Twentieth-Century International Economic Thinking, and the Complex History of Globalization

Project Information

ECOINT

Grant agreement ID: 885285

DOI

10.3030/885285

EC signature date 25 May 2020

Start date 1 October 2020

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 342 600,00

EU contribution

€ 2 342 600,00

Coordinated by

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ECOINT (Twentieth-Century International Economic Thinking, and the Complex History of Globalization)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ECOINT sets out to help us understand how we arrived at the economically integrated world in which we live today. It examines crucial sites at and through which the economic world has been imagined, and the people imagining: intergovernmental organisations and associated INGOs, and mid-level and ‘non-intellectual’ intellectuals, many of them women, working with and in these organizations from 1919 until 2001. ECOINT conceptualises and studies these widely overlooked social actors under the label ‘international economic thinkers’ and investigates their ideas and imagining as ‘international economic thinking’.
ECOINT has five objectives:
1. To capture ideas about ‘the economy’ from 1919 to 2001, leading to a capstone global history of international economic thinking, with a particular focus on mid-level and ‘non-intellectual’ intellectuals working with/at through international institutions, both IGOs and INGOs.
2. The study of an important but understudied cohort of these mid-level and ‘non-intellectual’ international economic thinkers in the 20th century international system, namely women, leading to a history of women economic thinkers working with/at international institutions, both IGOs and INGOs.
3. An emphasis on economic thinking generated in and through institutional sites that distinctly shaped the 20th century, leading to the mapping of international economic thinking at major IGOs, with particular attention to the UN Regional Economic Commissions, in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and Africa. ECOINT will also map the business INGOs that orbited in the international system, the IFBPW and where relevant the ICC, leading to new histories of these bodies, their expert staff and a deeper understanding of their international economic influence.
4. The establishment of a collaborative empirical research database gathering the primary evidence of male and female economic thinkers who found work as elite and ‘mid-level intellectuals’ in international policy making bureaucracies: the League of Nations, ILO, UN, UNESCO, FAO, IMF, World Bank, UNCTAD, and UN Regional Economic Commissions [ECs]; as well as women who sought influence through the IFBPW and ICC (HQ and regional branches), including as ‘non-intellectual’ economic thinkers.
5. The coordination of an outreach program based on ECOINT’s empirical findings dedicated to expanding public debate around the diverse ideological international roots of globalization and the role of women economic thinkers.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

. A central ECOINT strategy is the use of original sources in private and public archives. Within the reporting period, ECOINT has built up a unique database of sources, including the papers of Eleanor Hinder, Frances Perkins, Edith Penrose, Frank McDougall, Gunnar Myrdal, and select documents from CEPAL, UNECE, UNECA, UNCTAD, ECAFE, ECOSOC, ILO, and the WORLD BANK.
. ECOINT has established ‘international economic thinking’ as a new object of study in the historiographical scholarship on globalization. This was achieved through ECOINT-workshops, the presentation of research in international settings, the establishment of individual and institutional networks and the publication of foundational texts.
. Targeting its objectives, ECOINT’s work has focused on
. The conceptualisation of ‘international economic thinking’ and ‘international economic thinkers’. This has been done in an interdisciplinary way and in critical conversation with established literatures, such as historiographies of economic thought and development, the IR literature on international order, the multidisciplinary scholarship on the planetary, various streams of IPE.
. The identification and study of individual women ‘international economic thinkers’. Findings have been made available in an online database of profile-texts.
. The study of key sites of ‘international economic thinking’, e.g. League of Nations, ILO, UNCTAD, UNECE, ECOSOC, CEPAL, UNECA, World Bank, through the synchronic and diachronic mapping of notions of and debates about the role and purpose of ‘the economy’. Findings have been published in working papers and journal articles.
. Multidisciplinary discussions on how to grasp the nature and role of business people as ‘international economic thinkers’. The distinction between social actors organized in dedicated organisations, such as the ICC, and individuals taking up administrative positions within UN organisations has been identified as conceptually significant and will guide the ongoing research.
. The identification, conceptualization and application of significant themes, such as social/economic, technical/political, cooperation/integration, public/private.
. Across its research, ECOINT has considered and discussed gender and geographical biases reproduced in existing knowledges and datasets
. Research is currently feeding into a co-authored book on the historiography of ‘international economic thinking’ (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and an edited collection that showcases a variety of methodological approaches to ‘international economic thinking’ and empirical findings on its manifestations across different sites.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ECOINT is designed to be innovative and adventurous in its methodological and conceptual strategies in the following ways:
- ECOINT takes seriously the international character of globalization’s history and the international institutional contexts that fostered ideas about the purpose and potential of integration of the world’s economies. Its research program reveals the international character of 20th century globalization by historicizing international economic thinking.
- ECOINT categorises and classifies ‘international economic thinking’ as a means of illuminating the breadth and depth of 20th century international and economic history, on a global scale. In this respect, it speaks to other existing related sub-fields, such as IPE, and the History of Economic Thought, Business and Banking studies, for example, but it is also marking out new territory of substantial interest to those other fields.
- ECOINT will endeavour to fundamentally rethink how we approach/write the intellectual history of economic thought, and the international 20th century, by recognizing that century’s institutional and archival distinctiveness, and focusing on thinking, at the interface of ideas and practices. It has at its methodological core the incorporation into history of economic thought ‘mid-level’ and ‘non-intellectual’ economic thinkers. It emphasises the importance of women as well as men as economic thinkers, from around the globe.
- ECOINT ‘stirs’ women back into our general understanding of international economic thinking and insists on the general relevance of the history of women to how we think about both the international character of the 20th century, and the international paths to contemporary globalization.
- On these conceptual and methodological bases, ECOINT tracks the ideational and ideological paths, the connections between politics and economics, that led not only to ‘market fundamentalism’, but also in other directions, ‘welfarism’ on a world-scale, economic internationalism and nationalism. More generally, ECOINT’s global, multi-faceted approach will add ‘distributional imaginaries’ to the repertoires of our understanding of 20th century international economic thinking, and a globalizing world.
- ECOINT builds on the burgeoning trends of a new history of capitalism in international contexts by launching an ambitious research program to establish a broad history of international economic thinking, and practices, that will rewrite the complex history of globalization.

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