ABSTRACT
The number and variety of goods that people could buy grew as did the passion for possessions, making demand a motor of economic growth and of an outlook called materialism. By 1900 capitalism had become the world's leading economic system. Karl Marx described a socialist alternative, promising to make growth occur without capitalism's boom-bust cycles or its spiritual degradation. Modern societies possessed great capitalist structures, such as big business, railroads, and steamships, which traditional societies lacked. Three economic schemes such as capitalism, Marxism, or fascism, offered an alternative to traditional capitalism. Adam Smith admired the eighteenth-century American colonies because they had evolved an economic system that benefited workers and owners alike, paying high wages and delivering high profits. In Europe's old regime, which collapsed during French Revolution, people had carried a legal identity; they were commoners, bourgeois, or nobles. The agricultural revolution, led by artificial fertilizers and mechanized implements, drove down the share of a family's income spent on food.
