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In later times, the dominant role of landed estates as a basis of public service faded. Capitalist development of manufacturing and commerce created other means of obtaining income, but ordinarily demanding the attention of the owner; at roughly the same time, governments began imposing taxes to fund government bureaus and the military so that people of talent could perform government services for salaries without need for the proceeds of absentee ownership of farmland. Parts of the United States of America, typically New England and Pennsylvania, never had a landed aristocracy, so their armed forces and government agencies could never be organized on the basis of a landed aristocracy. Exactions through taxation to support armies and navies or government bureaus with a civil serviceA civil servant or public servant is a civilian career public-sector employee working for a government department or agency. Further workers in non-departmental public bodies may also be classed as civil servants for the purpose of producing statistics. typically proved less onerous than the exactions of absentee landlords who maximized income through the oppression of the peasantry; where the government practiced the separation of church and stateThe separation of church and state is a concept in law whereby the structures of state or national government are kept separate from those of religious institutions. The concept has long been a topic of political debate. Its opponents are usually called t, as in America and, later France after the 1789 revolutionThe period of the French Revolution in the history of France covers the years between 1789 and 1799, in which democrats and republicans overthrew the absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church perforce underwent radical restructuring. While France wo (and other countries afterwards), churches could survive only through voluntary contributions from the membership.

By 1800, a landed aristocracy became obsolete in most places, and the separation between land ownership and public service became a reality. Capitalist enterprise increasingly created more income (and hence potential tax base) than did traditional agriculture, and professional officers in military service who had no responsibility for securing their own funds but selected through military academies that weeded out gross incompetents, and civil serviceA civil servant or public servant is a civilian career public-sector employee working for a government department or agency. Further workers in non-departmental public bodies may also be classed as civil servants for the purpose of producing statistics. that earned regular salaries proved generally more competent than those who attained such appointments in the past through family connections, and at lesser cost to the State. Such traditional aristocracies that survived became targets for revolutionary and radical opposition as class privilege often survived without any assumption of social responsibility.

The last large exemplar of the principle of a landed aristocracy as a basis of rule, RussiaThe Russian Federation ( Russian: , transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija , or Russia (Russian: , transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija , is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. With under the RomanovThe House of Romanov pr. Rah-MAH-nof), the last ruling dynasty of Russia's imperial era, ruled Russia for ten generations from 1613 to 1917. The House came to power with the election of Mikhail Feodorovitch Romanov as ruler of Russia in 1613 following a p dynasty, literally died in the BolshevikA Bolshevik ("", derived from Russian word loosely translated as "majority") was a member of a faction of Bolsheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) led by Vladimir Lenin. The other faction was known as the Mensheviks, derived from "m Revolution due to the venality and incompetence of the landed aristocracy that had long underpinned the empire.