In the 18th century these expectations were reinforced by the widespread conviction that since nature herself (as Isaac Newton had shown) worked by invariable laws and not divine caprice, human affairs should also be conducted so far as was possible according to fixed and regular principles, rooted in rationality, in which the scope for arbitrariness was reduced to a minimum.

The most powerful groups in society, in any case, had elaborated persuasive rationales for exemption. The clergy, a vast corporation drawing revenues from a sixth of the kingdom’s land, and creaming off, in the form of tithes, a notional tenth of the yield of the rest, paid no direct taxes on the grounds that it performed its service to society by praying and interceding with God. The nobility, the social elite which owned over a quarter of the land, levied feudal dues over much of the rest, and steadily sucked most of the newly rich into its ranks via ennobling offices, resisted the payment of direct taxes as well. Nobles, the argument went, served the kingdom with their blood, by fighting to defend it.

The crisis was triggered by King Louis XVI’s attempts to avoid bankruptcy.

It was not that France lacked the resources to survive as a great power. Over the next generation the French would dominate the European continent more completely than they had ever done. It was rather that many of these resources were locked up by the system of government, the organization of society, and the culture of what revolutionaries would soon be calling the ancien régime, the old or former order. It took the Revolution to release them.

Yet it was hard to see how a French king could keep up his international pretensions without some modification in his subjects’ time-honoured privileges and inequalities. Nowhere was the kingdom’s lack of uniformity more glaring than in the structure of privilege and exemption which gave each and every institution, group, or area a status not quite like any other.

As in every aspect of the ancien régime, the judicial and institutional map of France had no uniformity.

Rapidly adopting western modes of education, military organization, and technology, yet retaining their own distinct Japanese national culture and unity

Having determined that the Shogun’s regime was outmoded and incapable of defending Japan, modernizing leaders from two southern provinces undertook a revolutionary war to overthrow it. Proclaiming their loyalty to the Japanese emperor—who had been a ceremonial figurehead under the Shoguns—the leaders of this so-called Meiji Restoration claimed only to be restoring the primacy of the emperor.

abolished the monarchy and all feudal privileges, executed the king and queen, and nationalized the Catholic Church and sold off its lands. Following the American example, they declared France to be a republic, under the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The French revolutionaries saw themselves as repeating the feats of the early Romans who had overthrown their king, depicting French leaders in togas and calling their military leaders “consuls” after the old Roman term.

Shoguns had been financially weakened by growing debts to the rice merchants of Osaka

In 1852, the U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry sailed a fleet of modern steam-powered warships into Tokyo Bay in an impressive display of force. Sweeping aside all resistance, he imposed a humiliating treaty on the Shogun.