The Economic Effects of the Great War

For more than a century before, the Great War there were a series of  qualitative leaps towards the integration of regions and nations into a global economy. Throughout the world people's incomes and working lives came to be affected more and more by exports and imports, by foreign investment, by the migration of labour across frontiers and by fluctuations in rates of exchange between currencies within the imperfectly understood operations of an embryo international monetary system. In short, nineteenth-century industrialisation integrated national, regional and local economies into an interdependent global economy.