Pan-African thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed innovative ideas that challenged the racialized hierarchies of the world economy. Some of these thinkers are discussed in previous chapters, such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James (both discussed in chapter 7) as well as Amy Ashwood Garvey (chapter 10). This chapter discusses three other prominent Pan-African thinkers who sought to cultivate the transnational economic solidarity of Africans and the African diaspora in order to challenge this group’s subordinate position in the world economy. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey was the best-known popularizer of this kind of “economic Pan-Africanism” via his Universal Negro Improvement Association and its Black Star Line. The other two discussed in the chapter are W.E.B. Du Bois (from the United States) and Hubert Harrison (who migrated from the Danish West Indies to the United States). The latter two disagreed with Garvey and each other about a number of issues, ranging from their views of capitalism to the role of the African diaspora in Pan-African politics.

Neomercantilists rejected the liberal advocacy of free trade, urging instead strategic trade protectionism and other forms of government economic activism in order to promote state wealth and power. Their goals were similar to those of pre-Smithian mercantilist thinkers, but they defended their priorities in new ways by engaging critically with the ideas of classical economic liberals. This chapter describes the important role of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List in helping to pioneer neomercantilist thought as well as other less well-known thinkers from Europe and the United States who developed distinctive and influential versions of this perspective. Many of them were inspired by List but adapted his ideas in some interesting ways, including William Ashley, Mihail Manoilescu, Gustav Schmoller, and Sergei Witte. Another key figure, Henry Carey, was more inspired by Hamilton than List, but developed an important version of neomercantilist thought that was very distinctive from both of theirs. These thinkers highlight how neomercantilism in Europe and United States had more diverse content than the common textbook depiction suggests.

Scholars of international political economy (IPE) often locate the origins of their field in the contested nature of the world economy of the early 1970s, but many of its early proponents drew important inspiration from political economists who had an international focus from the pre-1945 period. This chapter summarizes the book’s analysis of the field’s pre-1945 roots, an analysis that challenges conventional depictions of this history in two ways. First, the book embraces a more global conception of the field’s pre-1945 roots by highlighting many contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States. Second, it shows that discussions of the international dimensions of political economy before 1945 involved much more than a debate between the three perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. This introductory chapter also highlights some limitations of the analysis as well as some of the motivations behind the project.

Feminism is often portrayed as a relatively new perspective in debates about the international dimensions of political economy, but it has predecessors in ideas advanced by some prominent thinkers in the pre-1945 era. These thinkers shared– with varying levels of commitment – a broad normative goal which has echoes in contemporary feminist IPE literature: that of challenging patriarchal practices and structures in order to end women’s subordination within the world economy. There were many divisions among these thinkers, including between those who sought to promote feminist goals within an economic liberal framework (including Jane Addams, Bertha Lutz, Chrystal Macmillan, Harriet Martineau) and those more drawn to socialism and Marxism (Williama Burroughs, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Aleksandra Kollontai, Paulina Luisi, Magda Portal, Clara Zetkin). Some other thinkers also linked feminist goals to other perspectives such as neomercantilism (once again, Henry Carey), Pan-Africanism (Amy Ashwood Garvey), and anarchism (He-Yin Zhen).

This chapter examines some Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian thinkers who argued that religious values and civilizational discourse needed to be front and center in discussions of political economy. The Pan-Islamic thinkers called for new kinds of economic solidarity among a transnational Islamic community that could promote its interests and values within the world economy. Their proposals included Iranian-born Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s calls for the collective economic modernization of the Islamic world, the endorsement of specific joint economic projects such as the Hejaz railway by Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, and India’s Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi’s focus on the need for all Muslims to embrace a new kind of Islamic Economics. By contrast, the Pan-Asian thinker Sun Yat-sen focused on the interests and values of a transnational community that he conceptualized in civilizational terms. Sun argued that Asian countries’ interests and values could be promoted by development-oriented economic cooperation amongst themselves, their collective pursuit of neomercantilist goals, and an alternative tributary model of international economic governance centered on the principle of the “rule of Right.”

