::The rise of Athenian (as opposed to 'Greek') democracy was intimately related to the consolidation of internal slavery and the expansion of Athens' imperial outreach in the wake of the Delian league, an instrument, ostensibly formed to ramify and coordinate an Ionian confederacy whose goal was to defend Greece against Persia, but was quickly transformed into an instrument of financial exaction on Athens' allies, in order to consolidate its power and, incidentally, finance its monumental infrastructure, whose ruins we now admire as we indulge in a nostalgic Schwärmerei for what E A Poe called 'the glory that was Greece'. 
 The pattern repeated itself in Europe, with Great Britain and the slave trade, and Atlantic commerce in slave labour that fueled American democracy, which also had an internal slave proletariat, and which again, exploited the post-war Yalta settlement (just like the Delian League) to build its global imperial empire. The feedback loops are already totally short-circuited: it's just that the massive electronic infrastructure of home entertainment, TV, digital films, cable, the internet, creates a fiction of a 'global social network', a pseudo-tribal palliative for lost 'community'. Power dominates with arms of mass destruction abroad, and arms or tentacles of mass distraction internally. The function of China today is to provide slave-labour for deindustrializing, Western economies by the reallocation of labour to a non-democracy, and the 'hollowing' of the industrial middle-class in the occidental homeland. The consequence is total intellectual empowerment,-one can access everything- and comprehensive social disempowerment - since no one knows anyone else except virtually, in contrast to Aristotle's ideal democracy whose numbers should not exceed the number of people who could hear and watch an orator speak. I think we should end this here. Wiki is not a forum. But, good luck with your research.