ABSTRACT
The capitalist world-system became truly global-i.e. it encompassed all inhabited parts of the world-sometime in the late nineteenth century. The geopolitical conflicts created by this development were expressed in the First World War. This war broke up two geopolitical entities of great significance for western Europe, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. It also shook, publicly humiliated and restricted the scope of the global activities of the then recently unified and globally expansive German Empire and weakened the political stability of the Russian Empire, the largest imperial territory of the world, covering much of northern Eurasia.
