Economics--Money economies meet social organizations organized around different principles.  As Eurasian societies embraced agricultural food production as a mode of living that was advantageous to them, their social, political, and economic structures

changed.  Classes emerged because of the development of specialized duties.  Governments became large; bureaucracies emerged to manage food storage.  That, in turn, demanded a clerical class which, in turn, needed to invent writing.  Other class and specialization roles also emerged: soldiers, farmers, artisans (makers of tools for farmers and for soldiers), religion and religious classes at first to enforce then later to oppose the secular authority.  With the abundance of food and with the elimination of the necessity to move constantly, populations exploded.  With population explosion comes the need for new territory and hence a new role for the soldier class and its concomitants: weapons, transportation systems, writing systems now not just to keep track of food but to record the orders of authority and of hierarchy.  With the expansion into new territory, sustained by plant harvests and animal domestication, comes the encounter with other peoples.  These people may be similar as those in France and England and Spain had become by 1500.  Or they may be different as the Maya and Cherokee and Mandan and Sioux and Chinese—different because of their geography, their climate, the wild foods and animals available for domestication for the preceding millennia.  

Western European societies focused on economics, on trade, on business, on the pursuit of portable wealth that functioned as capital.  This focus emerged out of the tension between a state society with hierarchical, specialized classes, the population explosion of a food producing society which demands new land to contain its burgeoning people, and the assumption that the state functions as a sovereign individual in its own competitive self-interest.  European states had long been competing for relatively scarce land, engaged in a competitive race determined by the accumulation of symbolic wealth as money sufficient to hasten the pace of invention of new technologies.  For the Europeans, discovering the New World infused vast new wealth into state coffers and utterly transformed the power alignments that had been traditional.   As Jack Weatherford says in “Silver and Money Capitalism,” the vast flood of silver into European states shifted the balance of power westward.  Silver created a new money economy and localized its power center to the west, a confirmation and consolidation of the military shift of power that had created a vacuum of social order in the wake of the fall of Rome approximately one thousand years earlier.  The infusion of silver debased the value of other currencies (Turkish and others) and shifted trade and capital power to the upstart European nations fronting the sea and looking west.  Power from wealth and technology was about to intensify.

The Six Characteristics

Politics
Economics
Technology
Biology
Philosophy
Dominance