Both by his reading of economic history and his practical experience of trade policy, Stresemann was convinced that the dominant forces in the twentieth-century world would be the three major industrial economies: Britain, Germany and the United States. The economic great powers were rivalrous, certainly. But they were also functionally and inescapably interconnected. Germany needed raw materials and food from overseas export markets to provide its population with work and bread. The British Empire was better placed with regard to raw materials, but it needed Germany as an export market.
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