The international spread of antitrust since World War II suggested the historical process shaping global capitalism. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the growing separation between owners and operators resulted in managers becoming the primary decision makers. This transformation of capitalism constituted what historian Alfred Chandler called the managerial revolution in American business. Managerial capitalism nonetheless spawned popular anxiety that big business had exceeded the government's capacity to impose accountability, engendering the creation of a regulatory regime known as antitrust. By the 1930s managerial capitalism had appeared in varying degrees in the industrial nations of Europe and in some European settler societies such as Australia, and Japan. Generally, however, these nations expressly rejected American-style antitrust as unsuited to their cultures. The perception of antitrust as a distinctly American response to big business changed after World War II. Governments increasingly adopted workable antitrust regimes; by the turn of the millennium, antitrust was instrumental to the clash between state sovereignty and globalization associated with the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The internationalization of antitrust occurred within a contested cross-cultural public discourse that recognized Americanization as an active element primarily in relation to indigenous factors already constituting capitalist systems. Given this interaction, what foreign and indigenous elements explain the global change from opposing antitrust to supporting it? The Allied occupations of Germany and Japan following World War II suggest the difficulties in answering this question.