This made me realize how unique and amazing our American founding fathers were,(reply>), @rmcewan10 Vast swathes of the interior of Africa, the North American continent, the interior of Central Asia, the Mideast were semi-anarchic, insofar as the political organization of these regions were either a patchwork of competing, semi-nomadic tribes (all of sub-saharan Africa, minus the Boer settlements in modern day South Africa), or largely ungoverned peripheries of empires (such as Qing Dynasty in the case of Mongolia and Central Asia, or the Arabian Peninsula and modern day Iraq in the case of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires).  So, yes, Ved Joshi is correct in asserting many parts of the 18th century world were anarchic.  <br><br>"perhaps worth noting that a good number of those monarchies, in which all members of society were equal before the law (if not at the ballot box), were able to abolish the system of slavery, a society in which some human beings are the property of others, decades before the USA, and without requiring a bloody internecine war to accomplish it."<br><br>Couple parts to unpackaged here.  In the 18th century, no European monarchies, even including common law Britain, possessed equality before the law.  Social privilege (noble titles, etc) and money or one's lack thereof decisively contoured one's experience in the judicial systems of the time.  French Revolution and Napoleonic occupation, and imposition of the Napoleonic Code across most of Europe, overturns much of this for a time, at least de-jure, until the Restoration.  But, its crucial to point out that the French definition of citizenship was exclusively male (France only enfranchised women in 1954) so not even the most liberal of European societies (France) in the 19th century conceived of politics in a universal sense including all members of society. (Whereas the first female elected official was a Wyoming Congresswomen in 1869--individual US states enfranchised women long before the 19th Amendment passed in 1920).  Second, all parliamentary systems in the 18th and 19th century had highly limited franchises, which post-1815 were generally determined by ownership of property.  So, in reality, the US WAS uniquely inclusive by 19th century standards, advent of universal white male suffrage began in 1830s, completing by 1856 across all states.  In comparison, only 24% and 22% of men in Germany and supposedly liberal Britain could vote before WWI.  <br><br>Third, the reason European monarchies were able to abolish slavery easily was due to the fact that after 1815, Britain was the only global European power left, as France, Britain's primary imperial competitor in the 18th century was defeated, and forced to concede its oversea empire.  The Spanish and Portuguese empires were already in terminal decline and British naval hegemony, particularly its strategic bases gained at the Congress of Vienna, ensured its control of major sea lanes. So London had the strategic leverage to force compliance.  Intersecting this favorable geopolitical reality was the decline by the early 19th century of the Caribbean sugar plantations which had been the main driver of European slave demand.  With industrialization, specifically the rise of the textile industry, Britain's commodity demand shifted to cotton.  While there certainly was a moral impetus behind the British campaign for the abolition of the slave trade, the decisive catalyst was shifting economic interest.  Britain no longer had anything to lose from its abolition; though, Britain's insatiable demand for US cotton was contradictory to its campaign, as it built up and reinforced the slave-based agricultural system in the US South.  The lack of an internecine war over the abolition of slavery in Europe was the fact that there was no equivalent slave-holding class, like the Southern US Plantation aristocracy, in Europe.  <br><br>"The founding fathers, generally speaking, were men of questionable moral standing, who came together to establish a democracy in which the majority of the population couldn’t vote, some were the property of others, and the massacre of the indigenous population of the continent on which that country was founded was not only permitted in law but encouraged, in order to achieve the rather ill-defined notion of ‘manifest destiny’."<br><br>The founding fathers came together to establish representative democracy i.e. a republic, not a mass democracy.  Their justification was the historical precedents of Greco-Roman democracy, especially Athens whose excesses during the Peloponnesian Wars, typified the problems of restraining popular passions in the maintenance of government/policy and democratic government itself.  It also important to note that every 'democracy' in history circumscribes and limits participation in politics.  The conflation of voting rights and political power is also specious in a lot of ways.  The expansion of the franchise has paradoxically lead to the decline of voter participation in the US; it also reifies group identities and the political incentives to divide and conquer the electorate into rival coalitions.  The founders were farsighted in recognizing the danger of partisanship even if they themselves were not immune from it, and the strength of political and cultural homogeneity amongst the governing class from which compromise can more easily derive.<br><br>"Massacre" is hyperbolic, Euro-American settlement of the continent was a three century long process, and official colonial and eventually federal policy oscillated on the legality of frontier violence. If US policy had actually been a concerted, unchanging drive for ethnic genocide there wouldn't be Indian reservations and tribes in existence today.  In contrast, to the famines of Imperial India, Leopold's Congo, or the toll of Spanish introduced diseases in central and south America, the indigenous death toll in North America was on the low end, though this owes probably more to the far lower population density of the continent than anything else.  There was indeed numerous cases of mass violence against native civilians but brutality cut both ways, something which contemporary textbooks sanitize in their accounts of westward expansion.  The "indigenous population" of North America was incredibly diverse, culturally and politically.  "Native American" is a post-hoc invention; no such pan-indigenous solidarity ever existed when it might have counted-- and countered European expansion into the interior of the continent. Ironically, the eastcoast political establishment of which all the founding fathers were members of generally opposed restless and haphazard frontier expansion 'manifest destiny' embodied.  That term and phenomenon was a product of the 1840s, not the early American republic of the founders era.,(reply>), @Ved Joshi yes. I like you style.,(reply>), @Ved Joshi I'm with you.,(reply>), Amazing for sure. Unique, I don't think so.,(reply>)," @rmcewan10 someone once told <a href=""http://me.we.live/"">me.we.live</a> in one of the worst outcomes ",compared to other realitys were certain things never happened.we as a collective species have failed so much.