The Neglected History of International Political Economy: A Roundtable on Eric Helleiner’s “Contested World Economy.”
Organized by Mirek Tobiáš Hošman, Editor-at-Large
The field of International Political Economy (IPE) has experienced a rapid expansion since the second half of the 20th century. Especially the turbulent decade of the 1970s – with two oil shocks, creeping debt crisis, the formation of the New International Economic Order, and what Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye famously dubbed as the “complex interdependence” – provided a solid ground for the growth of the discipline. Scholars such as Robert Gilpin, Charles Kindleberger, Susan Strange, Robert Cox, and Peter Katzenstein, to mention a few, studied the interconnectedness between the functioning of the international economy and the political dynamics, and formed the intellectual and institutional basis for IPE. Benjamin Cohen in his intellectual history of the field (2008) even suggests that as far as institutionalized network of scholars counts for a distinct research community with its own boundaries, rewards and careers, “the field of IPE has existed for less than half a century”.[1]
Eric Helleiner’s Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) reveals a rich intellectual heritage that has been neglected in the historiography of IPE. Ideas explored by Helleiner were not only elaborated long before the 1970s (Helleiner’s book focuses on the period between 1776–1944), but their proponents also came from all parts of the world. Helleiner thus not only expands the chronology of IPE thought, but also reconstructs lost and marginalized voices of thinkers from non-Western world. Contested World Economy thus provides an important corrective to the standard genealogy of the field of IPE and adds an important element to the currently emerging historiography of the IPE debates.
In this roundtable, historians and an IPE scholar discuss Helleiner’s contributions with the author responding at the end. On behalf of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, I would like to thank them all for their engagement.
– Mirek Tobiáš Hošman, University of Bologna, Paris City University
Participant bios:
Vivien CHANG is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College's Dickey Center for International Understanding. She is writing a book tentatively titled Creating the Third World: Anticolonial Diplomacy and the Search for a New International Economic Order.
Blaise TRUONG-LOÏ is temporary lecturer in history at Paris Nanterre University. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation at Sciences Po in 2024 on international financial control institutions in the late 19th century. His research interests straddle history of global economic governance, history of globalization and history of imperialism.
Lucia QUAGLIA is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. Previously, she was Professor at the University of York (2012-2017). She has published 9 books, many of them with Oxford University Press. Her most recent books are: The Perils of Internal Regime Complexity in Shadow Banking (Oxford University Press, 2022); The Politics of Regime Complexity in International Derivatives Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020). She has guest co-edited 5 special issues of academic journals, such as the Journal of European Public Policy (2023, 2018), New Political Economy (2019), Review of International Political Economy (2015) and Journal of Common Market Studies (2009). She has published more than 60 articles in refereed academic journals in the fields of public policy, political economy, and EU studies. Together with Manuela Moschella and Aneta Spendzharova she has published a textbook on European Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Eric HELLEINER is Professor and University Research Chair in the Department of Political Science and Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. In addition to the book being reviewed in this roundtable, he has published six other single-authored books, of which the most recent are The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell University Press, 2021) and Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2014). His books have won the IPE Best Book Award, the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations, the CPSA Prize in International Relations, and the Donner Book Prize.
Vivien Chang
Eric Helleiner’s The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy opens with Adam Smith’s 18th-century ideas about classical economic liberalism and concludes with the 1944 Bretton Woods conference whose institutions anchored the post-World War II global economic order. The “embedded liberalism” Anglo-American policymakers championed at the negotiations institutionalized Smith’s ideas about free trade, individual freedom, and international peace, albeit with greater leeway granted for economic regimes that featured managed economies or social security.
Yet The Contested World Economy is not so much about how classical economic liberalism came full circle as it is an effort at restoring the voices and perspectives that Bretton Woods left out—and that the present-day field of International Political Economy (IPE) continues to omit. In the wake of Benjamin Cohen’s—and other IPE scholars’—concerns about the dynamism of the field, Helleiner’s pathbreaking new book comes at an opportune moment.[2] It provides an important corrective to what Helleiner identifies as a core issue: “IPE has been missing a relatively succinct summary of its history from the standpoint of both the ‘longue durée’ and ‘the perspective of the world.’” (ix) His exploration moves beyond the field’s longstanding focus on liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism—the “three orthodoxies”—to include both non-European thinkers and heterodox approaches to international economic relations.
