ABSTRACT
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a series of global economic transformations (notably the shift in the energy base of industrial capitalism from coal and steam to oil, gas and electricity) as well as the related political reconfigurations (particularly the rise of new forms of confrontational nationalism) sparked off an anxious, characteristically fin-de-siècle debate about the likely shape of the global order in the coming twentieth century. The advent of a modern, increasingly global political economy and the emergence of cohesive, land-based and continental-scale nation states such as the USA posed obvious challenges to the older and smaller European imperial states whose power rested on widely dispersed trading empires.
