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Revisiting Interwar Global Economic Governance: Technocrats, Sovereignty, and the Perennial Problem of Legitimacy in Global Governance

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The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. By Nicholas Mulder. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 416 pp. Hardcover, $32.50. ISBN: 978-0-300-25936-0.
The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance. By Jamie Martin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. 352 pp., photos, illustrations. Hardcover $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-674-97654-2.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2023

Laura Phillips-Sawyer
Laura Phillips-Sawyer*
Affiliation:
Jane W. Wilson Associate Professor of Business Law, University of Georgia School of Law, Athens, Georgia, USA
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Extract

The international institutions that govern global capitalism—the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wield considerable power over the flows of trade and finance, and thereby the nation-states that participate in it. (And opting out is nearly impossible.) Those institutions were created in July 1944, amidst World War II, with the laudable objectives to restore global trade and capital flows, protect national sovereignty, and promote peace through interdependence. In short, these institutions represented the solution to the failures of interwar international governance—more specifically, the failure of the League of Nations to stem macroeconomic instability or the Second World War.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Business History Review , Volume 97 , Issue 3: Governing Global Capitalism , Autumn 2023 , pp. 647 - 655
Copyright
© 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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