Committee:

Harold James, adviser
Natasha Wheatley
Yair Mintzker
Steven Press, Stanford University

Abstract:

Shaping an Interconnected World charts the emergence of globalization as a plastic political problem—a world of markets that could be, would be, had to be shaped. From 1880 to 1974, Hamburg provided answers to this problem, answers that proved foundational for the postwar Federal Republic of Germany and for the architecture of post-1945 liberal international order.
Hamburg: Germany’s “gateway to the world,” the capital of its colonialist ambitions and seat of its most committed internationalists. In 1880, as the first era of globalization dawned, few cities had broader horizons. Hamburg provided a fulcrum for the transformation that bridged this first era of globalization with the second: the transition from a world of economic integration knit together by empires to one of globalization contested by international institutions, post-imperial powers, post-colonial states, and private firms. Hamburg’s merchants and politicians foresaw—and sought to manage—this transition, turning Hamburg into a seismic experiment in ordering interdependence after empire.

Hamburg then became a unique crucible for the making and re-making of remarkably durable models of liberal world order. Yet, beaten into these models were scars of imperial legacies, interwar instability, and the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship: evidence of the malleability that made the line between liberal and illiberal ways of ordering the world blurry and, therefore, fragile. Seeking solutions to this fragility, postwar liberals turned to Hamburg—to unlock the promise of shaping an interconnected world, but in so doing to forget how destabilizing interdependence could be.

Shaping an Interconnected World ranges across German history, the history of empire and international ordering, and the history of globalization and global economic governance. It unites two divergent strands of global histories of Germany; uncovers unknown German enthusiasm for liberal internationalism in the Interwar Period; unearths novel evidence on the relationship between German overseas imperialism and Nazism; shows how the renovation of German liberal imperialism provided the raw material for contemporary Germany’s position as a world power defined by economic might; and reveals Germany’s central role in the transformation of twentieth-century global political economy.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.