Now this has partially reversed. Western commodity traders’ power, at least when it comes to certain niche metals. Germany’s near-monopoly on tungsten smelting in the 1910s has been replaced by China’s monopoly on rare earth processing today. Konkel argues that “the Pax Americana was the resolution to the interwar raw materials problem.”

Memories of World War I shortages led the great powers to secure supply as geopolitical competition intensified in the 1930s.

Before the war, the European tungsten market resided in Hamburg, where more than 2000 tons of concentrated ore was sold annually. This was remarkable, considering Germany produced, at best, one percent of the world’s tungsten ore. Indeed, most of the world’s tungsten ore was being mined in parts of the British Empire, but more than half of global

The German “Octopus” and Processing Chokepoints

Yet geology wasn’t everything. Processing mattered too. And processing, the allied powers discovered in World War I, was disproportionately concentrated in Germany. Before the war, Germany’s geological deficits had driven its traders to scour the world for supply. They’d bought mines across the world

The U.S. wasn’t alone in having lots of steel but comparatively few alloying materials. “The four leading steelmaking countries in the world,” Konkel writes, “the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France—accounted for 90 percent of the world’s steel production, but perhaps only 1 to 2 percent of the world’s manganese.” Most of the world’s

The Age of Alloy Steel

The early 20th century, Konkel argues, was a world built with steel, almost all of which was produced in one of three locations: the UK, the Upper Midwest, or Central Europe. These regions were the locomotives that drove industrialization; they were also sources of the era’s strongest militaries. Given the need for steel to