One of Yukichi Fukuzawa's big disappointments, when he accompanied the first Japanese ambassador to the United States in 1860, was that no one could tell him how to find George Washington's descendants. He realized that he was in a country with no hereditary elite, but, he confessed: "I could not help feeling that the family of Washington would be revered above all other families." Americans seem to be equally baffled by aristocratic cultures. Students in my global history class at Notre Dame struggle to understand societies that esteem birth more highly than wealth and that rate breeding above...