with:

1. The transport of goods and people.

2. The financing of such transactions through bills of exchange, and
the like.

3. The insuring of trading ventures.

The people which succeeded in obtaining the carrying trade quite
generally secured the banking and insurance business, both of which
until recent years, have been principally concerned with trading.

The trade of the middle ages was small in volume, and was carried on,
for the most part, in valuable commodities, since the cost of
transporting bulky, cheap articles was generally prohibitive. With the
emergence of modern industry, and its production of large amounts of
surplus commodities, important industrial groups like Britain and
Germany which depended for their prosperity on their ability to find
foreign markets for their surplus commodities, have been driven to a
fierce struggle for these markets.

Latterly the effort to dispose of surplus has taken a new form--the
investment of capital in foreign enterprises. Instead of trying to sell
an electrical plant to the city of Buenos Aires, a German business
adventurer (enterpriser) secures a contract to build the plant, buys the
equipment from the German General Electric Company, takes the bonds of
the City of Buenos Aires in payment for the plant, and finances the
transaction by selling the bonds to a German banking syndicate. Through
this process, the German (or Belgian, or British) business world invests
its funds in "undeveloped" countries.

At the outbreak of the World War, foreign investment had become a
science, with the British leading all of the investing nations. C.K.
Hobson, in his book, "The Export of Capital," and in a later article in
the "Annals of the American Academy" for November, 1916, throws some
important side-lights on British foreign investments. He notes that for
some years preceding the war, Britain had never invested less than 500
millions of dollars per year in foreign countries and that just before
the outbreak of the war, the annual export of capital had reached a
total of a billion dollars per year. In 1913 the British foreign
investments were approximately 20 billions of dollars, distributed
geographically in a most significant fashion. The largest investment
(3,750 millions of dollars) was in the United States; then came Canada
with 2,500 millions; following were India, 1,800 millions, South Africa,
the same amount, Australia, 1,500 millions, and Argentina a l