The four decades following America's first Gilded Age in the 1870s were pocked with dislocation: multiple financial panics, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the onset of the Mexican Revolution and Otto von Bismarck's German makeover.

FORBES: Worlds apart?

It is true that, under the ethnic-Manchu Qing dynasty, which fell in 1911, China ruled Mongolia cruelly.

ECONOMIST: A tug of war between commercial logic and popular sentiment