Halfway through the first part of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo, an American millionaire named Holroyd agrees to finance a silver mine in the fictional South American republic of Costaguana. Described as having ‘the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest’, Holroyd shares his vision of a future in which the United States of America will become the world’s new superpower. ‘Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe,’ he says. ‘We shall be giving the word for everything; industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it – and neither can we, I guess.’

It is impossible not to think of Conrad’s prophetic novel at the moment, especially given the American seizure of Venezuela’s oil industry, the financial incentives built into the administration’s Gaza ‘peace plan’, as well as its ongoing threats to annex Greenland. Holroyd’s speech, with its religious nationalism (‘the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe’) and aggressive rhetoric (‘whether the world likes it or not’) sounds a lot like the sort of bellicose language we have by now come to expect of this imperialistic phase of Trumpism, with or without the Caps Lock theatrics.

But Nostromo is also a prophecy of Pax Americana, the 80 or so years when the United States did indeed give the word for everything, whether the world wanted it or not. Published in 1904, two years after Halford Mackinder wrote that ‘The European phase of history is passing away… and a new balance of power is being evolved,’ Nostromo’s portrayal of a cadre of foreign investors, railway entrepreneurs, and local aristocratic elites allying themselves against a South American peasant revolution was a far-sighted vision of what American imperialism might look like. Conrad predicted what the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano described in 1973 as Latin America’s ‘siphoning off of national resources into imperialist affiliates’.

Centred on the promise of the San Tomé silver mine, Nostromo follows the idealistic ambition of the mine’s owner, the Englishman Charles Gould, to use it as a civilising force to bring progress to the ‘generally stormy’ political atmosphere of the republic, plagued by years of instability, dictatorship, and corruption. Shortly after securing Holroyd’s financial backing, Gould rhapsodises to his wife that the mine will be the salvation of Costaguana: ‘I pin my faith to material interests,’ he responds to his wife’s initial scepticism. ‘That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards.’

V.S. Pritchett considered Nostromo the most ‘strikingly modern’ of all Conrad’s novels and said it could just as easily have been published in 1954 as 1904. He may have had in mind the disparity between Holroyd’s influence on events and his minimal role in the novel. Sitting in his office building in San Francisco, the financier Holroyd never once actually goes to Costaguana, and in any case is prevented by countless other business interests from devoting more than ‘twenty minutes every month’ on his South American ‘hobby’. It’s possible Conrad, who had already written Heart of Darkness, was thinking here of the singular brutality of King Leopold II in the Congo. As Adam Hochschild remarks in King Leopold’s Ghost, the Belgian monarch ‘never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh’.

Nostromo is also the first great novel of global capitalism. Near to the end, Captain Fidanza, the charismatic Italian whose nickname lends the novel its title, strolls around ‘the progressive capital’ of the newly seceded Occidental Republic wearing ‘a brown tweed suit, made by Jews in the slums of London, and sold by the clothing department of the Compañia Anzani’, a local general store. Even the peculiar shape of the novel, its warped chronology and lack of a narrative centre, mirrors the vertiginous sense of living in a globalised world, of being subject to impersonal forces beyond one’s comprehension. When the novel’s historical events are recounted to an imagined visitor, they appear as ‘a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly apprehended’.

Far from bringing about ‘a better justice’, the San Tomé mine corrupts everyone involved in it, eventually embroiling Costaguana in a kind of civil war that culminates with the secession of Sulaco, the coastal province in which the mine is located. Among the first to salute the flag of the newly independent Occidental Republic is an American cruiser. As Maya Jasanoff shows in The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, these developments were reflected in real-time by the US-backed secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903, and by President Theodore Roosevelt’s updated version of the Monroe Doctrine, the so-called ‘Roosevelt Corollary’, which Jasanoff describes as being ‘in essence’ the same as Holroyd’s assertion in Nostromo that the US will run the world’s business.

In his essay ‘Autocracy and War’, written shortly after Nostromo, Conrad argued that ‘the common ground of concord, good faith and justice is not sufficient to establish an action upon, since the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of material advantage’.

It’s a claim Nostromo bears out. By the novel’s end, Emilia Gould reluctantly acknowledges that, to her husband, ‘material interests’ hold far more fascination than either matrimonial love or political justice. ‘Will there be never any peace? Will there be no rest?’ she asks. No, the pessimist Dr Monygham tells her. ‘There is no peace and rest in the development of material interests. They have their law and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman.’ He goes on to tell her, in so many words, that it has all be for naught: ‘Mrs. Gould, the time approaches when all that the Gould Concession stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back.’ Emilia is crestfallen. ‘Is it that we have worked for, then?’

In this question the tragic folly of an entire epoch lies buried.