There is no simple explanation for why the Early 20th Century was so catastrophic for the World System: World War I (WWI), the Great Depression (GD) and World War II (WWII), all in a row, all followed by a series of minor wars, crises and unresolved problems until the Present.
Imagine that you were British inventor, physicist and engineer Archibald Montgomery Low (1888-1956) and you had heard about George Vacher de Lapogue predictions about growth and catastrophe in the 20th Century, but you found them a little wacky.** So you produced the graphic above (based on mental models, mathematical equations and speculation) predicting the path of British Development for the first half of the 20th Century to check de Lapoque's predictions. Each Attractor Path was based on a different Geopolitical Alignment:
- WE
- BAU
- DE
- RW
- US
- W
Notes
** Archibald Montgomery Low (1888-1956) produced many accurate and many not so accurate forecasts. He did not forecast World War I, the Great Depression, World War II or any future Geopolitical Alignments for Great Britain. George Vacher de Lapogue, however, did based on exponential growth and theories of White Supremacy (needless to say, we are still dealing with White Supremacy in the Trump Administration and these problems never seem to go away).
Wikipedia
- Historiography of the causes of World War I Historians writing about the origins of World War I have differed over the relative emphasis they place upon the factors involved. Changes in historical arguments over time are in part related to the delayed availability of classified historical archives.
- Schroeder, Paul W. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered (2025), influential essays by a leading historian
- Schroeder, Paul W. (2007). "Necessary conditions and World War I as an unavoidable war". In Levy, Jack; Goertz, Gary (eds.). Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals. Routledge. pp. 147–236. ISBN 978-1-134-10140-5.
- Schroeder, Paul W. (2004). "Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War". Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan US. ISBN 978-1-4039-6357-4.
- The Long Nineteenth Century a term for the 125-year period beginning with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, and ending with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was coined by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and later popularized by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.
- Kennedy, M. (2014) Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history': Niall Ferguson
- Crafts, N. (2014) Walking wounded: The British economy in the aftermath of World War I
- What is the Best Counterfactual for the Long Nineteenth Century?
- The Man in the High Castle is an alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1962, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II.
- Hypothetical Victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of the Second World War (1939–1945) a popular topic in the alternate history sub-genre of speculative fiction and in scholarly works that discuss the possible alternative path of history.
- Pasdirtz, G. W. (1981) Instability and Late Nineteenth Century German Development UW-Madison Thesis.
- Timeline of the Great Depression The initial economic collapse which resulted in the Great Depression can be divided into two parts: 1929 to mid-1931, and then mid-1931 to 1933. The initial decline lasted from mid-1929 to mid-1931.
- Timeline of British History 19th Century
- Timeline of British History 20th Century
- Geopolitical Economy a contemporary Marxist approach to understanding the capitalist world historically. It was proposed by Radhika Desai in her Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire as a critique of contemporary mainstream theories of International political economy (IPE) and International relations (IR).
UKL19 Measurement Model
Three component state variables of the UKL19 Model explain 100% of the Variation in the indicators: UK1 = (Overall Growth), UK2 = (XREAL+X-L-HOURS-U) Export-Employment Controller and UK3 = (X-XREAL-Q-N) Malthusian Export-Price Controller.
UKL19 Time Plot
Overall growth in the UKL19 model continued through the Nineteenth Century and may or may not have been approaching a steady state around 1900. The Export-Employment and Malthusian Export-Price Controllers hit a minimum just before 1860 (see the Boiler Plate for a discussion of Historical Growth Controllers).
UKL19 BAU Forecast
AIC Statistics
All the models estimated from the Maddison Data Set are unstable (see the Boiler Plate). The best short-term (year-to-year) model is linkage to Western Europe (WEL19 Model) . The best Attractor Model is linkage to the US (USL19 Model) The Random Walk (RW) and other models have overlapping AIC Confidence Intervals.
UKL19 BAU System Matrix
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