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By the sixteenth century in the more advanced Western countries the outlines of a balanced economy, based on a resourceful technology, had come into existence; and if all the parts had been kept in being then, its further mechanization might have taken place with great human profit at many points, without upsetting this balance.The other point is that the power elements in this technology began, from the fourteenth century, to get out of hand, as feudal stability, based on use and wont, custom and ritual, was undermined. This was mainly the result of the new principles and incentives of capitalist finance, with its acquisitive appetites, its love of numbers and quantitative increase, themselves symbols of a new kind of status, with its new seizures of power. All these motivations were in turn augmented through the imperious demands of militarism for weapons and armaments, in a period of national unification and colonial expansion.
" – extract from The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford, 1964