Word: feudality
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...Cocos Islands, a glistening coral archipelago, lie midway between Australia and Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The main island, with a population of 500, has been ruled more or less benevolently like a feudal fiefdom for the past 145 years by descendants of a Scottish sea captain named John Clunies-Ross. He settled in the coconut-growing islands in 1827, imported Malay workers from Java to harvest the copra for export, and in 1886 his grandson obtained a grant in perpetuity to the islands from Queen Victoria...
...search of the truly victorious in the battle of the sexes, Hardwick eventually took pity on a bewildered young knight from The Canterbury Tales. Burdened with the task of finding Woman's heart's desire, he was to discover that the answer fit in perfectly with his own feudal society: to dominate. From Hardwick's final hypothesis, it would seem that this struggle for dominance on the part of the female has been the guideline in the fluctuating fortunes of seduction and betrayal ever since...
...restrictive society, one that would keep women from their lovers, artists from their work, men from their friends. No one is ever alone except for the woman trailing her lover. Mizoguchi's fluid camera wanders in and out among the people, the crowds of women lined up before feudal lords, groups walking through the city streets, a girl cringing in a corner. The camera observes everything, tolerant and forgiving. Even the worst actions proceed only from the passions of the too-loving heart. Mizoguchi possesses in full the Japanese gift of finding beauty everywhere...
...foreign policy by other means, La Cosa Nostra regards murder as an instrument of business-often conducted with a vengeance. The peculiar vogue that the Mafia is now enjoying in films and books may spring from a kind of stylish atavism that Americans recognize in a brute feudal system that allows swift retribution with no red tape. In part, it simply appeals to the antibureaucratic impulse, the secret instinct that things can be "fixed," even in satisfyingly violent ways. For the moment, many still find the Mob romantically sinister and enterprising, but the popular infatuation may fade now that...
...small way, the fate of South Viet Nam has long hinged on the fortunes of the restless, landless peasants whose rebellion against an intolerable feudal way of life was one of the original causes of the war. In the 1950s, the Viet Cong cut a wide swath through the Vietnamese countryside by importing Ho Chi Minh's formula of routing the landlords and distributing "land to the tiller." Today, the leading advocate of Ho's thesis is none other than President Nguyen Van Thieu...