A pioneering history traces the origins of global economic
governance—and the political conflicts it generates—to the
aftermath of World War I.
International
economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank exert incredible influence over the domestic policies of many
states. These institutions date from the end of World War II and
amassed power during the neoliberal era of the late twentieth
century. But as Jamie Martin shows, if we want to understand their
deeper origins and the ideas and dynamics that shaped their
controversial powers, we must turn back to the explosive political
struggles that attended the birth of global economic governance in
the early twentieth century.
The Meddlers
tells the story of the first international institutions to govern the
world economy, including the League of Nations and Bank for
International Settlements, created after World War I. These
institutions endowed civil servants, bankers, and colonial
authorities from Europe and the United States with extraordinary
powers: to enforce austerity, coordinate the policies of independent
central banks, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity
prices. In a highly unequal world, they faced a new political
challenge: was it possible to reach into sovereign states and empires
to intervene in domestic economic policies without generating a
backlash?
Martin follows the
intense political conflicts provoked by the earliest international
efforts to govern capitalism—from Weimar Germany to the Balkans,
Nationalist China to colonial Malaya, and the Chilean desert to Wall
Street. The Meddlers shows how the fraught problems of
sovereignty and democracy posed by institutions like the IMF are not
unique to late twentieth-century globalization, but instead first
emerged during an earlier period of imperial competition, world war,
and economic crisis.