The implements of specialization—­the machine building tools and the machine tools themselves—­were housed in forests of associated workshops.  The mechanics of specialization sprawled over acres and square miles of factory floor space.  Nowhere were the results of the great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.

Two centuries of the great revolution have given present-day industrial society a capital plant the like of which has never existed on the planet in any historical period.  After two hundred years of meteoric development, it exists today on a planet-wide scale and at a level of all-pervasive dominance undreamed of even up to the middle of the last century.

Modern industry “plants”—­steel plants, cement plants, open pit mines, textile plants, machine tool plants, auto plants, rubber factories, oil refineries—­not only occupy extensive acreage per plant, but the same interests and corporate managements operate dozens of plants in widely separated geographical areas and produce a great variety of goods and services.  An experienced observer feels entirely at home in any industrial center, on any continent.  In Detroit, in Dusseldorf, in Osaka, in Shanghai, in Bombay, the architecture of the plants is essentially the same, the machines in the widely separated plants bear a striking resemblance to one another, and the problems of management are similar.

Unit plants and their coordinated managements in the aggregate compose the present-day world economy.  They are the essence of its being.  They occupy the skyline and dominate the economic life of modern industrial society.  They are the units which make up the sum-total of modern industry which, in its turn, is the bony structure around which have grown the sinews and muscle of present-day planetary economy.

Modern state structure goes back through the half dozen centuries during which it has been developing.  Its ancestors may be met with in the history of previous civilizations.

Modern industrial structure on the other hand is something essentially new under the sun—­newly imagined, designed, constructed, productive.  It has no ancestry before 1750 because its essential building unit—­the modern machine—­did not exist previous to that date.

In the last chapter we dealt with the growth of states into empires and the aggregation of empires into civilizations with the possibility that the existing states could be welded into a world federation.  One of the chief obstacles to such a development is the centuries of conflict during which modern nations have been built up and the strong bonds of nationalism have been established as a means of holding divergent groups of people in line by particular oligarchies operating in particular civilizations.