As new year approached a century ago, most people in the West looked forward to 1914 with optimism. The hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo had not been entirely free of disaster-there had been a horrific civil war in America, some regional scraps in Asia, the Franco-Prussian war and the occasional colonial calamity. But continental peace had prevailed. Globalisation and new technology-the telephone, the steamship, the train-had knitted the world together. John Maynard Keynes has a wonderful image of a Londoner of the time, "sipping his morning tea in bed" and ordering "the various products of the whole earth" to his door, much as he might today from Amazon-and regarding this state of affairs as "normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement". The Londoner might well have had by his bedside table a copy of Norman Angell's "The Great Illusion", which laid out the argument that Europe's economies were so integrated that war was futile.
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