TRANSNATIONAL ECONOMIC PROCESSES 375 focus on economic activities.Virtually any "tangible"item involved in such processes is likely to have a significant economic dimension in that it can be treated as a commodity or service to which monetary value can be attached. Whether it is a question of goods,information,or money itself,its presence is likely also to entail certain costs for the governments or societies involved. This economic aspect of transnational activities is central for several addi- tional reasons. First,transnational processes seem to have arisen in the contemporary inter- national system after the technological revolution induced persistent economic growth in the highly developed or modernized societies of Western Europe. The remarkable development of first the British and later other Western economies in the nineteenth century through the "extended application of science to problems of economic production"enabled these societies to mo- bilize resources on an unprecedented scale.?This mobilization of economic resources coupled with revolutionary innovations in the fields of transporta- tion and communication enabled Western states to expand their power and influence,if not their rule,over the rest of the planet.The linking up of the various states of the world through this process of growth in transnational economic phenomena was accompanied by an unprecedented mobility of certain factors of production (population,capital)as well as of output. Second,these economic activities were transnational,as defined above,as a result of the kind of political regimes in which the industrialization process first occurred.These states were,by and large,liberal democracies.Very little of the initial growth in trade was a result of planned governmental activities Rather,the responsibility for taking advantage of the economic potential of new technological innovations was usually in the hands of private industrial- ists and bankers whose main incentive was the profit motive.Given the nature of the regimes involved international economic activities were bound to have some transnational element,and these were generally private business enter- prises. Third,with the onset of sustained economic growth in what are now the most highly modernized societies economic values became a central substan- tive focus of political and other social activities.This was the case for several 2 Simon Kuznets,Modern Economic Growth:Rate,Structure,and Spread (Studies in Comparative Economics,No.7)(New Haven,Conn:Yale University Press,1966),p.9.A similar definition has been used to describe the revolution of modernization in human affairs;see C.E.Black,The Dynamics of Modernization:A Study in Comparative History (New York:Harper Row,1966),pp.1-9. 3 For example,overseas emigration from Europe was at a level of some 257,000 per year in 1846 and increased to a rate of 1.4 million per year at the outbreak of World War I.Thereafter the rate pre- cipitously declined.Similarly,world trade increased at an accelerating rate through the first half of the nineteenth century,reaching a per decade rate of growth of 61.5 percent in the 1840s and declining to about 47 percent at the outbreak of the First World War.It,too,later declined drastically.With the rapid growth of world trade in the century before World War I the share of the foreign trade sector in the national product also generally increased in the industrializing societies.More complete data on the period between the 183os and 196o can be found in Kuznets,pp.285-358