| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This work begins in the early twentieth century, when Great Britain stood at the center of the first modern global economy. The dream of British free-trade liberals was coming true; world trade was expanding, and economists, financiers, and business leaders in many nations were working to eliminate tariff barriers and expand international trade and finance. Three things made this expansion possible. The large British steam-powered merchant marine, watched over by the Royal Navy, was making it possible for buyers and sellers of many goods to have confidence that products would be shipped on time. Second, as Nicholas Lambert observes in Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War, the "huge explosion in international trade after 1870 was made possible largely by the development of the London credit market," which allowed vendors to ship goods to purchasers on the guarantee that payment had been made and would find its way through London to the vendors' banks. Third, the creation of reliable submarine cables allowed vendors, purchasers, and banks to communicate almost instantaneously across whole oceans, facilitating the various messages that in their turn made international commerce possible.
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