As the age of exploration gave way to imperialism, Europeans found that the semitropical climates of the Caribbean Islands and of the Southern United States were suited particularly well for the planting of tobacco, sugar, and cotton, as was Ceylon suited for the growing of tea. As a result, plantations devoted to the growing of single cash crops were set up by wealthy investors. These North American cash crops paid for the expansion of a commercial empire around the globe, to India, South Africa, and later Hong Kong, as those places were developed as colonial governing regions to support the plantations which European interests, especially British interests, controlled.

As the world's first vertically integrated multinational corporations, first capitalized by the Dutch stock exchange and then by Lloyd's of London, the colonial enterprises were inextricably linked together in a global trading system, bringing raw materials, cotton and sugar, tea and gold, tobacco and coffee to Europe, returning with slaves from the Gold coast or textiles and machined tools to America and India.

These days, too, transnational companies seek some security for their investments, and so take an interest in the political stability of the countries in which they invest directly. For this reason, American based transnationals prefer to invest in countries which fall under the American sphere of influence, such as Latin American nations, Caribbean states, and the Phillipines. British companies, for similar reasons, invested in commonwealth member states such as Hong Kong, India, South Africa and the Caribbean. Most transnationals have been willing to make direct foreign investment in the four Asian dragons, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea.

China itself is seen as a risk because of its communist regime, which purportedly operates slave labor industries on a wide scale. Africa is also seen as risky territory since its warlike regimes are both uneducated and unstable. Who wants to build industrial works in a nation that cannot maintain a functioning elevator in its capital city? Such investment as is made in risky territory is limited to the extraction of raw materials for immediate export for processing under more favorable conditions overseas.

There are tens of thousands of transnational companies, but only about three hundred of them control over twenty five percent of the world's assets.Eighty five percent of the world trade in wheat, corn, coffee, cotton, iron ore, and timber are controlled by a handful of companies through their multiplicity of subsidiary operations.

Transnationals operate under the active principle of comparative advantage, where any location on the globe is a potential location for business. One third of all trade consists thereby of intrafirm transactions.

From a locational perspective, the most confounding businesses are those having to do with trading paper assets, currencies and stocks. They transfer ownership of these assets every few seconds from one part of the planet to another with no possibility of any overall accounting being made which comprehensively explains what is happening. There is a tremendous amount of trust involved in these investments, and any whiff of trouble will trigger selloffs of assets which can cripple a regional economy or destroy a currency and bankrupt a nation's central bank. This is the reason that the folks in the driver's seat at these multinational investment brokerages are known affectionately as the masters of the universe.