Abstract
So dramatic and complex are the events surrounding the two World Wars that, perhaps inevitably, they tend to obscure the impact on international affairs of the third global catastrophe of the century — the world economic depression which occurred midway between the wars. Beginning in 1929, the depression wreaked havoc on currencies, trade and employment throughout the world, brought down governments, undermined political systems and scarred the lives of nearly everyone who survived its depredations. Its consequences were so pervasive that simple reference to it possesses almost no explanatory value. Yet without minimising sources of conflict existing before the depression, any study of war origins must take account of the fact that the watershed between the two wars — the point at which the post-war era gave way to another pre-war era — coincided with the onset of the depression. It is not too much to say, indeed, that the course of events leading to the war cannot be understood without due recognition of the fact that the international economic and political order broke down simultaneously.
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Notes and References
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On Norman’s struggle to defend sterling and the international monetary system see Robert Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932. A Study in Politics, Economics, and International Relations (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 5.
J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919).
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Geoffrey Warner, Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France (London, 1968), p. 48; Melvin Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, 1979), p. 266.
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This and other sources of Anglo—French friction are described in Robert Boyce, ‘Insects and International Relations: Canada, France and British Agricultural “Sanitary” Restrictions between the Wars’, International History Review, vol. 9, no. 1 (February 1987), 1–27.
Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936–1939 (London, 1977), p. xiii.
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© 1989 Robert Boyce
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Boyce, R. (1989). ‘World Depression, World War: Some Economic Origins of the Second World War’. In: Boyce, R., Robertson, E.M. (eds) Paths to War. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20333-8_3
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