Liane Hewitt

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: In the wake of World War I, many European economists and industrialists proclaimed the end of laissez-faire capitalism. Structural imbalances between production and consumption shattered the pre-war, liberal faith in the power of markets to regulate themselves and naturally restore equilibrium between supply and demand. Economic historians have well-documented how the violent price fluctuations and chronic mass-unemployment of the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, encouraged states to abandon free trade, embrace economic nationalism, and pursue varieties of planning (whether fascist in Italy & Germany, communist in the USSR, or democratic in New Deal America & Popular Front France). But how did private business respond to the failure of markets? This paper argues that the great question of interwar economic reconstruction was not, whether, but who should plan? Cartels offered an attractive alternative to statist planning. Drawing on the archive of the International Chamber of Commerce, the paper demonstrates how the golden age of international cartels during the 1920s-30s was predicated on the promise that private planning, or "industrial self-government" via producer agreements on prices and output, constituted a third-way to disordered free markets and state intervention. Founded in 1919, the ICC gathered the leaders of industry, commerce and finance from across Europe and America. Its “Cartel” and “Europe” committees closely collaborated with the League of Nations to promote cartels. The ICC especially championed international cartels as the path to maintaining cross border trade and supply-chains, modernizing industry, and building an economic “United States of Europe” which could secure peace and match American Fordist mass-production. The paper concludes by highlighting how following World War II, the ICC would embrace competition without shedding much of its support for cartels nor its advocacy for private enterprise over state planning.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: World War I ushered in a deglobalization of the world economy that persisted until the end of the Bretton Woods capital controls in the 1970s. Or so most historians have argued. This paper suggests an alternative framing. If intergovernmental efforts failed to reconstruct the pillars of the pre-1914 global economy—namely free trade and the gold standard—businessmen continued to pursue internationalism. During the 1920s and 1930s, states increasingly closed their borders and pursued varieties of national economic planning. Meanwhile, international cartels and other private business agreements proliferated like never before. This paper argues that we should interpret this “golden age” of international cartels as an attempt to build an alternative, private global infrastructure for cross-border trade and business transactions, when states were failing to do this job. The paper focuses on the first World Economic Conference organized by the League of Nations in Geneva in 1927 which discussed in detail the question of international cartels in the context of world economic reconstruction. Many economists, statesmen and industrialists at the conference promoted private business agreements as an alternative to inter-state trade treaties, which had failed to arrest trade wars. These voices also looked to international business cooperation, not to intergovernmental diplomacy, to build a United States of Europe, secure world peace, preserve international trade, and regulate unstable markets. The paper concludes by arguing that it is more accurate to read the interwar years as shaped by a co-dependent dynamic of state-led economic deglobalization and business-led globalization propelled by international cartels, and other forms of private international business diplomacy, including private arbitration tribunals and private transnational business legal services proviced by the International Chamber Commerce.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: Krooss Dissertation Prize finalist