While Helleiner’s narrative is anchored by the “three orthodoxies” and such household names as David Ricardo, Friedrich List, and Karl Marx, it is his inclusion of lesser-known figures, regions, and perspectives that makes his book a standout. Notably, Helleiner achieves three interlocking aims. First, he demonstrates that the development of IPE cannot be attributed solely to the diffusion of Western thought to the rest of the world but instead to complex, multidirectional webs of influence. In all three cases, IPE theorists based in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East interpreted and adapted Western models to fit local needs and contexts. At times, non-Western thinkers developed their own versions of the three orthodoxies independent of Western influences. For instance, Sun Yat-Sen’s influential neomercantilist writings, which promoted an ambitious nationalist strategy of state-led industrialization, drew inspiration from the self-strengthening movement in the Chinese republic rather than the contemporaneous works of foreign political economy (77-78). Sun’s ideas about foreign capital and multilateral institutions, too, would in time shape the agenda at Bretton Woods, where the Chinese delegation participated in the creation of the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (commonly known as the World Bank).[3] The intellectual roots of IPE are thus global and transnational—in sharp contrast to the Western-centric perspectives on political economy that still dominate the field.
Second—and in spite of the links he draws between non-European thinkers and the three orthodoxies—Helleiner reminds us that the dominant intellectual paradigms were not always attuned to nor uncontested in the colonized societies of the Global South. For instance, orthodox Marxists, who sought to “end class-based inequality and exploitation within the world economy,” were often dismissive of non-Western interests (87). Third World intellectuals, such as Peru’s Jose Carlos Mariategui and India’s Manabendra Nath Roy, were skeptical of European Marxists’ understanding of imperialism as “a progressive economic force” as well as Vladimir Lenin’s belief in the centrality of anticolonial nationalism for the broader anti-capitalist struggle (112). In their view, “a united front” formed by the bourgeoisie and also workers and peasants was untenable because the former tended to ally with imperialists (111). Mariategui was also critical of the Second International’s “indifference to ‘the fate of Asian and African workers’ and for promoting a form of internationalism that ‘ended at the borders of the West, at the boundaries of Western civilization’” (112). The rise of alternative models, including autarkism, Pan-Africanism, and economic regionalism, was in part due to the perceived inadequacy of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism in tackling the concerns of unorthodox thinkers within and outside of Western Europe and North America.
Third, Helleiner underscores the nuances of economic ideas by emphasizing divisions among scholars of a given perspective and their own sometimes-competing preferences. Rather than reducing important thinkers to a single paradigm, he insists on the mutability of their thought, with many adopting different perspectives over time or even all at once. Germany’s Georg Vollmar, to take one memorable example, was taken with the possibility of a socialist state that would adopt neomercantilist policies in a global capitalist economy. Marx, too, advocated free trade and trade protectionism at different junctures in bids to “hasten the Social Revolution” (90-91). Proponents of economic autarky were also driven by a kaleidoscope of motivations: some, such as Mahatma Gandhi and the Gold Coast’s Kobina Sekyi, were drawn to the ideology in hopes of isolating their traditional cultures from outside influence, while others like John Maynard Keynes and Johann Fichte championed economic self-sufficiency while highlighting cross-cultural scholarly and artistic exchange. Helleiner’s emphasis on complexities is especially welcome in his chapters on environmentalism and feminism, whose supporters oscillated between existing paradigms and at times rejected state control of the economy altogether.
One of The Contested World Economy’s greatest strengths is the narrative coherence it achieves without eschewing the built-in messiness of its subject matter. In light of the plurality of approaches Helleiner explores, however, questions remain as to why certain ideas gained currency even as others fell by the wayside, and relatedly, how politics and power (or the lack thereof) shaped the implementation of these schemas. Helleiner maintains that his book is a “history of ideas” rather than “intellectual history”—a deliberate choice that nonetheless occasionally elides the stakes of the discourses (13).
