“Building Blocs” charts a global history of the last great crisis of globalization—the transwar decades from the 1880s through the 1940s—by centering strategic minerals needed to make steel. Little studied, but critically important, alloying minerals like tungsten and manganese were only needed in small amounts, but they were essential to the foundations of both national prosperity and security: steel and military production. Herein lay a fundamental problem: none of the industrial powers possessed adequate domestic deposits of these minerals, which were concentrated in remote locations such as central India, the Caucasus, southern China, Brazilian jungles, the Australian outback, and southern Africa. In a world in which steel was power, “Building Blocs” shows that resource anxieties motivated interwar quests for autarky and autonomy in the form of self-contained blocs. The scramble for strategic minerals escalated tensions and put rivals on the road to war, reshaping the forms and structures of geopolitical entities and international institutions throughout the transwar period.

It is widely accepted, among political scientists at least, that Italy's so-called ‘First Republic’ (c.1946–1994) had a tripolar party system while the ‘Second Republic’ has had, at least until 2008, a fragmented bipolar one. A superior conceptualisation of the party system of the ‘First Republic’ was provided by Paolo Farneti, and it remains relevant both for a better understanding of the current party system and for exploring party system dynamics, particularly the relationship between structure and agency in such dynamics. Farneti synthesised Sartori's 1976 analysis of tripolar mechanics with Galli's equally famous analysis of the party system (as one of ‘imperfect bipartism’) in terms of the coexistence of a subordinate bipolar dynamic and a dominant tripolar one. This article argues that the dynamics of the party system in the ‘Second Republic’, or at least the transition to it, can be conceptualised in terms of a dominant bipolar dynamic and a subordinate, tripolar one. This latter dynamic is significant, both empirically and theoretically, despite being subordinate.