Aristocracies figure prominently in discourses concerned with modernization. The demarcation of elites selected as significant for political, social and cultural change and associated problems of defining nobilities, aristocracies and gentries have long preoccupied historians of Early Modern Europe. For hundreds of years, royal, ecclesiastical and judicial offices, as well as military and naval commands remained the preserves of noble families and aristocratic patronage. Aristocrats and aristocracies with historical reputations as 'improvers' tended to manage estates located close to urban markets, maritime cities or natural waterways. As radical intellectuals and classical economists of ancien regime Europe appreciated aristocratic regimes were not there to promote economic growth and structural change let alone social mobility and political modernization. In the resource abundant and labour scarce conditions of the Americas, the accumulation of wealth, status, style and the foundation of a lineage promoted strategies that were unavailable to, or avoidable by, the aristocracies of ancien regimes in Europe.