Word: feudality
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...Intrigue Becomes the Pattern." Yet all this is only a drop of progress in a bucket of despair. The fields and villages of Iran are owned by several hundred feudal families who take from two-fifths to four-fifths of what the peasants grow. Under those terms, the peasant is neither able nor eager to improve the land or h's farming methods...
...power. While Nehru made speeches and handled India's foreign relations, Patel shaped much of the nation's domestic policy. As Home Minister, he used his police to suppress Communist terrorism and to "discipline" troublesome labor unions. As States Minister, he brought India's 550-odd feudal princelings to heel. (In one whirlwind 96-hour tour he pressured two dozen princes into surrendering their political powers, thus added 8,000,000 people and 56,000 square miles to the Dominion of India.) Together with his many friends among India's industrialists, he worked successfully to modify...
Then Henry Head came to the island. Henry was a bustling, 5 ft. 6 in. insurance salesman from nearby Guernsey. Three years ago he married a Sark woman of property. In feudal Sark, her properties and duties automatically became his, and Henry found himself a member of Sark's parliament. At first he refused to take his seat. "Sark," he said churlishly, "has done without me for 500 years. It can do without me now." Then, finding himself stuck with the job, he plunged deep into Sarkese law. He soon discovered among other things that the very parliament...
Republished for the first time in 18 years (in a new translation), A Sports man's Notebook now seems far removed from all such flaming issues, and the brutality of the feudal masters whom Turgenevshyly rebukes can hardly shock a world accustomed to far darker examples of Russian tyranny. Though Turgenev's motive in writing it was to atone for the extreme cruelty with which his mother had treated her serfs, what shines through after all these years is the author's intense love for the Russian land, the Russian tongue and the Russian character...
...Honey Spread. By Eleanor's alliance the Plantagenet adventure was loosed on Europe, France and Britain were pounded into dusty poverty under half a century of campaigns, the feudal system itself was staggered. Yet, also, the sweet Provengal culture was spread like honey over Britain, and three sun-washed, heroic figures rose for a long moment against the Dark Ages. They were the three great Plantagenets: Henry II, Eleanor, and their son Richard the Lion Heart. The greatest of them was Eleanor herself, though centuries passed before the world realized...