ABSTRACT
The world economic map as we approach the new millennium is substantially different from that of one hundred years ago. Arguably, we now live in a more highly integrated global economy. In part, the difference between today’s world economic map and that of the late nineteenth century reflects the gradual processes of evolutionary change. We can identify a succession of international divisions of labour-geographies of economic specialization-which, through time, overlap and interpenetrate, leaving traces of the old within the new. However, this evolutionary, incremental path of geo-economic change has been punctuated, from time to time, by revolutionary events in which either the pace or the direction of change is radically altered. The Second World War was one such dramatic event which, in a whole variety of ways-both political and technological-helped to reshape the global economic map. It was ‘one of the great punctuation marks in human history’ (Stubbs and Underhill 1994:145); ‘a great dividing line’ (Scammell 1980:2). The vast majority of the world’s industrial capacity (outside North America) was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. At the same time, new technologies (including what were to become the information technologies) were created and many industrial technologies were refined and improved in the process of waging war. Necessity had, indeed, proved to be the mother of invention.
