ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the question of international trade and its collapse during the interwar period. Following decades of seemingly unimpeded growth, international commerce was severely disrupted by World War I. While the 1920s saw some attempts to restore the pre-war conditions conducive to international trade, the 1929 onslaught of the Great Depression spelled a new and lasting contraction of international trade. The chapter, however, contends that the interwar period was not a pause in a linear growth of trade but rather a period between two rather different territorial and economic world orders. In this, it was also a period of experimentation with new forms of commercial and economic territorial units and also provided the sources for the new global system of the second half of the twentieth century.
