In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

Peace planning intensified starting in 1917, as the Russian Revolution and Wilson’s decision to join the war raised its ideological stakes. There were several competing projects for cooperative control over raw materials and for international free trade, but these plans were undermined by conflicts over resource sovereignty and imperial preference. The final League Covenant included a barebones commitment to ‘equitable treatment of foreign commerce’ In the 1920s, Llewellyn Smith, Harms, Coquet, and Riedl used this legal placeholder to revisit the work that was left undone at the peace conference, drawing on the new organizational structures that developed around foreign trade policy during and after the war.

In the early 1920s, Hubert Llewellyn Smith took the lead in developing a new framework for multilateral trade policy in the Economic Committee of the League of Nations. He integrated the existing bilateral treaty regime into the League by imposing new forms of international oversight and standardization – most notably by codifying the most-favoured-nation norm. He also crafted a new rule-making routine to support the development of standalone multilateral agreements on key topics such as customs administration. Llewellyn Smith worked hard to preserve the status of the British Empire as an autonomous but segmented sub-unit within the League but he also understood that doing so would constrain Britain’s leadership capacity. Consequently, he aired on the side of caution, seeking consensus, working incrementally, and avoiding bold provocation. His limited ambitions allowed him to focus on crafting a new multilateral process, with important consequences for the subsequent history of international trade policy in the interwar period and beyond.

Part 1 of the book concludes by considering the paradoxical effects of two World Wars, at once harnessing an unprecedentedly vast emotional and material reservoir in the service of a common cause while at the same time ushering in a new era of ‘internationalism’ that would ultimately strip the British world-system of its effectiveness and fundamental rationale. Reformers in the interwar years sought to breathe new life into imperial Britishness ‘with a small “b”’ (in the words of Australia’s Keith Hancock) alluding to a more inclusive concept embracing a ‘diverse family of many kindreds and languages’ . By tracing interwar developments across three key interfaces - political thought, economic cooperation, and Indigenous rights advocacy - the shortcomings of this aspirational new Commonwealth are laid bare. Such was the long ascendancy of race in the hierarchy of Greater Britain that it could not easily be cast to one side.

The centrality of the Bretton Woods international conference (1944) in the reshaping of international economic and financial institutions in the post-war world has always seemed obvious. In this story Keynes has been recognised as a key player, given his central role as a key advisor of the British government (despite his now precarious health). The mythology of Bretton Woods has often focussed on a supposed clash between a ‘Keynes Plan’ that sought to introduce the concept of ‘bancor’ as an international currency, and a ‘White Plan’ that was the brainchild of the leading US economist Harry White. But this way of telling the story misses the fact that ‘bancor’, for all its suggestive implications, was never put to the conference as an option. Instead we see Keynes – sadder and wiser than in Paris perhaps – accommodating all along to an American view that ‘a deal’ had to be struck. It was one that crucially involved Britain in paying for the benefit of Lend-Lease by adopting the mantra of ‘non-discrimination’. So here is a revealing example of the priority for expediency over truth in a real-world situation.