Capitalism had won. It was not people's revolutions, but the slow industry of a rising middle class that toppled feudal monarchies. Productivity led to prosperity, and succeeding generations of new money made the class system nearly irrelevant. The process moved swiftest in the new American colonies, where a shortage of laws, problems that required ingenuity to overcome and a booming population of arrivals eager to carve out a share for themselves, laid the ground floor for it to become the economic superpower of the 20th century. The political, religious and social revolutions that accompanied this surge of history were all spinoffs of that vast unfolding flower of human productivity.
