Experts of the World Economy: European Stabilization and the Reshaping of International Order, 1916-51

Abstract

This dissertation traces the origins of the earliest international schemes to manage the world economy between the middle of the First World War and the conclusion of the Second. It follows the emergence of a transnational network of economic experts, affiliated with the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, who attempted to create a new form of international administration in response to the challenges of stabilizing Europe after the First World War. These experts included economists, statisticians, bankers, officials from various state bureaucracies, and international civil servants from many different European states, including France, Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Sweden, as well as from the United States. It investigates how they developed a new role for the economic expert on the international stage in response to a series of crises: the food, raw materials, and shipping shortages of the First World War and its immediate aftermath; the hyperinflation of postwar Austria; the deflationary crisis of 1920-1; and the Depression. Their efforts not only helped to reshape the imagination and practices of international governance, but the research they sponsored also transformed how the “world economy” was understood. Their work was not radically interrupted by the outbreak of the Depression and the Second World War; rather, it provided sources of expertise and techniques of governance for Anglo-American plans to reshape international order after the Second World War. Drawing on documents from over twenty archives, this dissertation shows how dominant conceptions of sovereignty, international organization, and capitalism were transformed during this period of serial crisis, and how the unorthodox idea of bringing the world economy under international bureaucratic control became a new common sense. In so doing, it locates the long-term intellectual, political, and institutional origins of the international economic order created after the Second World War, and of the kind of international technocratic management of global capitalism that persists to this day.