The Fraying Bonds of Peace

Economic Origins of the First World War

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What is the relationship between economic interdependence, war, and peace? William Mulligan addresses this key question in a major new account of international economic relations and the origins of the First World War. He shows how economic interdependence reshaped power politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, channelling rivalries into trading and financial relations and constraining states from going to war. However, this reshaping of power relations created new asymmetries of power with winners and losers. And as the losers turned towards the use of military force to compensate for their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, they altered the logic of economic interdependence, which now came to serve the militarisation of European politics, rather than act as a constraint on war. This shift in the logic of economic interdependence was a key pre-condition for the outbreak of war in 1914.