ABSTRACT
Monopolization through violence and economic warfare is with us today just as in the early history of commerce in the Middle Ages. Just as their predecessors fought to appropriate their neighbors' wealth through raids, the cities of the Middle Ages used their military superiority to monopolize the tools of production, control trade, and make the outlying societies dependent upon their commerce. The loss of the city's markets for both raw material and manufactured products due to the comparative advantage of the countryside meant impoverishment and possibly even starvation for those in the city who formerly produced that cloth. The same loss of monopoly through increased technological knowledge of the countryside and its natural comparative advantage held true for other products and other cities. To protect their access to crucial resources, powerful imperial cities of the Middle Ages used military power to eliminate the comparative advantage of the countryside and that of other cities.
