ABSTRACT
Economic historians of globalization tend to portray the First World War as a disruptive event that abruptly ended the pre-1914 golden age of international economic integration and initiated a period of so-called deglobalization (i.e., regression back toward autarky).1 It is certainly true that First World War dramatically severed many of the political, business, financial, and trade connections that had driven economic globalization since the 1850s. However, while the war certainly changed the international economy, the process of globalization did not come to a sudden halt in the summer of 1914. The diplomatic historian Adam Tooze has recently argued that rather than ending globalization, the First World War merely caused globalization to take on different forms. Indeed, he shows that the war actually increased some global economic interconnectedness, albeit in a form very different from “late Victorian globalization.”2 The business historian Geoffrey Jones has also challenged the conventional wisdom that globalization ceased as of 1914. In his study of how successive “waves of globalization” have driven the rise of the multinational enterprise (MNE), Jones notes that the first wave of MNEs lasted from c. 1880 straight through First World War and into the interwar years, cresting just prior to the worldwide financial collapse in 1929.3 According to Jones, multinationals continued to expand after First World War even as “the first global economy disintegrated,” largely bolstered by robust outlays of foreign direct investment by firms, especially in cross-border corporate ventures and acquisitions. Multinationals continued to flourish, as did “free-standing companies” (i.e., firms that had their headquarters and shareholders in one country and all of their productive assets in another).4
