ABSTRACT
Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism. Liberals agree that World War I decisively ended the first globalization, the era of British hegemony. Probably the two most famous and widely read arguments in the history of international relations theory are those of British liberal Norman Angell and Russian Marxist VI Lenin within a few years of each other around the outbreak of World War I. Author's corporatist argument is that imperialism was the dominant strategy during the decades before World War I and that it was a consequence of business alignments in much the way that Hilferding described. Rudolf Hilferding coined the term finance capital to refer to the unification of banking, industrial, and commercial capital during the late nineteenth century that created many huge corporations and even larger cartels, trusts, combines, and conglomerates.
