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.

   4.  Rootless middle classes and the wretched of the earth
   might join forces and pull down western civilization’s house
   of cards.

Western civilization, like its predecessors, was accepting and following one central principle:  expand, grab and keep.  The application of this principle took the form of an axiom of public and private life:  might makes right; let him take who has the power; let him keep who can.

Grab and keep, in a period of rapid economic expansion, led each of the burgeoning European empires to the zealous defense of its frontiers as the first principle of imperial policy.  The second principle:  geographical expansion, followed as a matter of course.  Expansion inside Europe, with its tight frontier defenses, meant war with aggressive rivals.  Expansion abroad, especially in Asia and Africa, was less costly and might prove more profitable.  As a consequence, from 1870 onward, British, French, Dutch, Russia and German colonial territory increased; European armaments multiplied.  Each expanding empire prepared for the day which would give it additional square miles of European and foreign real estate.

Grab-and-keep, with its resultant chaotic free-for-all, was the rule of thumb accepted and followed by the West during the decline of Roman power and through the middle ages to modern times.

The “might makes right” formula was in violent conflict with the “love and serve your neighbor” professions of Christian ethics.  Nevertheless, it was the accepted overall principle of private enterprise economy and the ruling ethic of Western statecraft.  The principle was formulated in five propositions or axioms: