Compte-rendu par Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, à paraître dans Journal of Economic History

A broad synthesis on the Great depression by such a productive and original scholar as Harold James could only have much appeal. The result is surprising,  not very homogeneous, but with many very interesting insights and much solid scholarship. The book has six chapters. The introduction presents the 19th century globalization and its limits in a broad, interdisciplinary, perspective.  The three following chapters are much more in the tradition of modern economic history. Their relative sizes reflect results both from the relevant literatures and from the previous works of the author, maybe exaggerating their actual relative importance : money and banking (ch.2) benefit as well as trade and tariffs (ch.3) from a much more detailed analysis (70 pages each) than the “reaction against international migration” (ch.4) or chapter 5 on “the age of nationalism versus the age of capital”, with only 20 pages each. The books ends with a substantial “can it happen again ?” conclusion.
The really good point of the book is its unification of three traditions of scholarships up to now frequently separated on money, trade and migrations, within a unique framework. The common framework is given in the introduction, which proposes a broad methodological perspective for the study of globalization, based on the hypothesis “that globalism fails because humans and the institutions they create cannot adequately handle the psychological and institutional consequences of the interconnected world. Institutions (…) become the major channels through which the resentments against globalization work their destruction” (5). This justifies the focus of the book on those institutions created by the nation States (themselves the highest level institutions protecting against global problems) to handle globalization : tariffs, central banks and immigration legislation. After that methodological proposal that will develop along the book, James also discusses globalization in a broad intellectual tradition from the Reformation to the “19th century and its sins”, with the examples of Ortega y Gasset, Marx, Wagner and Lord Salisbury (among others) intellectual, artistic and philosophic reactions against globalization.
Chapter 2 on monetary and financial problems is a perfect and less surprising synthesis of a now well-established literature. It places banking crises at the center of both the international and national crises, and some less emphasis on the responsibility of the gold standard as a transmission mechanism than has been fashionable recently. It details the day-to-day events of the crisis, but gives also a more original account of its structural origins by insisting on the tensions as well between national (budgetary) and supranational (gold standard) objectives as between nations.
Chapter 3 on trade and tariffs gives a high level of responsibility in the depression to U.S. tariff politics and policies. It also insists on the links between the gold standard crisis, the drop in capital movements and the spread of tariffs. Chapter 4 on migrations is more rapid. It mostly convinces of the economic and political importance of the links between migrations on one side, welfare and trade policies on the other, not only during the depression but in a long term history of globalization. Ch. 5 analyzes briefly the relationships between economic events and the rise of nationalism in the special case of the tensions between monetary policy and international politics in France and Germany in the years preceding the second world war.
One excellent feature of the book is that James tells stories with historical actors well incarnated and present through archival documents and precise chronologies, even if he also integrates the most recent advances in the economists’ understanding of history. In the introduction, he tries to propose a global historical view of globalization and its problems, and I hoped he would answer K. Polanyi’s anti-globalisation attacks. But most of the following chapters don’t address the fears he had mentioned. In the conclusion, which I liked less, James turns to his vision of the contemporary world, a vision with surprisingly little nuance : the opening-up of the any economy is for him always and undeniably a good thing ; the 1980s and 1990s' path of liberalization both in international relationships and within national economies (privatization, labour market deregulation, etc) results of “sustained reflection about appropriate policy” (208), not of power (imperial) politics or of intellectual mode. As a consistent liberal, James not only thinks that today : “there is no coherent intellectual package that links the resentment” (224) against globalization, but also that –structuralism being dead–only ethical problems remain, mostly with leaders of third world countries. Since he has little confidence in international institutions, it looks like the only way is to follow G.W. Bush' Irak policy. Not everybody will agree. But they should read that book.