This volume offers an impressive collection of scholarly papers which investigate the historical foundations of globalization before 1945. The book explores the effects of the nineteenth century technologies of the railway, the telegraph and the steamship which promoted the globalization process by boosting trade across frontiers and triggering migration of labour and flows of capital to the temperate areas of agriculture. The colonial empires, in particular the British Empire, facilitated the process, as the integration of capital markets and monetary systems and methods of business organization followed trade and labour. The volume also covers the time between the wars, when impediments to trade, migration and currency movements increased and led to a period of deglobalization and divergence.