Ending the first global economy?

Before 1914, Europe seemed the secure pivot of world trade and multinational business; after that date, global power discernibly shifted. Through two world wars, Europeans left behind an earlier era of peace and rising prosperity, and fought themselves into exhaustion. Their wars within Europe, for much of the nineteenth century, had been comparatively short, and, indeed, after 1871 no one great European power found a reason to fight another. Rival states, from the 1880s onwards, colonized Africa by reaching diplomatic solutions to territorial disputes: no imperial gain there was worth the cost of a major conflict back home. In Asia, the governments of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the USA and Japan settled disputes over the control of China's ports; meanwhile, Britain, France and the Netherlands gradually divided the lands and resources of South East Asia by reserving military action for the people being colonized. Tibet, Afghanistan and Persia were all dangerous flashpoints, but did not pull Russia and Britain into war with each other; quite the contrary, as the Treaty of 1907 was a breakthrough resolution of their imperial contests, and the agreement over Persia, in particular, secured Britain's oil interests there and safeguarded its trade routes to India.

On the other hand, Russia had fought an economically and militarily emergent Japan in 1904–5, and decisively lost, bringing about the handover of a railway at the heart of South Manchuria's commercial development. Anglo-Russian rapprochement, in turn, facilitated the founding of the Triple Entente – between Britain, France and Russia – which lined up against a Germany that gave support to an Austria-Hungary destabilized by nationalist forces in the Balkans. International tussles over Morocco, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tunisia – between 1905 and 1911 – issued early warnings of how obscure disputes overseas might threaten the long period of peace. Historians continue to debate the causes of the Great War: nonetheless, while most accept that conflict was hardly inevitable, the dangers of diplomatic miscalculation in a Europe divided by two opposed military blocs were ultimately proven. Every one of the combatants, in 1914, had its own strategic and ideological reasons for escalating a local conflict into a worldwide catastrophe, and, consequently, all of them should receive, if not equal shares, some portion of the blame (Clark, 2012).