Jamie Martin teaches history at Harvard and is the author of The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire and the Birth of Global Economic Governance. He is writing a book about the economic consequences of the First World War.
Shortly after ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, 31 July 1914, less than an hour before trading was scheduled to begin, the London Stock Exchange closed its doors to business for the first time since its establishment in 1801. Crowds of brokers gathered in the narrow streets outside the building, many already wearing straw hats and holiday clothes instead of the traditional silk...
In the early years of World War Two, when Allied and Axis planners began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the question of how to prevent a return to the economic chaos of the 1930s was uppermost in their minds. In a series of negotiations that began in 1941 and culminated in the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, British and American officials debated how to re-create a stable and open capitalist world economy. What was obvious was the need to manage the interaction of national economies. Nothing like it had ever existed before.
Ross Ulbricht was arrested on 1 October, suspected of being the Dread Pirate Roberts, the mastermind behind the online illegal drug emporium Silk Road. Messages of support quickly spread across social media; funds are being raised for his legal defence. The Silk Road was shut down on 2 October. Allegedly run out of Ulbricht’s bedroom in a shared flat in San Francisco, the website boasted more than 950,000 registered users, and made getting drugs – apparently very good drugs – much easier and safer than ever before. But its founder isn’t a folk hero only because of the quality of the junk he made available. It’s also because of his radical libertarian philosophy.
As Western investors became controlling shareholders in the railways, mines and plantations of the global South, the supposedly peaceful worlds of trade and finance became harder to distinguish from imperialism....
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