Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó (review)

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• Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó
• Jay K. Rosengard (bio)

Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó, editors, Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions. History and Historical Theory 3. Athens: Alfeios Editions and TransMonEA Project, Academy of Athens–HFRI, 2023. Pp. 323. Non-commercial publication.

This publication is a multifaceted analysis of the global monetary regime's evolution, from the disintegrating impacts of the Great Depression during the interwar period to the often inequitable and destabilizing adaptations of the postwar era. This transformation is investigated via what the authors call a "financial engineering process" generated by interactions between governments and global financial institutions within the context of national and international political economies. The volume is the result of a research project supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and comprises contributions by an extremely diverse and somewhat esoteric group of young Greek scholars, many affiliated with the Hellenic Open University and drawn from the fields of history, philosophy, economics, politics, and demography.

The book is a very ambitious endeavor, creative in concept and earnest in execution. It is especially noteworthy that it is a Greek publication written for an international audience, a daring venture into a domain usually dominated by English-speaking academic communities. It has the usual problems of compilations in maintaining coherence of vision and narrative, as well as consistency in level of detail and focus. It is also replete with numerous long, tedious, and often excruciating explanations of research methodologies that divert rather than illuminate. Nevertheless, it provides new perspectives on topics extensively covered by others, including post–World War II debt and currency crises (chapters 8–10) and the impact of the Great Depression in the Weimar Republic from the vantage point of all three levels of government—national, state, and local (chapter 5). It also includes an original exploration of new topics such as both the benign and potentially exploitative impacts of international agency assistance in building national statistical expertise. Examples of such assistance covered in the book are the League of Nations Economic and Financial Section in Turkey (chapter 2), the League of Nations Economic and Financial Organization globally (chapter 4), and the International Agrarian Bureau in Eastern Europe (chapter 3). Another strength of this volume lies in the plethora of data provided by the authors in support of their narratives, with all chapters thoroughly documented and annotated.

The most interesting chapters are those focused on Greece. Chapter 6, by Lefteris Tsoulfidis, presents a long-cycle view of what the author calls an [End Page 125] "Interwar Depression" (1920–1939) rather than dealing exclusively with the nadir of the Great Depression (1929–1932). It also goes beyond the United States and other global economic powers and details transmission of the Depression to other countries such as Greece and traces subsequent national impacts including fiscal (rising public debt, inability to service this debt, default, austerity), monetary (devaluation, contraction), political (de-globalization, isolationism, trade wars, nationalism, coups, autocratic governments), and social (growing income and wealth inequality, increased poverty). In the particular case of Greece, this chapter reveals a novel facet of international transmission, namely, that it worsened the depression by adopting a hard drachma monetary policy—a policy based on unfulfilled expectations of foreign aid in a global environment dominated by counterproductive isolationism and the self-defeating pursuit of national self-sufficiency.

Chapter 7, by Antonis A. Antoniou, can be read as a prequel to chapter 6, tracing precursors of the Interwar Depression to systemic weaknesses in the Greek financial sector in the face of national default and global conflict. Antoniou focuses on the 1897–1912 period and provides a comprehensive analysis of macroeconomic and fiscal trends in Greece, including gross domestic product composition by sector, revenue composition by source, expenditure allocation by sector, and the structure and flows of sovereign debt. This chapter places subsequent macroeconomic difficulties in a very revealing historical context by examining underlying systemic weaknesses and resultant vulnerabilities.

The volume's...