The four decades following America's first Gilded Age in the 1870s were pocked with dislocation: multiple financial panics, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the onset of the Mexican Revolution and Otto von Bismarck's German makeover.
Far from limiting its war effort to fending off the encircling allied powers of Russia, France and Britain, German diplomats and soldiers tried to foment popular anti-colonial revolution in India and Egypt, to create a widespread Islamic jihad against the colonial rulers, to disrupt the allies' global communications.