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in the volume of industry and commerce, with a corresponding growth in national rivalry.

The international situation of the last decade of the nineteenth century, therefore, can be understood only in the light of the various conflicting movements of national expansion which found expression in Asia, Africa, and Oceanica. In the gradual development of affairs three factors of peculiar interest to Great Britain and the United States had assumed significance; that by 1890 the United States was committed to a policy of aggressive commercial expansion; that that policy must inevitably lead her into European international politics; and that the beginning of an Anglo-American trading policy in opposition to the current European methods of expansion had already been laid in Samoa and Hawaii.

In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan began an active effort to draw the attention of the two great English speaking races to this intimate association which was slowly developing between them. In that year he published his first great naval study, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. A second study was published in 1892, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire. These were followed by a number of short articles in prominent American magazines. Through them all