The Long Shadows of the Great War

The years before the First World War saw the construction of the first global order that the world had seen. Because European states, for the first time in centuries, restrained their tendency to wage war, a set of informal but powerful cooperative practices arose: free trade, the gold standard, and a balance of power among the most powerful countries. These measures helped Europe and North America to flourish but were forcibly imposed through imperialism upon Africa and Asia. The informal global order of the nineteenth century came crashing down in the First World War, known in its time as the Great War. Over the next thirty years, war, depression, and dictatorships prevented the restoration of a new global order. How the informal global order of the nineteenth century collapsed and a new institutionalized cooperative global order arose after 1945 is one of the most significant questions in world history. Re-examining the origins of the contemporary global order created over seventy years ago can help illuminate the contemporary challenges of how to adapt that order to meet the demands of the twenty-first century.