In Chapter 4, I address humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes. The narrowing of political economy by nineteenth-century classical economists was challenged on two fronts. Some economists fought to maintain a broad social and moral perspective, but some economists turned the narrowing theory of classical economists into a stinging rebuke of capitalism itself. I begin by discussing the rising influence of humanism in the twentieth century. Next, I discuss the Hungarian-Austrian political economist Karl Polanyi and his critique of capitalism based on humanism. Although he was initially attracted to Marx’s moral critique, Polanyi eventually rejected Marxism on similar grounds as Tawney. In his search for a moral foundation for capitalism, Polanyi rediscovered the moral theory behind Adam Smith’s writings. I then discuss the British political economist John Maynard Keynes. Similar to Polanyi, Keynes rejected the narrow utilitarianism of both Marx and the classical economists in forming his moral foundation for capitalism based on responsibility and duty. This sets up a discussion of humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism based on Polanyi’s and Keynes’s seminal works.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

The First World War was a fundamental watershed in the history of Europe and the world, causing deep and long-lasting shifts in politics, society, the economy, and the cultural sphere. The human costs were enormous. More than 70 million soldiers were mobilized between 1914 and 1918, of whom up to 9.3 million died. Many more were hurt and often had to live with their injuries and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. The civilian casualties were unprecedented, too: almost 8 million non-combatants fell victim to the direct and indirect consequences of the war, including displacement, captivity, and forced labor, but also starvation and epidemics. The experience of loss and destruction, of economic decline and social deprivation, traumatized whole generations for many years to come.

Since the founding of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Americans have rooted their national identity in their relationship with the wider world. America’s geopolitical position, its civilizing mission, its identity as the home of a chosen people, and its security requirements have shaped not only Americans’ external relations but also their very sense of themselves and who they are in a world of other peoples.

American nationalism has of course had several other sources than the outside world.1 The virtue of republican self-government – what might be identified as “civic nationalism” – has been an obviously powerful font of America’s self-identity, particularly the ways in which Americans have seen themselves as different, even superior, to other countries.

Chapter 8 looks at the famous case of German World War I reparations. Had Germany defaulted already in 1929, it would have saved two years worth of interest payments and entered autarky at the same time, as market access was by then de facto gone. At this point, the European nations did not have the ability to enforce debt contracts and the United States agreed to a de facto cancellation of reparations. The German sovereign default in the 1930s was on debt issued to pay reparations, but it also had several effects on other state liabilities, with loans offering different kinds of creditor protection. Germany in the 1920s had high levels of reparations, but was able to borrow, because it offered de facto seniority to new loans. Creditors were willing to lend into a large debt stock because they thought they would rank senior to reparations. The German default on its sovereign debt was special because it was allowed by its politically weak creditors, who were unable to enforce debt contracts in the 1930s.

In the 1910s, human and animal populations all over the Lushai Hills were pounded by a chance series of calamities - environmental, financial, agricultural, and epidemiological - forever altering the social landscape. This chapter is about how people attempting to escape the crush of bamboo famine, debt, crop failure, and disease were set in motion across mountains. As traditional coping strategies were constrained by new political, economic, and environmental realities, shattered clan groups began to forge new survival mechanisms out of missionary medicine and Christianity itself. Shattered families, scattered clans, sickly refugees, and indebted labourers were dashed across mountainsides to become seekers of new powers as older survival mechanisms failed or were ruled out, regulated, or lost. Disasters reordered not only by catalyzing opportunities for spiritual searching, but also by remixing splintered clan groups of survivors - once disparate kin groups and communities that, according to contemporary upland cultural logics, were in dire need of communal healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Foregrounding local terminology in the telling of these pasts opens up causal explanations, interpretative pathways, and complexities otherwise obscured by using Western categories and frameworks alone, and points to the multiple meanings of the conversion process itself. Christianity advanced through catastrophe as shattered populations folded it back into the normal healing structures of upland life.

Chapter 9 is the brief story of the lesser-known World War I reparations of Bulgaria and Russia. Both reparations were large in terms of each countrys output but were subsequently negotiated away in political treaties. In the Soviet Unions case, it is one of the examples of how you can repudiate debt completely but under the cost of exiting the global trading system.

