Papers presented by Robert Yee since 2019
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"Economic Diplomacy and Banking Policy in Allied-Occupied Germany, 1945–1955"
Robert Yee, University of Oxford
Abstract:
With the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany no longer had a centralized budget, a functional central bank, or an overall regulatory framework. How, then, did the Allies, who oversaw four separate zones of occupation, craft a new economic policy for the divided nation? This presentation examines the debates over one aspect of governance: banking regulation in the decade after the war. It draws on archival material from France, Germany, the US, and the UK to show how officials, both German and Allied, proposed various models for the “decentralization” and “denazification” of the financial sector. In this effort, foreign ministries learned from (and contended with) the past regulatory legislation enacted during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Their subsequent reforms in the form of the Allied Banking Commission and the Bank deutscher Länder instituted a form of centralized regulatory administration, but one also compatible with Germany’s existing federal system. These negotiations not only came from the desire to achieve financial stability, but also reflected the growing concerns of geopolitical conflict at the onset of the Cold War. More broadly, this argument sheds light on the extent to which regulatory policies can serve a public-oriented goal. Contemporary actors may have made few direct references to protecting consumers or small businesses through regulation, but their meeting minutes and correspondence reveal a concerted effort to improve collective economic security. The “public” they envisioned serving was neither a collection of individuals nor the leaders of business associations, but instead the strategic goals of the nascent Western Bloc. While also exploring the tensions and contradictions of this project, this paper evaluates the Allied occupation through the lens of banking.
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Between Europe and Empire: Sir Henry Strakosch, Expertise, and Reconstruction, 1914–1926"
Robert Yee, Princeton University
Abstract:
This presentation examines the role of economic expertise in shaping reconstruction efforts after the First World War. It focuses on the contributions of Sir Henry Strakosch, who served as a member of the League’s Financial Committee and as chairman of a major South African mining corporation. In this sense, Strakosch operated at the intersection of two separate spheres, where he aimed to balance the interests of both private corporations and international organizations. Through formal conferences and informal advisory work, Strakosch ultimately shaped the trajectory of monetary reform in Central Europe and the British Empire. This project, more broadly, intervenes in the historiographies on interwar internationalism and global economic governance. Recent works by historians have shown how to understand the postwar economic institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, it is necessary to understand how such efforts originated from the interwar years. The First World War proved to be a major catalyst, not only in creating new international organizations, such as the League of Nations, for sustaining international cooperation, but also in leading to a reevaluation of societal views on expertise. Newly hired experts thus became involved in interwar projects of reinvention.