## The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance

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**Canonical URL:** [The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/september/book-meddlers-kearns.pdf)

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### Overview
- Book: The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance
- Author and affiliation: Jamie Martin, assistant professor of history and social studies at Harvard
- Publisher and details: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 352 pp., $39.95
- Reviewed context: Traces predecessors to the IMF and World Bank beginning at the close of the Great War and extending a quarter century before Bretton Woods.

### Historical precursors and institutions
- Wartime origins:
  - The narrative opens with Allied supply management during World War I and wartime supply councils.
  - Example: The London-based Nitrate of Soda Executive, “led by a British merchant and staffed by government representatives of European allies and the United States,” formed to dominate buying of a key ingredient of explosives and fertilizer from neutral Chile.
- Interwar institutions:
  - The League of Nations Economic and Financial Organization gained the ability in the 1920s to interfere through “new types of conditional lending,” provoking resistance from Albania to Austria.
  - The creation of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) “fueled dispute over sovereignty itself, and whether governments or supposedly apolitical financial bodies should control monetary policy.”
- Commodity arrangements:
  - Tin regulation described as “the final interwar innovation in economic governance,” controlling production and trade in British colonies such as Malaya.
  - The tin arrangement is characterized as a precursor to OPEC and “endured until 1985.”

### Key episodes and figures
- Connections to later institutions and personnel:
  - Links between League work and later IMF leadership: future IMF chief “(1956-63) Per Jacobsson” and top economist “Jacques Polak” traced to earlier League roles.
- Great-power dynamics:
  - Final chapter frames IMF origins within “the reversal of global apex power.”
  - Washington’s Lend-Lease Act exchanges (warships for eased “imperial preference” in trade and controls like wheat production) are highlighted.
  - Institutional outcome: “the international monetary institution proposed by John Maynard Keynes ends up more like the vision of his overshadowed American counterpart Harry Dexter White.”

### Themes and arguments
- Sovereignty and interference:
  - Central concern: tensions between national autonomy and international governance created by conditional lending, commodity controls, and supranational financial bodies.
  - Martin emphasizes “unequal sovereignty,” suggesting persistent hierarchies in global governance.
- Institutional continuity and legacy:
  - The book situates the IMF and World Bank as heirs to interwar and wartime governance practices rather than wholly novel creations.
- Tone and approach:
  - Described as “deeply researched” and engagingly written despite the potential tedium of bureaucratic detail.
  - Martin “brings alive forgotten figures who shaped our world.”

### Conclusions and implications
- Evaluation of reform prospects:
  - Martin suggests that “tweaks to existing bodies like the IMF and World Bank ‘may be insufficient to produce a more stable reconciliation of global governance and democratic politics,’” implying more fundamental change may be required.
  - He calls for “ambitious thinking” that can “supersede 20th century institutions and imperial legacies,” though his specific prescription is not provided in this book.
- Final normative statement quoted from the author:
  - “Governing the world economy needs to be dramatically rethought if it is to be made fully compatible, for the first time, with real economic self-determination and democratic self-governance,” Martin concludes, “and for all states, regardless of their histories of sovereignty and imagined standings in a hierarchical global order.”

*Review by JEFF KEARNS, Finance & Development, September 2022.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/september/book-meddlers-kearns.pdf_