Reinventing the World

While many scholars have highlighted the forces of economic disintegration at work during the interwar
period, new research has started to reveal the processes of institutional reinvention that emerged from this
turmoil, both in the League of Nations and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). Interwar
innovation was noteworthy in its scope – it aspired to universal application despite strong European roots
– and its scope – it reached deep into national administration and private business practice. This panel will
interrogate the role played by experts in that process. During a period of sharp conflict, experts often
presented themselves as neutral, giving their recommendations added weight with quantitative metrics.
Nevertheless, they were each motivated by a complex set of political and intellectual commitments. This
panel will consider how experts reimagined international order through the League of Nations, the ICC,
and the structures of colonial governance that underpinned these institutions. Experts played a formidable
role, not only in shaping ideas and policy, but also in defining new modes of political, economic, and
social governance. The panelists will discuss direct intervention in domestic economic administration, the
coordination of private business practice (driven by the ICC), and the elaboration of new rules governing
relations between states and firms. They will address key questions at the forefront of current scholarship:
how is legitimacy constructed in different avenues for expertise (international institutions, think tanks,
central banks, non-governmental organizations, chambers of commerce)? How do the traditionally US- or
UK-dominated narratives of international history change when we bring in experts from Central and
Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, or the colonial world? By probing these issues, the panel
reconceptualizes the interwar period as a key moment of transition between the diffuse globalization of
the nineteenth century and the more institutionalized processes of re-globalization that gathered steam
after 1945.