Even so, it should be clear by the time the reader finishes The Contested World Economy—bookended by the rise of classical economic liberalism and its apotheosis—that Bretton Woods’ ideas and institutions resembled a letdown rather than a triumph for most of the world. Sidelined at the conference and in the global economic system thereafter, it was not until the post-World War II period that Global South thinkers were able to forcefully assert their visions in such forums as the Bandung conference, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the New International Economic Order. Regionalism, race, and economic self-sufficiency suffused these debates just as they did in the pre-1945 era—yet they continue to be overlooked in most IPE textbooks. In writing Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East into the study of IPE, Helleiner contributes powerfully to efforts to generate “global conversations” in the field, which has remained mostly siloed along regional lines (264). Helleiner may end on a familiar note, but his emphasis on the “silences” at Bretton Woods opens up a horizon of avenues for future research. It is time their ghosts come out of the shadows.
Blaise Truong-Loï
The Contested World Economy belongs to the (very rare) category of books extremely useful for both teaching and research activities. Eric Helleiner explains in the introductory chapter that he wanted to write the book he was frustrated not to be able to recommend to his students on the history of international political economy (IPE) before 1945 and beyond the Western world. The challenge of writing a “deeper” and “wider” history of IPE is masterfully met. The book shows that the questions raised by the production, exchange, and distribution of wealth on an international scale were the subject of rich reflections long before the second half of the twentieth century and the rise of an academic discipline dedicated to them. Above all, with numerous case studies and an impressive bibliography drawing on a wide range of disciplines, it underlines that the history of these reflections goes far beyond the US-European world in which it is still too often confined. On this aspect, The Contested World Economy extends the conclusions drawn by Eric Helleiner in his previous works on the Bretton Woods negotiations and neo-mercantilism to earlier periods and other perspectives of IPE.
While the book will be useful to many students, no teacher will fail to benefit from its remarkable erudition and art of synthesis, well beyond international political economy. In particular, the book could be of great use to anyone who teaches history of political ideas, history of globalizations or, more broadly, who seeks to de-Westernize his or her course on the history of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The book shows, indeed, how the history of IPE reflects some of the key results of the historical works that aim to provincialize Europe and/or the United States.
In the same vein as, for example, David Armitage’s work on the appropriation of the United States Declaration of Independence by various political movements around the world since 1776,[4] chapters 4, 5 and 7 underline that extra-Western reinterpretations of the three orthodoxies at the heart of current IPE syllabi (liberalism, neo-mercantilism and Marxism) must be recognized as forms of creative adaptation designed to make these ideologies relevant and operative in other contexts. Similarly, while environmental history has long insisted on the consequences of colonization not only for colonized societies but also for imperial centers through, for instance, the acclimatization of new species, ideas of political economy did not circulate only from the West to the rest of the world.[5] The writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, put under the spotlight by recent studies on Indian economic thought at the end of the nineteenth century,[6] were also widely commented in Western Europe in the 1900s. Finally, just like several historians have laid emphasis on the synchronous rise of nationalism throughout the world from 1860 onwards – and therefore dismissed the idea of a phenomenon that spread from an original European center –,[7] Eric Helleiner’s book demonstrates that liberalism, neo-mercantilism and Marxism can be considered as not originating in Europe or in the United States. Asian contemporaries of Smith, List and Marx formulated ideas related to each of these ideologies at the same time as (or even before) them.
However, those who will read The Contested World Economy as the reference synthesis on the history of IPE will probably be interested first and foremost in the book’s main thesis. Widening and deepening the history of IPE enables Eric Helleiner to offer a “more comprehensive” narrative which underlines that some of the discipline’s most acute concerns nowadays, such as environmental, gender or racial structures of the world economy, can in fact be traced back to the nineteenth century (at least). This idea, totally aligned, for instance, with the growing literature on environmental reflexivity in the long run,[8] leads Eric Helleiner to some very stimulating reflections about how prominent thinkers and activists such as Bertha Lutz (1894-1976) or Eve Balfour (1898-1990) were marginalized or forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century. The book notably insists on the paradoxical lack of influence of these two women’s writings on the Bretton Woods negotiations, given that their audience in the 1930s-1940s brought up feminist and environmental issues to the forefront. It explains this phenomenon by the political agenda of the architects of Bretton Woods and by the construction of this conference as the original object of international political economy. This combination of an epistemological reflexivity and a political reading of the construction of knowledge is undoubtedly a key methodological contribution of the book.
