Global power is itself something extraordinary. It imbues those people who have experienced it with arrogance and self-confidence that is hard to exaggerate. First Britain, and then the USA, have behaved on the global stage as if their role as a world leader has been ordained by God. For Britain to give up her empire so easily in 1944, some devastating events had to have occurred.

One of the keys to understanding the period between 1914 and 1945 is the continuation of colonialism. Stated or unstated, the expansion and control of foreign states was a major war aim of Britain, France, and Germany. The winners, Britain and France took everything. The one major part of the world uncolonised until this period was the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had been a strong precapitalist Empire some hundreds of years old. During the 19th century, as the Europeans expanded, the Ottomans declined in wealth, power, and territory. By 1900, they only existed because the European powers supported the Ottomans geographically to stop the Russian Empire from expanding southwards into the Mediterranean.

The global relations of power were altered fundamentally after the turbulent period between 1914 and 1945. In 1914, Britain was the world’s leading industrial state. She controlled the global infrastructure for trade and finance on which the world’s stability depended. Thirty years later in 1944 and 1945, Britain had lost nearly everything she had fought for over the previous 400 years. The USA took over global leadership. Worse, as far as Britain was concerned: she was about to lose control of her huge global empire and become again a small island nation in the North Atlantic.

There is a small body of historians who have argued the case that the British ruling classes or a powerful part of that class, did wish to go to war with Germany in 1914. And further that they prepared all the conditions for such a war. This small group of historians has in the main been ignored by the establishment historians who have been given prominence by the major publishers in both the USA and UK.

Britain wanted world dominance, and there was never any place for a competitor of any size like Germany. This thought, that Britain willed and manipulated the way towards the 1914 war, has been so unthinkable to British historians and the public alike that it has never been widely discussed. Unlike German scholarship - where the issue was widely discussed - those few scholars who suggested that a major section of the ruling classes consciously decided to go to war with Germany have been side-lined and ignored.

The period between 1914 and 1945 saw war break out across the world. These 30 years saw death and destruction on a scale that had never before been envisaged. And, while this period is behind us by over 100 years, it is still replayed in books and television almost as if it was yesterday. These wars are seared into the public mind as almost nothing else in history. As is so often repeated, history is written by the victors, and so it has been.