ABSTRACT
Most things exist long before they are named. So it is with global govern ance. A century ago, before World War I, the globe was already governed by a thin network of public and private inter national organ iza tions linking the industrial core countries of the mainly European empires that had so recently succeeded in conquering and divvying up the entire world. The organ iza tions served a small but crucial part of the new imperial economies: their fundamentally new industries-electrical power, pharmaceuticals, and various new consumer products-were the economic engines of the Second Industrial Revolution.