If Eric Helleiner’s call for a “broader history” resonates in a particularly convincing way at the end of the book, it could nevertheless perhaps be taken even further. As he endeavors to decompartmentalize IPE, Eric Helleiner pays attention to actors whose repertoire of action and horizon of expectation were not limited to calls for (inter)state action, whether via multilateral treaties, tariff policy or international labor conventions. For this reason, one could regret, for instance, that Nicholas Mulder’s book on economic sanctions, quoted in chapter 13 on economic regionalism projects, was not used more extensively in chapter 10 on feminist perspectives. It would have highlighted the evolution of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s position on free trade. Whereas it adamantly defended the latter at the end of the First World War, the League reassessed its position in the early 1930s after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and supported forms of citizen boycott of Japanese goods as a means of restoring world peace as it was likely not to “stir up a movement of mass hatred and war spirit.”[9] To take the project of deconstructing Bretton Woods as the original totem of IPE to its logical conclusion, would it not then have been necessary to emphasize more systematically how the different perspectives of international political economy found other expressions than negotiations, treaties and inter-state organizations? Boycotts, mentioned in chapters 12 and 13, could have been an opportunity to highlight more clearly these transnational mobilizations of civil actors, which are themselves too often presented as novelties that recently emerged with the rise of environmentalist, feminist, or racial perspectives whose distant roots are exhumed by the book. In other words: although Eric Helleiner, in the wake of his previous books, always finely contextualizes the ideas he analyses, readers with more of a historian’s than an economist’s fiber would probably have appreciated a history of ideas all the more comprehensive that it systematically embraced the breadth of the social mobilizations set in motion by these ideas.
Finally, if The Contested World Economy perfectly fulfills its mission of showing that the history of IPE did not begin in 1944, it also raises several questions about the chronology of reflections on the international dimensions of political economy. The book’s chapters tend to be arranged more thematically and geographically than chronologically, which is not at all a problem, but leaves the issue of how to periodize the pre-Bretton Woods era open. Interestingly, the First World War and the creation of the League of Nations do not play as central a role in the book as in recent studies on the history of global economic governance.[10] Instead, the 1870s seem to emerge as a more relevant caesura in many parts of the book. By that time, the growing interconnection of the world resulting from the acceleration of Western imperial expansion led to the rise of regionalist thought (pan-Asianism) and projects of racial or religious solidarity (pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism) as well as to the emergence of a new orthodoxy (Marxism). Does this mean that the pre-Bretton Woods era should be divided along this decade? Or should other caesuras, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, be added? Or does The Contested World Economy invite us to embrace the 1776-1944 period as a whole? Confronting us with these large questions while at the same time offering a master synthesis that will undoubtedly find a broad and diverse readership is not the least of the merits of Eric Helleiner’s book.
Lucia Quaglia
I was truly delighted when I was asked to review Eric Helleiner’s book (2023) The Contested World Economy. I first read this volume with genuine curiosity shortly after it was published and very much cherished the idea of re-reading it for the roundtable organized by the Toynbee Prize Foundation. In the opening sentence of the book preface, Eric mentions that he thought about ‘writing this book for quite some time’ (p. ix). We, as readers and scholars of IPE, are lucky that he has taken on the challenge, producing an insightful volume that is a much-needed contribution to ‘widening and deepening’ the intellectual history of International Political Economy (IPE) and, more generally, the scholarly debate in IPE.