With the conclusion of the First World War the ages of global empires comes to an end and hitherto familiar and trusted ways of governing come to an end. Empires shatter, Kingdoms tumble. The interbellum is the age of mass mobilization of peoples in a host of new states. New political systems come to the fore (socialist, communist and fascist regimes), new concepts (universal suffrage, equal representation, corporatism, etcetera) claim their place in new liberal democracies that pop up throughout the world. New constitutions of a sixth generation - the Leviathan constitutions - enshrine the arrangements needed for these forms of mass mobilization.

World War I felled Berlin’s grand hotel industry in three blows. The first was a shortage of goods, services, and labor; the second, a decline in the quality of the goods and services still available; and the third, a resultant depletion of capital reserves as shortages drove prices out of reach. As the state increased its demands on everyone’s time and energy, managers found themselves unable to devote their full attention to shoring up systems and hierarchies. A grueling four years then ended in ignominy and danger when, in November 1918, political violence surged into hotel lobbies, restaurants, and guest rooms. The fate of Berlin’s grand hotels mirrors the fate of the German Second Empire, which also collapsed in the face of defeat and revolution in the fall of 1918.

This final chapter follows the journey of Jerban student Sālim Bin Yaʿqūb (d. 1991) from Tunisia to Egypt, where he lived at the Buffalo Agency in the twilight years of its existence in the 1930s. The chapter draws on a diverse body of materials including manuscripts from his private library, his research notes, and a recorded interview from the 1980s with him about his time in Cairo. He spent much of his life in the decades following his return from Egypt to Tunisia preparing materials for a book just like this one. Bin Yaʿqūb’s story is thus at once that of the gradual disintegration of the Agency and its library and the earliest attempt to preserve the memory of the Ibadi community in Cairo and the Buffalo Agency before it disappeared. Although he died before writing it, the idea for his book both inspired and laid the foundation for this one.

The third chapter of the book analyzes Pynchon’s portrayal of the complex geopolitical situation around 1900. Against the Day is the longest and most relentlessly globetrotting novel in the global trilogy, and the chapter traces the different literary mapping strategies that Pynchon employs to depict the progress of modernity across the planet and his characters’ restless traverses through this and other worlds. The chapter also analyzes Pynchon’s deft use of various genres from the depicted period, just as it discusses the novel’s curious non-depiction of World War I and Pynchon’s rendering of the defeatist attitude which made the war possible. Finally, through an analysis of the related themes of bilocation and refraction the chapter shows which modes of resistance Pynchon’s longest novel proposes to place against the day, and it undertakes a close reading of the novel’s highly ambiguous epilogue, which leads directly into Gravity’s Rainbow.

The unforeseen extent and duration of World War I interrupted much of Europe’s access to the abundant lands of the New World, on which its food supply had come to depend. In Germany, the British blockade starved some 800,000 people; mortality increased most (over 60 percent) from malnutrition-related tuberculosis. Central to the appeal of Hitler’s National Socialist movement was its call for the conquest of Lebensraum in eastern Europe and western Russia – and the expulsion or extermination of those regions’ native inhabitants – as a means to self-sufficiency in food. Both in Mein Kampf and in his “second book,” Hitler argued explicitly that neither factor substitution, factor mobility, nor new technologies could guarantee Germans’ food supply; only the admittedly costly and risky route of conquest would suffice. When Stresemann’s “export powerhouse” strategy of factor mobility collapsed after 1929, Hitler’s alternative won strong popular support. In the “breakthrough” election of 1930, the Nazi vote increased most in the cities that had suffered the highest wartime mortality from tuberculosis. Hitler’s genocidal plan appealed especially to the populations that had endured the worst wartime hunger and death.

According to bargaining models of war, war reveals private information about resolve and power, to which decision-makers respond rationally by increasing or lowering their reservation price for settling. Germany during World War I presents a puzzle for this baseline rationalist expectation, and theoretical accounts offer three reasons by which leaders in a losing situation might nevertheless rationally continue to fight. If others cannot be expected to abide by any peace settlement, a commitment problem arises that makes fighting on rational. Even exploring diplomatic settlement could reveal private information about a lack of resolve. Self-interested leaders fearing that defeat will result in domestic turmoil, revolution, and the loss of their elite prerogatives might have incentives to “gamble for resurrection.” I argue instead that are all more parsimoniously accounted for through a focus on morality, the expression of the ethics of German nationalists. The nationalist understanding of adversaries as lacking ethical restraint generates the perception of a commitment problem that makes anything else than victory unacceptable. Even peace overtures are dangerous. The German right scorned demands for further democratization during the war as selfish class politics, a betrayal indicating that the country was not unified enough for this existential struggle.