Private Internationalism in the Interwar Period: The International Acceptance Bank

In progress

"Private Internationalism" tells the transatlantic story of a short-lived Interwar financial institution, the International Acceptance Bank, and its remarkable network of patrons and partners. In the last decade, historians have uncovered the many foundations of post-1945 international order that were laid in the Interwar period, despite that period's instability. Institutions and tools of global economic governance have numbered among historians' key concerns, from the remaking of the League of Nations' economic agenda to the development of sanctions and other techniques for meddling in countries' and colonies' domestic affairs. Less attention, however, has been paid to how private actors sought to safeguard global interconnection from perceived political instability. The story of the International Acceptance Bank is precisely such an effort: born in the years after Versailles and designed to produce an economic settlement that the Paris Peace had not. I argue that, like other key innovations of Interwar internationalism, this private internationalism--and the network of personal ties that underwrote it--would echo well into the postwar years, thus laying foundations for the corporate globalism that would define post-1970s global political economy.

Photo: Stiftung Warburg Archiv, Hamburg, Germany.