Main argument of the book
The book provides a fascinating intellectual history of IPE in the longue durée taking a global perspective (p. ix). The volume is divided into three main parts. Part I examines the three dominant schools of thought in IPE (neoliberalism, neomercantilism and Marxism) in a global context; hence, there are chapters discussing each of the three ‘orthodoxies’ in the Global North and the Global South. Part II of the volume examines less-well-known approaches that have informed the debate in IPE: autarky, environmentalism, feminism, Pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism, and Pan-Asianism, as well as distinctive visions of economic regionalism in Asia, Europe and America in the 1930s and 1940s. Part III revisits the embedded liberalism paradigm of the Bretton Woods regime.
The book pushes the boundaries of the discipline in several respects. First, whereas traditional ‘genealogies’ of IPE would start their account after World War Two, Eric Helleiner’s book traces the evolution of IPE thinking from the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith in 1776 to the postwar settlement and the establishment of the Bretton Woods architecture. Since many of the ideas articulated in the discipline of IPE prior to 1945 continue to influence contemporary discussions, the broad historical coverage of the book is a much-welcome contribution to better understanding ongoing trends.
Second, whereas most genealogies of IPE tend to focus on thinkers in the Global North, especially in the United States and Europe, Helleiner’s book has a much broader geographical scope, discussing a number of scholars across various continents. Third, whenever the intellectual history of IPE is narrated in the literature, the attention is mostly on economic liberalism, neomercantilism and Marxism. By contrast, Eric’s book sheds light beyond these orthodoxies by discussing autarky, environmentalism, feminism, Pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism, Pan-Asianism, and economic regionalism in Asia, Europe and America during the interwar period.
Fourth, whereas traditional accounts of IPE ideational history tend to discuss one perspective at a time, presenting each perspective as a rather ‘monolithic’ endeavor, Helleiner brings the various perspectives into a conversation, teasing out their cross-fertilization and delving into the internal debates taking place within each perspective. Notably, an important issue that generated heated controversies within each perspective and which is evermore topical concerns the economic fundamentals of international peace. Other disagreements that cut across perspectives concerned the themes of imperialism, multilateralism and gender.
Fifth, the book considers the ‘creative adaptations of the three orthodoxies emanating from Europe and the United States’ (p. 259) to local contexts in other parts of the world, as well as the independent development of the three well-known perspectives in other parts of the world (read, in the Global South), without necessarily implying their ‘import’ of ideas from the Global North. Notable examples were neomercantilist ideas that emerged in East Asia, or economic liberalism in the Ottoman Empire, Japan and China. Furthermore, reversing the perspective, the book highlights instances in which IPE thinkers in the Global South influenced IPE thinkers in the Global North.
Points for discussion
The book accomplishes a major feat by discussing a large body of IPE literature and a variety of ideational perspectives that are likely to be unfamiliar to many IPE scholars. It encourages us, as readers and researchers, to think broadly and historically about IPE. Finally, it opens new venues for further research. Let me mention three points for discussion.
First, because of its ambitious coverage, historically and geographically, the book is, at times, rather succinct and is necessarily selective about what to include (or not). Thus, the book has a relatively limited space available for an in-depth examination of various perspectives as well as the discussion of individual thinkers. For example, Marxist thinking in India and China is examined in a couple of pages, whereas economic regionalism in Europe prior to the Second World War mainly focuses on the ‘German design’ for the European economy. Interestingly, the book identifies a pan-African perspective, a pan-Islamic perspective and a pan-Asian perspective, but not a South-American perspective. Not being an expert on any of these geographical areas, I am left wondering why. Furthermore, one might wonder as to whether some perspectives and thinkers are too diverse to be placed under a single umbrella, even though doing that is a very useful signpost for the reader. Finally, it would be helpful to spell out the criteria for including (or not) certain thinkers. The book says in the Introductory chapter that it restricts its analysis to ‘thinkers whose ideas became well known internationally or in specific national settings’, but further details on this point would be welcome.
Second, given the broad spatial and temporal scope of the work, the book has limited space available to outline the economic and political contexts in which various IPE perspectives were developed and various thinkers were embedded. For a fine-grained appreciation of why certain ideas were developed in certain ways at certain points in time, it would be insightful to contextualize their evolution within the specific socio-economic and political environment in which those ideas came to light. To put it the other way around, the extrapolation of IPE ideas from the context in which they were developed might produce a loss of nuances and, at times, makes the reading of the text a bit ‘dry’.
