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