In a speech at the launch of a battleship that same year, the kaiser was equally unsubtle: “Old empires pass away and new ones are in the process of being formed.”54 The Germans seeking World Power status were ultimately, as Michael Howard has written, “not concerned with expanding within what they saw as a British dominated world-system. It was precisely that system which they found intolerable, and which they were determined to challenge on a basis of equality.”55