The author of the book is aware of the importance of contextualization, and, indeed, he sees his work as a ‘conventional history of ideas’ rather than as a work of ‘intellectual history’ (p. 13). I would say that the book is both and does a remarkably good job in discussing a huge amount of literature in a book-length format. To be sure, it is fair to add that Helleiner’s intention was to write a book, not an encyclopedia, or a book series, though he might want to consider that endeavor in the future, that is to say, a series of books examining IPE perspectives that are relatively less well known by the IPE community, but that are important for the genealogy of the discipline and a fully-fledged appreciation of current events in the international economic and political system.
Third, the book traces the intellectual ‘ancestors’ of topical themes, such as the environment, gender, and race, which are important in current academic and policy debates. In the conversation taking place in this roundtable, I would like to invite Eric to elaborate further on how past debates have fed into current thinking on these themes. A topical issue that, as such, does not feature prominently in the book is geoeconomics, albeit it is implicit in some of the material discussed. What do the thinkers whose ideas are discussed in the book have to say about the interplay of economics and geopolitics – for example, in trade, technology, finance – the playing off of great power rivalries in the economic realm, and the strategic use of economic instruments to pursue geopolitical ends?
Overall, the book provides an excellent intellectual history of IPE in the longue durée and with a broad geographical scope. It is carefully researched and beautifully written. It is a landmark work in the discipline and is an absolute must-read for IPE scholars.
A response from Eric Helleiner, author of Contested World Economy
Let me begin by thanking Mirek Tobiáš Hošman for organizing this roundtable and by expressing my gratitude to Vivien Chang, Blaise Truong-Loï, and Lucia Quaglia for taking the time to read the book and to comment on it in such interesting ways. At a personal level, it also means an enormous amount to me to see this book discussed in an outlet of the Toynbee Prize Foundation which has done such important work to promote the kind of scholarship that I like to read and from which I have learned so much.
It is also very meaningful to me because I was hoping that this book might open more conversations between historians and scholars in my own field of international political economy (IPE). Many IPE scholars are not familiar with the fascinating work that historians have been doing to examine the history of political economy from a more global perspective in recent years. By drawing and building on this historical scholarship, I hoped to encourage IPE scholars to recognize its relevance to their own intellectual interests. It was, thus, very gratifying to read the generous comments about the book’s usefulness to IPE from Quaglia, a leading figure in my field.
At the same time, I have secretly hoped that historians doing this kind of work might also find the book interesting. For this reason, I was delighted to see the positive reactions to the book from the historians Chang and Truong-Loï. Particularly gratifying to read was Truong-Loï’s comment that “the book could be of great use to anyone who teaches history of political ideas, history of globalizations or, more broadly, who seeks to de-Westernize his or her course on the history of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.” I also enjoyed reading his comment that the book “belongs to the (very rare) category of books extremely useful for both teaching and research activities.” When writing the book, I felt I was constantly trying to balance these two goals. If readers think both are realized, I am very pleased. I also appreciated how both Truong-Loï and Chang called attention to a theme in the book that I also consider very important: the need to recognize that historical IPE ideas did not just diffuse from the West but rather involved what Chang eloquently describes as “complex, multidirectional webs of influence.”
Rather than dwell on other positive comments made by the reviewers, let me turn to some other issues they have raised. One is the important point noted by Chang that “questions remain as to why certain ideas gained currency even as others fell by the wayside, and relatedly, how politics and power (or the lack thereof) shaped the implementation of these schemas.” Relatedly, Quaglia notes that “the book has limited space available to outline the economic and political contexts in which various IPE perspectives were developed and various thinkers were embedded”. I agree entirely with these points. In my effort to produce a relatively succinct history of ideas, it was difficult to address them in any depth. I have analyzed them in more detail in some other publications cited in the book (and I appreciate Quaglia’s suggestion that I consider writing more on the subject!).
Truong-Loï also makes a helpful suggestion that I could have said more about “transnational mobilizations of civil actors” for citizen boycotts, citing Nicholas Mulder’s analysis of the feminist call from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in the early 1930s for private boycotts of Japanese goods (after that country’s invasion of Manchuria). As Truong-Loï notes, my book does highlight proposals for citizen boycotts, such as those inspired by ideologies of neomercantilism (p.85), environmentalism (p.150), Pan-Islamism (p.205), anti-imperialist Latin American regionalism (p.231), and Pan-Africanism (pp.190-1). Like Truong-Loï’s WILPF example, the last three cases were also associated with movements committed to the “transnational mobilization of civil actors”. For a history of IPE ideas, what made the WILPF initiative’s distinctive from these others was not just its feminist roots but also its alignment with John Hobson’s liberal advocacy for a collective “economic boycott” against aggressor nations (pp.240-1). As Mulder notes, the initiative brought the WILPF’s position closer to that of supporters of League of Nations whose charter had incorporated Hobson’s idea.
Truong-Loï raises some other important comments about historical periodization. He suggests that the 1870s emerge as a “more relevant caesura in many parts of the book” than World War 1 and League of Nations’ creation which have been the focus of prominent recent histories of global economic governance. He also asks: “should other caesuras, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, be added? Or does The Contested World Economy invite us to embrace the 1776-1944 period as a whole?”. I hesitate to comment too much on these points since historians are much better equipped than me to address issues of periodization. But Truong-Loï is right that I see both the 1870s and the 1930s as important caesuras for the politics of the world economy. At the same time, I was trying to encourage readers to view the 1776-1944 period as a whole as having some unity in the following ideational sense: it witnessed the global rise and fall of the kind of economic liberalism pioneered by Adam Smith.
Quaglia asks why the book “identifies a pan-African perspective, a pan-Islamic perspective and a pan-Asian perspective, but not a South-American perspective.” Although it is not a chapter title like the others, the latter can be found in one of the three cases analyzed in the chapter on economic regionalism. The case focuses on the ideas of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a Peruvian thinker who became a very prominent intellectual and political figure across Latin America during the interwar years (pp.229-34). Haya was not the first Latin American thinker to call for economic regionalism in his part of the world; those calls date back to the nineteenth century.[11] But Haya was particularly innovative in calling for a distinctive kind of “Indoamerican” anti-imperialist regionalism that could serve as a “bloc of economic defense for Latin America”.
Quaglia also invites me to “elaborate further on how past debates have fed into current thinking” on topical themes such as “environment, gender, and race.” Addressing this issue fully would take too much space, but I can note a few examples of how contemporary IPE thought on these topics has been influenced by historical thinkers discussed in the book. In the environmental area, the contemporary ecological economist cited most frequently in IPE literature, Herman Daly, was deeply inspired by interwar ideas of Frederick Soddy that I highlight (pp.156-7).[12] Similarly, scholarship that pioneered contemporary feminist IPE such as that of Sandra Whitworth showed a deep interest in some of the pre-1945 feminist debates described in chapter 10.[13] Recent IPE scholarship on race also cites the ideas of historical figures I examine, such as Olaudah Equiano (pp.46-7), Marcus Garvey (pp.188-93), and W.E.B. Du Bois (pp.193-97).[14]
Quaglia also asks what the thinkers in the book had to say about another topical issue today: the interplay of economics and geopolitics. This issue was a central preoccupation of many of thinkers discussed in the book, beginning with Adam Smith himself who set aside his free trade views to endorse England’s protectionist Navigation Acts on the grounds that “defense…is of more importance than opulence” (p.25). He even warned more generally that, while “the wealth of neighbouring nations…is certainly advantageous in trade,” it was “dangerous in war and politics” (p.24). Later prominent economic liberals also made exceptions to their preference for an open world economy for security reasons such as John Hobson who - anticipating the Western response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine - first developed a liberal justification for collective sanctions against aggressor nations (pp.240-1).
