es for consideration only occasionally. The
demand for economic necessaries each day recurs with tireless insistence
in the life of every individual. Men have learned this fact through
frightful experiences, and they look forward with hope or with dread to
the comfort of plenty or to the disaster of want. So effectually have
these forces entered into everyday life that they color all aspects of
human existence, and people continually think and act in terms of
economic hardship or of economic well-being. This simple fact of
economic determinism--the influence of the livelihood struggle upon the
conduct of individuals and of societies--plays a fateful part in shaping
both biography and history.

The economic issues before primitive society were comparatively simple
ones. The producer--the hunter, herder, farmer--snared his game and
cooked it, tended his goats and lived on their milk and flesh, planted
and reaped his crops, and used them to sustain life. Later, the baker,
the saddler, the tailor and the carpenter spent their energies in
producing the articles of their trade and in disposing of them. The
herdsman could live on his hills, the farmer in his valleys and the
artisans in their towns, content and at peace with the remainder of the
world, neither knowing nor caring what was happening to their fellow
dwellers on the planet. Confined within its narrow bounds, primitive
thought was as local as primitive life.

But such isolation is no longer possible. The currents of economic life,
like most other phases of human activity, have swept beyond the local
forests, the grass lands, the tilled fields, the oven and the
carpenter's bench, and gaining momentum in their ever-widening course,
they have circled the world.

3. _Worldizing Economic Activity_

The past hundred years have witnessed a speedy worldizing of human
affairs built upon a transformation in the ways of making a living.
These changes have been effected by the industrial revolution, which,
toward the end of the eighteenth century began to make itself felt in
Great Britain. Its influence spread over Europe, America and Australia
during the last three-quarters of the nineteenth century, but it did not
reach Japan until 1860. Almost within the memory of the present
generation, therefore, the scope of trade, manufacture and finance, the
search for markets, the organization and unification of labor and of
popular thinking about economic problems, have passe