When electrification became a viable proposition in the late nineteenth century, communications on a global scale were easy. People traveled. Steamships and cables linked distant continents, making for “rapid” contacts – not with the speed of today's internet world, but faster than ever in history. Railroads and telegraph lines stretched into interiors of independent as well as colonized countries. Ideas, knowledge, and technology could (and did) circulate through individuals, companies, and imperial administrators. Capital was more mobile than ever. The modern multinational enterprise, with coordination and control within the firm, came of age. So, too, did international banking acquire new dimensions. Stock markets in the more advanced nations in Europe handled a greater quantity of securities, domestic and international, than ever before, facilitating financial transactions throughout the world. The New York Stock Exchange, while still fundamentally a domestic market, had begun listing some foreign issues, even though it remained subordinate to London and in international activities to the bourses on the European continent. This was the very time – the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – that the introduction and spread of electrification had begun, varying in pattern and swiftness from one country to the next.

Because the beginnings of the diffusion of light and power facilities worldwide coincided exactly with the beginning of the age of globalization and at the identical time when the modern multinational enterprise emerged, the latter could and did assist in the international spread of electrification.