Did you ever get the answer? I'm doing the part 2
At that time the resources and especially money is scarce since the economy is just starting to recover again after the war. The businessmen needs cash or capital to simply buy and sell goods or to start a business.
i hope my answer helped you.
Answer: The answer is the 1st option.
Explanation: The first sentence in the passage above talks about predicting the possibility of Mongolian domination and then the rest of that paragraph backs this prediction by outlining how weak or fragmented much of the world was. So the author was suggesting that the world seemed to be ripe for conquest.
The second paragraph makes reference to ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian Desert" because Arabia would have seemed what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of small and bickering nomadic tribes. This reinforces the idea that no one would have predicted a new, powerful empire to emerge from Arabia at that time.
The second largest group was from Germany