This multidisciplinary workshop organised in the framework of the ERC-funded ECOINT project explores, amongst other topics, business actors and international organisations in the 20th century.
International organisations are not simply the realm of bureaucrats, diplomats and statesmen. For much of the 20th century, business actors have taken important international roles, both officially and unofficially. Recent work has shown for example that bankers and financiers took key roles in the League of Nations' Economic and Finance Committee; the International Chamber of Commerce was established in the name of business internationalism, and as a shadow bureaucracy for intergovernmental organisations; in the second half of the 20th century, the United Nations actively sought the involvement of businessmen in the promotion and funding of its programs. The examples are many.
Historians are exploring how neoliberal international actors sought to use the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF to impose visions of a new ordoglobal order in the 1970s. Through the 20th century, business actors of many kinds have seen in international organisations the means to different ends, from peace through the distribution of wealth, to the regulation and control of the world economy, whether through primary commodity controls and wealth redistribution schemes to international business cartels.
This multidisciplinary workshop, in the context of ECOINT, an ERC-funded project devoted to the history of 20th century international economic thinking, seeks to recover the trajectories of those business actors. Conceived widely and not exclusively, among the topics that will be discussed are:
• Business actors and international organisations
• Environmental governance and business internationalism
• Businessmen and imperialism
• Economic norms and the practice of international economic thinking
In a special session of the workshop, Assistant Professor of History, Jamie Martin (Harvard University) will present his recent book, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022).