As Europe and East Asia moved into the modern world, the political form constructed and reaching its apogee in the years before the Great War was a system of state-empires. The metropolitan cores of these state-empires were in Europe; the peripheries, in various parts of the world, were drawn into the system at various times and with various levels of integration. Such integration would include economic, social and political practices. More familiar metropolitan treatments that stress the determining role of the core, and equally familiar nationalist treatments which invert the tale, stressing the costs to extant civilizations of the process, under-report the integrated nature of these systems.