Abstract

"Global Order INC. The Secret History of How Corporate Power in the Global South Shaped Global Order"

Alanna O'Malley, Erasmus University (omalley@eshcc.eur.nl)

Multinational corporations have long operated in the background of governments, international organisations such as the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations (UN). Yet, the scope and scale of their political and economic influence remains broadly obscured, partially due to limited access to archives, and a false siloing of their role to financial spaces. This research will, for the first time, investigate the role of Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, Shell, and Union Minière du Haut-Katanga together, in shaping the global economic and political order 1944-2001. It will provide a ground-breaking contribution to the field of twentieth-century history, showing how these actors exercised political and economic agency to shape the process of decolonisation, development and the evolution of global economic organisations. The paper presents a wider project which has 4 related objectives: 1. To examine how the activities of MNCs preserved imperial networks of power; 2. To analyse how they shaped the process of decolonisation; 3. To determine how they wielded political influence through organisations; 4. To trace how Global South actors contested their role at the UN. The project’s innovative contribution will be to show how the world’s main economic institutions have been forged, manipulated and changed by corporations. Its primary impact will be in making visible how corporations have shaped the process of decolonisation and thereby perpetuated a system of global inequality which goes well beyond the North-South divide but created asymmetries across the Global South. The project will provide the first truly global history of the political and economic agency of corporations by investigating how they functioned within and between global institutions of economic order and how Global South actors contested their influence. GLOBORDINC will reveal a secret history of capital contestation as a key component of global order at a time when the unbridled power of corporations has never been so manifest.