The interplay of economics and geopolitics was discussed even more actively by many critics of economic liberalism in the pre-1945 era. It was at the center of the concerns of all neomercantilist thinkers, including China’s Zheng Guanying whose advocacy of “commercial warfare” foreshadowed some contemporary Chinese thought about politics of the world economy (pp.75-76). Like many proponents of greater national economic self-sufficiency today, advocates of autarky before 1945 were often driven by a desire to bolster their country’s geopolitical autonomy (pp.128-29, 131-33, 138). Japanese and German visions of economic regionalism in the 1930s also had strong geopolitical rationales (pp.219-29). In the early 20th century, even many Marxists were centrally concerned with the relationship between intensifying great power rivalries and the changing dynamics and structures of global capitalism (see especially pp.91-99, 101-2, 105-9).
These are just a few examples of the relevance of the history of pre-1945 ideas to IPE scholarship today. I provide others in the book itself. They all highlight a core point that I hope readers in my field take away from this book: that IPE scholars have much to learn from historians. If this book can also be useful to historians, I will be even more pleased. It would suggest that the strengthening of a relationship between IPE and history can be intellectually rewarding in a reciprocal way. At the very least, I hope the book helps to foster that relationship and I am grateful to Hošman, Chang, Truong-Loï, and Quaglia for working towards this same goal through their thoughtful contributions to this roundtable.
[1] Benjamin Cohen, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 2008), 2.
[2] Benjamin J. Cohen, “Are IPE Journals Becoming Boring?” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 3 (September 2010), 887-891. See also Robert Keohane, “The Old IPE and the New,” Review of International Political Economy 16, no. 1 (February 2009), 34-46; Benjamin Cohen, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Genevieve LeBaron, Daniel Mugge, Jacqueline Best, and Colin Hay, “Blind Spots in IPE: Marginalized Perspectives and Neglected Trends in Contemporary Capitalism,” Review of International Political Economy 28, no. 2 (2020), 283-294.
[3] Federico Pachetti, “Nixon in China: Back to Bretton Woods,” June 22, 2022, Toynbee Prize Foundation https://toynbeeprize.org/posts/nixon-in-china-back-to-bretton-woods/
[4] David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence. A Global History, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2007, 300 pages.
[5] Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, 216 pages.
[6] Maria Bach, « A Win-Win Model of Development. How Indian Economics Redefined Universal Development From and at the Margins: 1870-1905 », Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 43, no 4, 2021, p. 483‑505.
[7] Christopher Alan Bayly, “Nation, empire and ethnicity, c. 1860-1900”, in The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, Malden (Mass.), Blackwell, 2004, chap. 6.
[8] Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, “The Fragile Climate of Modernity. A Short History of Environmental Reflexivity”, Books & Ideas, 31 March 2014: https://booksandideas.net/The-Fragile-Climate-of-Modernirty. See also Antoine Missemer’s ERC project on “energy transitions in the history of economic thought (19th-20th c.)”: https://www.centre-cired.fr/etranhet/
[9] Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2022, p. 185.
[10] Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy. The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920-1946, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, 400 pages; Jamie Martin, The Meddlers. Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2022, 352 pages.
[11] See, for example, Andrés Rivarola PUNTIGLIANO and José BRICEÑO-RUIZ, eds., Resilience of Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2013. See also Alejandro Bunge’s interest in South American regionalism discussed briefly in my book (p.84).
[12] Herman DALY, “The economics of Frederick Soddy” in Herman Daly, Beyond Growth, Beacon, Boston, 1996, pp.173-90.
[13] Sandra WHITWORTH, Feminism and International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1994.
[14] See, for example, John NARAYAN, “The wages of whiteness in the absence of wages: racial capitalism,
reactionary intercommunalism and the rise of Trumpism,” Third World Quarterly, 38(11)(2017): 2482-
2500; Samuel Ojo OLORUNTOBA, “(Re)negotiating existence: Pan-Africanism and the role of African
Union in a changing global order,” Global Studies Quarterly 3(3(2023), ksad045, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksad045; Lisa TILLEY and Robbie SHILLIAM, “Raced markets: An Introduction,” New Political Economy 23(5)(2018), 534-43.