feudal

It's reminiscent of Elon Musk's Texas compound, where he can play out his fantasies of being a feudal king behind walls that shield him from the scary real world.

The practice was initially met with resistance because of its feudal undertones, but eventually it gained traction by the late 19th century, particularly in the hospitality and restaurant industries.

That was less true, perhaps, for a significant group of Black abolitionist writers who clearly understood Jefferson’s vision as limited by his belief in a natural hierarchy of color, even as he sought to break with the feudal hierarchies of England and the Old World.

In the years following the American and French Revolutions, when calls for liberty from England and equality among citizens still echoed across the new nation, pro-slavery thinkers in the United States had little appetite for openly associating slavery and racial hierarchy with an antiquated European medieval feudal order.

While there is evidence of slaveholders associating themselves with a type of feudal lordship and associating the skin aristocracy with medieval times during the opening decades of the 1800s, such claims blossomed in the 1820s and 1830s for several reasons.