The people which succeeded in obtaining the carrying trade quite generally secured the banking and insurance business, both of which until recent years, have been principally concerned with trading. The trade of the middle ages was small in volume, and was carried on, for the most part, in valuable commodities, since the cost of transporting bulky, cheap articles was generally prohibitive. With the emergence of modern industry, and its production of large amounts of surplus commodities, important industrial groups like Britain and Germany which depended for their prosperity on their ability to find foreign markets for their surplus commodities, have been driven to a fierce struggle for these markets. Latterly the effort to dispose of surplus has taken a new form--the investment of capital in foreign enterprises. Instead of trying to sell an electrical plant to the city of Buenos Aires, a German business adventurer (enterpriser) secures a contract to build the plant, buys the equipment from the German General Electric Company, takes the bonds of the City of Buenos Aires in payment for the plant, and finances the transaction by selling the bonds to a German banking syndicate. Through this process, the German (or Belgian, or British) business world invests its funds in "undeveloped" countries. At the outbreak of the World War, foreign investment had become a science, with the British leading all of the investing nations. C.K. Hobson, in his book, "The Export of Capital," and in a later article in the "Annals of the American Academy" for November, 1916, throws some important side-lights on British foreign investments. He notes that for some years preceding the war, Britain had never invested less than 500 millions of dollars per year in foreign countries and that just before the outbreak of the war, the annual export of capital had reached a total of a billion dollars per year. In 1913 the British foreign investments were approximately 20 billions of dollars, distributed geographically in a most significant fashion. The largest investment (3,750 millions of dollars) was in the United States; then came Canada with 2,500 millions; following were India, 1,800 millions, South Africa, the same amount, Australia, 1,500 millions, and Argentina a like sum. The British investments in Belgium, France, Germany and Austria were negligible. Thus it was in the new and undeveloped countries, not in the old and developed ones that Britain sought her investment opportunities. In their efforts to play at this great game of imperialism, and to win their share of profitable business, Germany, France, Japan, Belgium and the United States were dogging the British heels.