Papers by Jamie Martin
The Historical Journal, 2021
This historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the F... more This historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the First World War. It first considers how, over the last decade, there has been a move to emphasize the war's imperial dimensions: in reconsiderations of the war in Africa, the experience of soldiers and workers from across Europe's colonial empires, and the German ‘global strategy’ of fomenting unrest within the Allied empires. It then suggests that new global histories of the First World War give further attention to its economic aspects, particularly in two ways: first, by recovering understudied global financial aspects of the war, including the effects of the 1914 financial crisis and wartime inflation on economies and societies far outside of Europe; and second, by investigating wartime histories of primary production, both in colonial territories and sovereign states in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It argues that these approaches can offer an important correctiv...
International History Review, 2021
This article examines the global crisis of commodity glut that came in the wake of the Fall of Fr... more This article examines the global crisis of commodity glut that came in the wake of the Fall of France and Italy's entry into the Second World War in June 1940, when the extension of the British blockade and shipping problems cut off primary producers around the world from major continental European markets. As a surplus of unmarketable primary commodities piled up in British colonies, as well as in Latin America and French, Dutch, and Belgian colonies, this jeapordized the blockade and threatened political unrest across the British Empire, as well as the spread of Nazi influence in Latin America. This article examines how the British government attempted to respond to this crisis, both unilaterally and in combination with the U.S. government. In doing so, it argues that Anglo-American negotiations over a joint approach to the problem of commodity glut led to some of the earliest attempts to create new international economic organizations for the postwar period. While these plans were transformed as the surplus problem itself changed in late 1941, they nonetheless laid the groundwork for Anglo-American relief planning, contentious negotiations over an international wheat agreement, and international commodity price stabilization schemes.
a d a m t o o z e a n d j a m i e m a r t i n The entanglement between war and economics revealed... more a d a m t o o z e a n d j a m i e m a r t i n The entanglement between war and economics revealed by the First World War was to become one of the defining features of the first half of the twentieth century. Never before had war been so resource-intensive, never before were economies so self-consciously reorganized around the needs of war. The war economies of the First World War were novel and unanticipated improvisations, experiments in organization. In 1914 the sense of a break was dramatic and shocking, but it had the virtue of clarity. There had been peace and then there was war. After the First World War the victorious powers struggled to restore the clarity of this boundary between war and peace. The new self-conscious ideology of peacefulness that was such a characteristic feature of international relations in the 1920s had its counterpart in the effort to restore the international economy. 1 The relationship between economic restoration and pacification was reciprocal. Curbing arms expenditure and restoring the 'knave proof' discipline of the international gold standard were conjoined aims. Perhaps this nexus was best exemplified by the British 'ten year rule' adopted in 1919. To create the conditions necessary for fiscal consolidation and a return to the gold standard, this mandated that military budgeting should proceed on the assumption that no major war should be expected within ten years. In 1928 Churchill had it made self-perpetuating.
Before his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes played an important role in postwar German academic philos... more Before his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes played an important role in postwar German academic philosophy and religious thought. Best known for his leftist political theology and scholarship on the history of Western eschatology, Taubes's thought was influential on mid-twentieth-century debates in Germany about secularization and modern political theology. Outside his relationship with Carl Schmitt, however, Taubes has received little attention in histories of postwar European thought, and few attempts have been made to understand his idiosyncratic work on its own terms. This essay presents new contexts for understanding Taubes and his political-theological critique of the ideological dominance of liberalism in postwar Germany. By analyzing Taubes's thought through the lens of his intellectual quarrel with Hans Blumenberg over secularization, it reassesses his contributions to postwar debates about the political temporality appropriate to a secular and non-utopian social theory, and the consequences of these debates for broader critiques of political liberalism.
334 pp, £9.99, February 2015, ISBN 978 1 78074 544 2 Inequality and the 1 Per Cent by Danny Dorli... more 334 pp, £9.99, February 2015, ISBN 978 1 78074 544 2 Inequality and the 1 Per Cent by Danny Dorling Verso, 234 pp, £12.99, September 2014, ISBN 978 1 78168 585 3
When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighte... more When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The 'balmy air and bright azalean colour' of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the 'irritable' and 'exceedingly tired' citizens of postwar Britain. Keynes was in Savannah for the inaugural session of the board of governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two institutions he had helped found at the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944. He was desperate to persuade the Americans not to place the headquarters of the two institutions in Washington, where he feared they would function more as appendages of the American state than as truly international bodies, but their location in the American capital was all but a fait accompli, requiring only a handful of votes from the odd array of allies the US had assembled at the meeting. Keynes's last effort to check the growth of American power had failed. He died six weeks later.
This paper looks at the role of the 'historical crisis' in Jacob Burckhardt's theory of history. ... more This paper looks at the role of the 'historical crisis' in Jacob Burckhardt's theory of history. By examining how Burckhardt praised the 'crisis' for the ways in which it could accelerate historical processes, the paper challenges interpretations of his work that focus exclusively on its synchronic elements. It also examines the relationship of his theories of the crisis to his views on warfare and on how large-scale wars could serve to speed up historical development. Ultimately, this paper seeks to challenge the easy categorization of Burckhardt as either a conservative or a liberal thinker by suggesting that his work channelled the rhetoric of both his radical and his reactionary intellectual contemporaries. In the introduction to his famous lectures series 'Über das Studium der Geschichte', first delivered at the University of Basel in the winter semester of 1868, Jacob Burckhardt announced that he would be teaching: the accelerated movements of the whole process of history, the theory of crises and revolutions, and also of the occasional abrupt absorption of all other movements, the general ferment of all the rest of life, the ruptures and reactions – in short, everything that might be called the theory of storms (Sturmlehre). (1979: 31) Known for his rich, multifaceted studies of past epochs of cultural vibrancy, Burckhardt now turned his focus to the sore spots of history, the hinges where violent disruptions shifted the passage of time in one direction or another, and the political or
Book Reviews by Jamie Martin
H-Diplo (Diplomatic History), 2021
A roundtable conversation on Christy Thornton's book, with a brief review essay by me.
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Papers by Jamie Martin
Book Reviews by Jamie Martin