Industrial Communication Technologies, Colonial Expansionism, and the Burst of Globalization in the Decades before WWI

The half-century before the First World War saw the fullest burst of the globalizing process until the last decades of the 20th century and the first years of the third millennium CE. The prewar phase of globalization was dominated by the conquests and territorial aggrandizement of the industrialized or industrializing European nations and empires as well as the more limited expansionism of the United States and Japan. The intensification of colonization was facilitated by and in turn gave rise to the further elaboration of communications and transportation systems, greatly enhanced volumes of worldwide commercial transactions and commodity exchanges, unprecedented levels of human migration, and rich cultural exchanges in spheres as diverse as the arts and architecture, scientific inquiry, and popular entertainments. But the colonial framework in which globalization occurred meant that it was dominated by and disproportionately benefited colonizing societies and fixed ever more firmly the "underdeveloped" status of peoples and societies in colonized areas.