This chapter argues that the pre-capitalist imperial expansion into the American continent depended on the same symbiosis as the formation of the nation-states in Europe itself, i.e. the contradictory conjuncture of territorial warlordism and the monetary power of the transnational merchant classes. The former’s indebtedness to the latter fuelled the dynamic expansion, which continued even as it was intensified under the development of the capitalist mode of production, initially in the “home” territories and later globally. However, in the “home” territories the underlying class contradiction was masked, at least partially, and its social effects were dampened by national consensus, whereas on the colonial frontiers it was open and went “naked” (Marx). But with the outcome of the first inter-imperial global war, when the losers were forced to bear the debts incurred by that war, the “naked” violence of colonial domination came “home”. Then the mask of restraint (which Marx called “the profound hypocrisy of bourgeois civilisation”) was discarded and the brutal reality emerged. This moment of revelation is the key to understanding the political nature of modern Fascism.