Private property for the first time became the dominant method to handle land and industry. Banking had grown in importance. The entire edifice was premised on a stable system of exchange; this was the pound sterling which acted as the world's currency. Gold had become the ultimate standard of value for all the major non colonised countries.

The British government at an early stage, in 1916, limited their adherence to the system and by 1931 removed the system altogether. The essence of the global capitalist system, that is the mechanism that held it all together, ceased to work.

How did the USSR manage to survive until 1989? In 1917, Russia was an ancient sprawling empire across thousands of miles of land. Despite a sophisticated and wealthy Court in Moscow, her peasantry was some of the poorest in all of Europe. There were a few isolated western factories, but the population was illiterate and there was no education except for an elite. Yet despite the invasions in 1918-1920 and the intense poverty of the people, Russian forces were able, just 25 years later, to repel the German invasion in 1942. Russia sacrificed 25 million people in the process.

Anti-Semitism had a long history in the 19th century. There had been discussions among a small minority of Jewish peoples of finding land for a nation-state for the Jewish people. Many different options were considered. This long-felt need was given expression in 1917 just at the point in the 1914-18 war when both sides knew they might lose. The Balfour Declaration was one final consequence of the 1914 war which we need to examine here. It has had a lasting effect and led 30 years later to the creation of the state of Israel.

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.

What had changed by the end of the 1914-18 war? The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had disappeared. The Chinese Empire remained in place, just about. The Russian Empire had erupted into a socialist revolution. This revolution would focus the minds of the European and American ruling classes for the next 70 years, the new socialist leaders would nationalise the companies privately owned by wealthy Europeans. They tampered with private ownership; previously, private property had been untouchable.

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.

The 30 years from 1914 to 1944 represent years of such death and turmoil at every level that it is hard to exaggerate the suffering across the globe. Many of the events of this period have become so seared into people’s memory, contemporary events are frequently compared and contrasted with them. More people than ever were involved in, or affected by war, and at the times when there was no war, there was chaos across the global economy, which affected everyone’s lives.

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.

Following on from last week’s blog, a second possibility was that Germany was responsible for the war in 1914. All the winning powers agreed with this proposition in 1919. The new Germany was the "contending" nation for world power. In the 25 years before 1914, the German economy was growing significantly faster than Britain's. Germany had only been unified as a single state in 1870, and therefore had missed out in the race for colonies: the ‘common sense’ of European foreign policy of the era. And Germany was competing for oil, the new super energy in the ground in the Middle East.

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.