By 1913, America was the richest nation in the world in terms of total and per-capita output. By 1918, she dominated the global financial structures by becoming the world's creditor nation. Her banks had provided the money to fight the war. She was preparing to take over world power; although that had to wait until the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. How had she generated such wealth at incredible speeds? The wealth generated by the USA came out of industrialisation which had begun early in the 19th century. As in Britain, industrialisation had originated out of cotton.

The USA appeared on the world stage with a big bang, if you will pardon the pun. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities which announced her entrance. In 1944, at a meeting with the British at the village of Bretton Woods in the northeastern USA, the leaders of the two nations made a historic agreement on the future global infrastructure: something that had been missing in the interwar years; it would remain intact in most respects until the present day.

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.

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.