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the First World War brought the competing imperial systems, tension, and disequilibrium to a head

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the peace of 1918/19 didn't create a durable peace as its architects sought out

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the tension would persist until well into 1945

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1914-1945

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a Thirty Years War with pauses and truces throughout

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especially when you look at Asia during this period, war was much more common than peace

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this epic of world history brought the old Imperial systems' contentions to a head with a human toll that the planet had never seen and which we would never see again

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during this time came a crack in the economic system

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aggravated the tensions that lurked in the wake of the so-called peace

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the Great Depression

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collapse of financial, commercial and the first age of real globalization

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took highly highly integrated global arrangement and fractured it

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from 1929 to 1932

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it took just a few short years to break this down

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a village will produce for its own consumption

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but what happens over the centuries when you separate production from consumption

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the 19th century was the high water mark, never had we seen such a separation between the two

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some countries produced manufactured goods (Britain), and some produce primary staples (India)

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transcends national boundaries

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each country is specializing

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to protect their own jobs, each unit breaks the bonds

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people became disillusioned with the orthodoxies of liberal economics

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John Maynard Keynes

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goes through a kind of transformation as a result of watching this happen

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the completely free marketplace was no longer a reality for healthy economics

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there was a turn away from the liberal formula

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by 1937, we start to see a slow recovery

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what eventually brought the world out of the economy tailspin were the demands of the wartime economy

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public policy experiments

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states were faster than markets

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capitalist, communist and colonial economies relied on the state as an engine

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the state was an agent

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the depression had locked itself into a steady state

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the command economies did better

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didn't just put money in pockets

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American New Deal

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France, Britain

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command economies

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state took over production itself

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this was new in the global economy for a state to play such an aggressive role

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all societies became mass societies

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experiencing pressure on the part of civilians to recovery

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mass production societies

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the automobile

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Fordism

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his workers should be able to afford an automobile

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they can be the consumers of what they produce

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a conceptual breakthrough

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recombine production and consumption

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paradox of modern capitalism

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while it created more integration, it created more volatility

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put pressure on states to integrate societies vertically

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resolving these problems was the challenge of the 1930s