World War I ended with the collapse of Europe’s global empires, and with them went the colonial model of the California engineer. As new countries formed, some repudiated the debts and concessions imposed on them by previous unelected governments. But if populations held some sort of fundamental right to cancel these contracts unilaterally under a principle we might call “economic democracy,” then how could anyone make investments in the first place? And it wasn’t just Europe and Russia; in Mexico, where a lot of California capital lived, the 1917 constitution declared that “the Nation shall at all times have the right to impose on private property such limitations as the public interest may demand, as well as the right to regulate the utilization of natural resources which are susceptible of appropriation, in order to conserve them and to insure a more equitable distribution of public wealth.”27 This began a two-decade process of expropriation as the Mexican state dispossessed American owners such as Hearst and Chandler. What was next—America’s new Panama Canal?