Owing, probably, to the peculiar topography of Europe, small-scale and broken, the pastoral-predatory culture has never been fully developed or naturalised in this region; nor has a monarchy of the great type characteristic of western Asia ever run its course in Europe. The nearest approach to such a despotic state would be the Roman Empire; which was after all essentially Mediterranean, largely Levantine, rather than peculiarly European. And owing probably to the same conditioning limitations of topography the subsequent sequence of institutional phenomena have also been characteristically different in this European region from that in the large and fertile lands of the near East. It is necessarily this run of events in the Western culture that is of chief interest to the present inquiry; which will therefore most conveniently follow the historical outlines of this culture in its later phases, in so far as these outlines are to be drawn in economic terms of a large generality. * * * * * In a passably successful fashion the peoples of Christendom made the transition from a frankly predatory and servile establishment, in the Dark Ages, to a settled, quasi-peaceable situation resting on fairly secure property rights, chiefly in land, by the close of the Middle Ages. This transition was accompanied by a growth of handicraft, itinerant merchandising and industrial towns, so massive as to outlive and displace the feudal system under whose tutelage it took its rise, and of so marked a technological character as to have passed into history as the “era of handicraft.” Technologically, this era is marked by an ever advancing growth of craftsmanship; until it passes over into the régime of the machine industry when its technology had finally outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty trade that gave it its character as a distinct phase of economic history. In its beginning the handicraft system was made up of impecunious craftsmen, working in severalty and working for a livelihood, and the rules of the craft-gilds that presently took shape and exercised control were drawn on that principle.[123] The petty trade which characteristically runs along with the development of handicraft was carried on after the same detail fashion and was presently organised on lines afforded by the same principle of work for a livelihood. Presently, however, in early modern times, larger holdings of property came to be employed in the itinerant trade, and investment for a profit found its way into this trade as also into the handicraft system proper. The processes of industry grew more extensive and roundabout, the specialisation of occupations (“division of labour”) increased, the scale of organisation grew larger, and the practice of employing impecunious workmen in organised bodies under the direction of wealthier masters came to be the prevailing form taken by the industry of the time.