Monopoly Menace: The Rise and Fall of ‘Cartel Capitalism’ in Western Europe, 1918-1957

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• Liane Hewitt (Sciences Po)
• Thursday 24 October 2024, 17:15-18:45
• Room 6, Faculty of History.

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Cartels today are illegal and illegitimate across the globe. Yet until the end of World War II, cartels were legal, ubiquitous, and even popular—especially in Europe. How, then, did cartels become bad? That is the question this dissertation poses. By the 1930s, over 1,000 monopolistic agreements regulated nearly half of world trade. International cartels governed the interwar world economy: setting prices and output quotas, dividing world markets, regulating trade flows, and even controlling the transfer of patents across firms and sovereign state borders. I conceptualize this regime as “cartel capitalism.” Most cartels were headquartered in industrial Europe. First, I trace how a surprising consensus in interwar Europe—comprising national governments, international organizations like the League of Nations, industrialists, led by the International Chamber of Commerce, federalists, and even socialists—backed cartels as a panacea to the problems of reconstruction after 1918: namely peace-building and the failure of free-markets. In the wake of 1945, however, most countries in Western Europe—along with the new supranational European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and European Economic Community (EEC)—started prohibiting cartels. My project illuminates the causes and consequences of this great reversal. Monopoly Menace reveals how Europe’s transnational reckoning with the shocks of the Great Depression, fascism, and total war produced a genuine anti-cartel revolution. Monopoly Menace ends by illuminating how American, British, French, and West German post-war planners designed new national welfare-states, the Bretton Woods Order, and the European Union on the control of private monopoly power.

This talk is part of the Core Seminar in Economic and Social History series.

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