minant force in Europe and in the non-European segments of
the planet which were gradually brought under European imperial control.

In the course of voyaging, "discovery" and the establishment of trade,
Europeans set up military outposts and maintained increasingly large
naval forces. The avowed object of these military and naval build-ups
was to defend and promote Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French and British
imperial interests. Actually military and naval installations were
marking out and maintaining the defense perimeters of their respective
colonial empires. One of the widely accepted axioms of the period
equated colonies with national prosperity. The more successful
colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries became the
strongholds of nineteenth century monopoly capitalism.

Industrial revolution, flowering in Europe during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, gave the European commercial empires a lead over
potential rivals based on Asian wealth-power centres. As a result of
this lead European empire builders were able to establish and maintain
their authority in India and Indonesia, dismember the Turkish and
Chinese empires and partition Africa among themselves. Their only
potential rivals were the lumbering, isolationist United States of North
America and the newly awakened Island Kingdom of Japan. Both of these
non-European nations began playing serious wealth-power roles in the
same period from 1895 to 1910. Up to that point Europe continued to be
the homeland of monopoly capitalism. The chief centers of heavy
industry, commerce and finance were in Europe. European merchant fleets
and European navies sailed the seas. European banks and business houses
dominated planetary financing, insuring and investing.

Viewed from outside, the ascendancy of Europe seemed to be complete.
Europe held the strategic strong points: productivity, wealth, the means
of transportation, mobile fire-power. By the end of the nineteenth
century Europe was the monopoly-capitalist motherland. The rest of the
planet was made up of actual or potential dependents under European
authority. From these outsiders living at subsistence levels, Europeans
could get their supplies of food and raw materials at low prices and to
them Europeans could sell their surplus manufactures, their commercial
services, and their investment capital at high prices. The resulting
European prosperity was expected to continue indefinitely in