This chapter examines the embedded liberal perspective of the Anglo-American thinkers who played a lead role in designing Bretton Woods order, including John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. These thinkers endorsed the broad liberal goals of boosting global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom, but they argued that these goals could only be met with a new kind of institutionalized liberal multilateralism that would make an open world economy compatible with various kinds of active public management of the economy. The roots of embedded liberalism can be found in efforts to reformulate the international side of classical economic liberal thought earlier in the twentieth century, including by thinkers such as Jehangir Coyajee.and John Hobson. The promoters of embedded liberalism at Bretton Woods sought to accommodate not just new ideas of domestic social security and activist macroeconomic management in Western Europe and North America but also the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning and neomercantilist views prominent in many less industrialized regions. At the same time, they made much less effort to engage with the perspectives discussed in the second part of this volume.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marxism emerged as a major rival to both economic liberalism and neomercantilism in debates about the international dimensions of political economy around the world. With their focus on ending class inequality and exploitation by challenging capitalism, Marxists put prioritized distinctive goals from those prioritized by economic liberals and neomercantilists in the pre-1945 years. This chapter examines Karl Marx’s ideas about the world economy as well as those of a number of his influential European (including Russian) followers. The latter include thinkers commonly discussed in IPE textbooks, such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also other thinkers who usually receive less attention, such as Carl Ballod, Rudolph Hilferding, Henry Hyndman, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and Georg Vollmar. The chapter highlights important disagreements among these various Marxist thinkers on issues such as free trade, imperialism, multilateral cooperation, strategies for challenging capitalism, the prospects for socialism in one country, and the relationship between capitalism and war.

European Marxism diffused widely to other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting support from many thinkers whose contributions to Marxist thought about the international dimensions of political economy deserve to be better known. This chapter focuses on some innovative and important Marxist thinkers from Trinidad (C.L.R. James, George Padmore), China (Mao Zedong), India (Manabendra Nath Roy), Indonesia (Tan Malaka), Japan (Kōtoku Shūsui, Takahashi Kamekichi, Sano Manabu), and Peru (José Carlos Mariátegui). These thinkers were important not just because they became well known in their local contexts and, in some cases, in wider international Marxist networks. They also sometimes developed ideas that predated better-known European ones and they often called attention to issues that received less attention in European Marxist debates, such as racial discrimination, Eurocentrism, the relationship between Marxism and Islam, the nature and impact of imperialism outside of Europe, and revolutionary politics in places subject to imperialism.

The concluding chapter summarizes the case for embracing a wider approach to the deep intellectual roots of the IPE field in the pre-1945 period that goes beyond the common focus on just thinkers from Europe and the United States and the debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. The wider approach of this volume highlights important contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States in the pre-1945 era as well as important debates both within each of the three orthodoxies and with perspectives beyond them. In addition to providing a more comprehensive history, this wider approach can help to strengthen efforts to foster more “global conversations” in the field of IPE today, to improve interpretations of contemporary political discourse as well as to contribute to the study of topics that are attracting growing interest within current IPE scholarship.

Classical economic liberalism was the first perspective on political economy to achieve worldwide influence. Its most famous advocate was Adam Smith whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations became a foundational text for economic liberals that was known around the world by the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, some other European political economists consolidated the international dimension of the classical liberal economic perspective by building on Smith’s ideas, including David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot. These and other European classical economic liberals were united in the belief that free trade and free markets would foster global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom. At the same time, they did not always concur about the precise ways that free trade would generate these benefits or about which of them was most important. They also disagreed about the universal relevance of economic liberalism, their willingness to accept exemptions from free trade, their interest in international specialization and economic integration beyond free trade in goods as well as about the place of force, imperialism, civilizational discourse, and intergovernmental cooperation in the economic liberal project. In short, there were many distinct versions of classical economic liberalism.

