Aristocracy

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ARISTOCRACY. That form of government in which the sovereign power is exercised by a small number of persons to the exclusion of the remainder of the people.

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And by the end of the civil wars, war and exile had insured that a fairly uniform military culture characterized the aristocracies. The early part of the eighteenth century saw the three kingdoms fully engaged in European and colonial wars and in a refocusing of politics and foreign and military policies that indicated the inextricability of martial culture from a developing sense of British identity.
Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms
Michele Renee Salzman focuses specifically on members of the Roman senatorial, imperial, bureaucratic, and ecclesiastical aristocracies in the West from 284 to 423 from an empire that practiced traditional Roman religions to one that outlawed them.
The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire
With the exception of the English aristocracy, aristocracies and colonial elites running patrimonial management economic systems have generally been viewed as a parasitic class contributing little to process of economic growth.
European Aristocracy and Colonial Elites: Patrimonial Management Strategies and Economic Development, 15th-18th Centuries
Even recent works about the different types of aristocracies have rejected traditional sketches emphasizing their social failure derived from their political inability to found longlasting regimes in France.
Contemporary French social history: crisis or hidden renewal?
It is in the nature of new aristocracies that they tend - at first, or until they've acquired the self-confidence to impose their own tastes and culture - to adopt the values of the class they've superseded.
Premiership footballers will be new aristocrats of turf
Here and elsewhere he compares and contrasts with the case of other contemporary aristocracies, but without overdoing it or ever forgetting the special circumstances which obliged the aristocracy of this corner of Europe to remain committed to its military function -- though in this connection more might have been said of the role of the non-noble urban militias, the caballeros villanos, and further thought have been given to the proposition that by the twelfth century `bishops drawn from the greatest noble families seem to have become few and far between'.
The Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century Leon and Castile

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