Jamie Martin

This dissertation investigates the origins of the earliest international schemes to study and manage the world economy in the twentieth century. It focuses primarily on the economic work of the League of Nations and the International Labour Office, and on the network of American and European economists that shaped this work. It looks at how these experts, working in Europe and Asia, formulated strategies for studying and regulating the world economy in the face of the successive crises of the interwar period. Drawing on archival research from across Europe and the United States, it argues that these strategies, while unsuccessful in the short term, were influential in laying the intellectual and political foundations for post-1945 organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and for postwar global economic development schemes.