The emergence of classical economic liberalism was much more than just a European story. Economic liberal thought found supporters among thinkers from many other parts of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom also adapted it in various ways in response to their local circumstances. This chapter highlights adaptations made by prominent thinkers from the Americas (Thomas Cooper, José da Silva Lisboa, Manuel Pardo y Lavalle, Carlos Calvo, Harold Innis), South Asia (Rammohun Roy, Dadabhai Naoroji), Africa and the Ottoman Empire (Olaudah Equiano, Alexander Crummell, Hassuna D’Ghies), as well as East Asia (Taguchi Ukichi, Yan Fu). The ideas of some of these figures also found an audience in Europe, revealing that liberal ideas flowed not just from Europe to the rest of the world but also in the other direction. Further, some economic liberals outside Europe questioned the European origins of this perspective by claiming its independent roots in their own region. In the Chinese case, the chapter also describes how a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, Chen Hongmou, developed ideas that bore some similarities to European economic liberalism without knowledge of the latter.

This chapter examines the ideas of neomercantilist thinkers from outside Europe and the United States whose thought became well known in various places during the pre-1945 period. Some of them adapted the ideas of neomercantilist thinkers from Europe and the United States in creative ways, including thinkers from Argentina (Alejandro Bunge), Australia (David Syme), China (Liang Qichao), Ethiopia (Gabrahiwot Baykadagn), India (Mahadev Govind Ranade, Benoy Sarkar), and Turkey (Ziya Gökalp). Others developed distinctive neomercantilist ideas without much, or any, reference to neomercantilist thought from Europe and the United States, including figures from Canada (John Rae), China (Sun Yat-sen, Zheng Guanying), Egypt (Muhammad Ali), Japan (Fukuzawa Yukichi, Ōkubo Toshimichi), and Korea (Yu Kil-chun). This latter group of thinkers reveal how the ideas of Hamilton and List did not play the same kind of central role in the emergence of neomercantilist thought that Smith’s played in the growth of economic liberalism. Taken together, all the thinkers described in this chapter reinforce the point that neomercantilist thought was characterized by considerable diversity.

Environmentalism is a perspective that is usually portrayed in IPE textbooks as a relatively new one that has emerged in recent decades. But a number of thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed pioneering environmentalist ideas that gained considerable attention during the eras in which they lived. With differing degrees of commitment, these figures were united by their desire to curtail human-induced environmental degradation in order to foster more sustainable ways of living within the world economy. They disagreed, however, about the causes of, and solutions to, the environmental degradation they identified. Some combined their environmentalism with economic liberal views (Alexander von Humboldt, Stanley Jevons); others with neomercantilism (Henry Carey); still others with Marxism (Marx himself) and autarkism (Eve Balfour, Graham Vernon Jacks, Sada Kaiseki). Others promoted environmentalist ideas that did not fit well into any of those categories, such as the Lakotan cosmology of Black Elk, the “Cartesian” approach of Frederick Soddy, and the decentralist visions of Richard Gregg, Radhakamal Mukerjee, Lewis Mumford and John Ruskin.

Although autarkic thought has not received much attention from IPE scholars, there is a long history of thinkers who prioritized their state’s economic self-sufficiency in order to enhance its autonomy (economic, political, and/or cultural) from foreign influence. This autarkic goal was rejected by classical economic liberals, neomercantilists, and most Marxists, but autarkic perspectives had at least as important a place in political debates as these other better-studied ones in some pre-1945 contexts. Like the other perspectives examined in this book, some strands of autarkic thought also circulated internationally in the pre-1945 era. This chapter identifies influential autarkic ideas developed by a number of thinkers from places as diverse as Britain (John Maynard Keynes, just briefly in 1933), China (Chen Gongbo), Germany (Johann Fichte, Friedrich Zimmermann), Haiti (Edmund Paul), India (Mohandas Gandhi), Japan (Aizawa Seishisai, Shizuki Tadao), Korea (Lee Hang-ro), Paraguay (José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia), Russia (Peter Kropotkin), Turkey (Sevket Süreyya Aydemir), and the west African colony of the Gold Coast (Kobina Sekyi). The chapter also highlights important disagreements amongst these thinkers, ranging from the specific reasons they prioritized autonomy to their views of the relationship between autarky and peace.