CANCELED: Jamie Martin - “The Meddlers” - Tara Zahra

This event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for a later date. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Jamie Martin will discuss his book The Meddlers. He will be joined in conversation by Tara Zahra.

Presented in partnership with the Law, Letters, and Society and the Chicago Center on Democracy

This is an in-person event and will be held at the Social Science Research Building. Masks are encouraged but not required.

About the book: International economic institutions like the IMF and World Bank exert incredible influence over the domestic policies of many states. These institutions date from the end of World War II and amassed power during the neoliberal era of the late twentieth century. But as Jamie Martin shows, if we want to understand their deeper origins and the ideas and dynamics that shaped their controversial powers, we must turn back to the explosive political struggles that attended the birth of global economic governance in the early twentieth century.

The Meddlers tells the story of the first international institutions to govern the world economy, including the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements, created after World War I. These institutions endowed civil servants, bankers, and colonial authorities from Europe and the United States with extraordinary powers: to enforce austerity, coordinate the policies of independent central banks, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices. In a highly unequal world, they faced a new political challenge: was it possible to reach into sovereign states and empires to intervene in domestic economic policies without generating a backlash?

Martin follows the intense political conflicts provoked by the earliest international efforts to govern capitalism―from Weimar Germany to the Balkans, Nationalist China to colonial Malaya, and the Chilean desert to Wall Street. The Meddlers shows how the fraught problems of sovereignty and democracy posed by institutions like the IMF are not unique to late twentieth-century globalization, but instead first emerged during an earlier period of imperial competition, world war, and economic crisis.

About the author: Jamie Martin is Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Bookforum.

About the interlocutor: Tara Zahra is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a professor of history at the University of Chicago. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Chicago, Illinois.