Gender is another aspect of identity that is important when exploring language in the workplace. It has been argued that gender is always relevant at some level when people interact.

The forty-three years between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of World War I (1871–1914) constituted an unprecedented period of peace in Europe. This resulted in part from a common interest among the European powers in seizing those areas of the world still outside Western control: although the expansion of Western influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific periodically caused tension, pursuit of empires overseas remained sufficiently distant to preclude a major European war over imperialistic competition.

Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914 and soon occupied the 600 or so islands in the South Pacific that Germany had acquired, mostly in the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline archipelagos. The Versailles settlement confirmed Japanese rule over the islands, but on condition that they remain unfortified; nevertheless in the 1930s the Japanese navy built airfields, ports, and fortifications, viewing them as ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’ to defend the Japanese homeland against a possible US attack. This policy, and Japan's ruthless conquest of China, combined with American immigration and tariff policies to create growing tensions in the Pacific. By closing their markets during the Great Depression, the Western powers encouraged aggressive Japanese policies towards the Asian mainland and helped Japanese militarists to gain power. In 1931, Japanese army units seized Manchuria without Tokyo's authorization. Six years later that army initiated an undeclared war against China, and Japanese troops soon controlled China's coastal regions and most of the important Chinese cities, leaving a trail of atrocities in their wake.

‘They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron.’ Thus wrote Christopher Columbus of the first natives he encountered in the New World on 12 October 1492. Arriving in the Bahamas on board one of three lightly armed ships widely used in voyages of exploration, Columbus reached a part of the world unknown to the ancients.

The settlement of twenty-three years of war between the European powers in 1815 represented no easy task, but the victors agreed that they possessed certain interests in common – in particular a desire to control the nationalism that had swept Europe. Even more critical to European peace was the general exhaustion: none now wished to resort to war to settle territorial disputes or to fulfil hegemonic ambitions. Although the Industrial Revolution that had occurred in Britain before and during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had provided the country's elite with unprecedented wealth and economic power, it remained content to maintain a balance of power on the continent while controlling the world's commerce.

The waning Greek city-states attempted valiantly – but more often tragically – to incorporate new methods of fighting, even though they were antithetical to the old amateur hoplite battle and the traditional etiquette of agrarian warfare. Nostalgia about the old ways continued, but political leaders were forced to confront the new military realities. ‘Nothing’, the orator Demosthenes warned his fourth-century BC audience of complacent Athenians, ‘has been more revolutionized and improved than the art of war.’ ‘I know that in the old times’, he continued, ‘the Spartans, like everyone else, would devote four or five months in the summer to invading and ravaging the enemy's territory with hoplites and citizen militia, and then would go home again. And they were so old-fashioned – or such good citizens – that they never used money to buy advantage from anyone, but their fighting was fair and open.’