In World Trade since 1431, Peter Hugill showed how the interplay of technology and geography guided the evolution of the modern global capitalistic system. Now, in the successor to that widely acclaimed book, Hugill shifts the focus to telecommunications, once again demonstrating that those nations that best developed and marketed new technologies were the nations that rose to world power.

Beginning with the advent of the telegraph in the 1840s, Hugill shows how each major change in transportation and communications technologies brought about a corresponding transformation from one world economy to another. British advances in international telegraphy after the American Civil War, for example, kept that nation just ahead of the United States in the communications race, a position it held until 1945. Hugill explains how such developments as aerial bombardment of cities in World War I spurred the development of radio and, ultimately, radar. He also traces the steps that led to the British surrender of world hegemony to the United States at the end of World War II.