Yet one way or another, India's faster growth seems to have improved living standards even in these complicated little principalities.
FROM Napoleon to Bismarck, it took roughly 70 years to knock Germany's myriad principalities into a single empire.
Small states (or more accurately, small nation-states) include modern city states, free ports, principalities and island states (Malta, the Channel Islands, Iceland and so on).
The last three orders alone have regular dealings with mortals: Principalities, Archangels, Angels.Among these are the only angels who are given names, the archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel (though Uriel's name is doubtful).
In the Middle Ages, today's Germany was made up of scores of kingdoms, principalities, cities and states.
It was more than a symbolic moment for a business which used to be run like a collection of principalities rather than a global enterprise.
HALF a millennium ago this year Niccolo Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat, issued a treatise, "The Prince", setting out tactics for navigating a landscape not so different from today's British political scene: the power squabbles within and between the principalities of 16th-century Italy.
Before Bismarck, Germany's provinces, principalities and palatinates often had rulers who were keen to establish local industries.
Some countries would like to try and some already have.Citizens of a clutch of states and principalities, none of them members of the EU, may end up making as much use of the euro, which was traded for the first time on January 4th, as any German or Italian.
It is particularly valuable to be reminded of the importance of the web of mostly tiny principalities that made up the empire, famously described by Voltaire as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Among the co-operative central banks, the days of the old principalities are almost gone.
