This chapter is the second building bloc of a wider reconstruction of the main economic, (geo)political, and ideational forces that enabled European integration to take off as of the spring of 1950. It describes the practical unfolding of European integration after the Second World War. This part of the book tries to uncover deeper layers (of psychology and belief) in this history through three crucial sub-histories. This chapter deals with the second of these sub-histories. It traces how the coming about and the workings of the Marshall Plan gradually illuminated an institutional, economic, and political pathway for integration in Western Europe. This second sub-history shows how the gradual (self-)outmanoeuvring of the United Kingdom in matters of European cooperation happened to that country and the West, and how this worked as a catalyst for regional European integration and ‘the emergence of a continental West’.

As railroads began to physically connect the United States, modern telegraph technology, commercialized by Samuel Morse, began to connect regionally diverse investors and financial analysts through financial markets. Stock markets became popular in the late eighteenth century, in large part because of telegraph technology. As the transaction costs of communication decreased, and network effects increased, more investors and financial analysists participated not only in regional stock markets, which also flourished during this period, but also national ones like the New York Stock Exchange. However, the rules designed to uphold very high-quality standards of major stock exchanges made participation in these markets unaffordable for most ordinary people hoping to invest. Additionally, many unsophisticated investors were lured into “bucket shop” schemes, which promised ordinary investors the opportunity to access Wall Street investment opportunities but whose interests were inherently at odds with investors and which more resembled a gambling option rather than an actual investment.