Hard upon their heels came the commercial war between the European nations, fought over the whole surface of the globe. The various factors of primary accumulation may be classified more or less chronologically, and with special reference to certain countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In the last named, at the end of the seventeenth century, they were systematically assembled in the colonial system, the national debt system, the modern system of taxation, and the modern system of production. To some extent they rested upon brute force, as, for instance, in the colonial system. One and all, they relied upon the power of the State, upon the concentrated and organized force of society, in order to stimulate the transformation of feudal production into capitalist production, and in order to shorten the period of transition.
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.
It is itself an economic power.