In the end, haute finance failed to avert the First World War, which in turn would bring about a fundamental change in the banking system of the West. But a watershed was reached in 1815. Before then, governments and merchants had always accepted that wars provided the opportunity to expand trade. After the industrial revolution, with the rise of a prosperous middle class, the economics of war changed for all time. The hundred years peace, as Karl Polanyi called it, allowed the industrial revolution to spark the development of mass society, a totally new form of civilisation.
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