and agriculture, and agriculture was also thoroughly commercialized. Capitalism had enormously accelerated human collective powers, predominantly diffusely, right across this multi-power-actor civilization.