No. of Recommendations: 13
I recently re-read Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August about the start of WWI. At the time, no one really believed a war could happen, or if it did, it would be over quickly because everyone was getting rich on international trade and a bothersome war would interrupt that...
An interesting observation about the "getting rich from trade" bit: Indeed the world was. Global trade as a fraction of global GGP hit about 14% by 1870 and remained that high, give or take, until the first war. The nadir was around 6.7% in the mid 1930s, not that surprising.
But more interesting is that world trade intensity didn't back up to the gilded age levels again until around 1975.
Jim
