Crisis and Reform of the Western World

Abstract

T HE wide national and territorial market areas of the European states and their colonial empires were, from the end of the eighteenth century, opened first for internal and later for international free trade. Considerable national and international uniformity of law grew under the influence of the law of the Roman Empire which was favorable not only to national but also to international intercourse. This Roman law had been pretty generally established by the dawn of modern times in practically all leading countries and it had been molded into the national conceptions of law. The gradual guarantee of personal rights even in otherwise absolutist states of Europe, and the abolition of the rest of mediaeval feudalism in favor of personal freedom, legal equality and free individual property and contract rights, opened the way for the activities of the growing bourgeois class. This class, the most active exponent of the spirit of the age, became more and more conscious of its value and importance. The individual, freed from mediaeval ties, immediately and personally confronted with responsibility for the social universe, and armed with weapons of modern science, buoyantly started out for new horizons. The technique of transportation of persons, materials, and news very soon overcame the resistance of time and space to a degree that made the whole world in many respects into one market area and one system of national and international division of labor. This world market was served by an equally widely developed monetary and credit system.