Sean O’Casey based himself in London between 1926 and 1938, and this chapter examines the cultural life of interwar London during O’Casey’s time there. London’s theatre world had long been an important destination for Irish playwrights, and this section of the book establishes the kind of expectations and tastes that O’Casey encountered when he arrived here from Dublin. The chapter explores O’Casey’s interaction with the English capital’s culture and society, and shows how the move to the English capital shaped O’Casey’s social views as well as the subject and form of his writing.

The vast majority of emigrant veterans returned to their pre-war places of residence. Between bureaucratic hurdles, economic difficulties and the fact that many were leaving their loved ones behind in Italy, this was not an easy choice. This chapter covers the period of 1919 to 1921 and examines the early years of the emigrants’ reintegration into their lives abroad. The men faced different difficulties depending on their country of residence and personal circumstances. As veterans of a foreign – albeit Allied – army, Italians found themselves ineligible for national support schemes designed for British, French or American ex-servicemen and at the same time were cut off from supports on offer back in Italy. The issue of pensions was a major and ongoing problem. Even when the veterans received them, they did not stretch very far in expensive cities outside Italy and it was up to private charitable organisations to fill the gap. While in some countries the men found their status as veterans used against them, in the US, it was taken as proof of their good character. Thus, the arrival of Italian veterans was generally regarded in highly positive terms as it bucked the perceived trend of ‘low-quality’ Italian immigrants.

Although military issues are not often included in accounts of American society in the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter shows how they influenced young Americans’ access to education by examining debates surrounding mandatory military training that male students in certain secondary schools and colleges that were part of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program had to undergo. These debates illuminate the tensions that existed and grew between access to education and national security throughout these years, as well as the strengthening of the relationship between educational institutions and the military. The ultimate defeat of ROTC’s opponents by the end of the 1930s demonstrates that American society had come to accept the teaching of military subjects in civilian educational institutions.

Against the dominant tendencies to either overlook the interwar period, or to dismiss it as dead-end conservative nationalism irrelevant to the important history that will unfold after WWII, this chapter reveals it as an engagement with problems of ongoing relevance in Ghana. Resting on different ideas about Akan culture and political values, thus chiefs, the debates are conscious of contemporary thinking in the wider world, and based on different opinions about how to go forward. It is a defining moment in time when the notion of Akan homogeneity enmeshed debaters in personality squabbles, factional and party rivalry. The chapter employs Emma Hunter’s insight about other liberalisms, arguing that the debaters had a vision that employed an older but still relevant communal, group rights liberal vision. This connects them to the contemporary, and removes them from the place they are often placed: as backward looking and refusing to think constructively.

This chapter offers an historical grounding in interwar international relations. It tracks and analyses the progress of international relations in the period between World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45), both of which are rightly seen as two major and formative conflicts in international history and indeed for the study of International Relations. It is sometimes assumed that the two World Wars were primarily European affairs, at least in their origins, and reflected the persistence of European predominance in a fast-changing world. Yet these were truly global and globalising wars, as reflected in their causes, courses and consequences, the technologies they employed and the ideas they helped generate. The period in between the wars was a turbulent and unstable one. It foreshadowed European decline and witnessed the rise of the United States, the challenge of the Soviet Union and the Far East and, more gradually, of peoples around the world subject to imperial rule – in short, the interwar period provided the foundations for the international system that developed over the following decades. Many of its contours are still visible today.

Southern European Fascist regimes claimed to be ruled by a higher concept of ‘social justice’. While the propagandistic nature of this claim is clear, this chapter argues that behind it lies a coherent (if at times paradoxical) ideal that directed the action of states and institutions. Drawing on the cases of Italy and Portugal, this chapter charts the roots of fascist ‘social justice’ and how it reflected a core set of ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state where hierarchy and the primacy of the nation shaped a deeply anti-egalitarian idea of justice.

This chapter investigates the degree of pass-through from import prices and tariffs to wholesale prices in interwar Britain using a new high-frequency micro data set. The main results are: (i) Pass-through from import prices and tariffs to wholesale prices was economically and statistically significant. (ii) Despite devaluation, import prices exacerbated deflation in the early 1930s because of the global slump in export prices. (iii) Rising protection, however, was a mild stimulus to prices during the shift to inflation.

Like other developing countries, Poland based its interwar monetary policy on the gold exchange standard. Following a bout of hyperinflation , Władysław Grabski’s 1924 reform led to the establishment of the Bank of Poland. Early efforts to return to the gold standard, however, were not entirely successful. In 1925, an economic crisis weakened the zloty dramatically, before futher monterary reforms were introduced in 1927. Post-war monetary instability made Poland reluctant to abandon the gold standard after 1929 and foreign exchange controls were first introduced as late as 1936. The central banks reluctance to abandon the gold standard contributed to the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in Poland. The chapter thus reveals the challenges faced by a newly-formed country lacking adequate reserves and a financial track record to stabilise its currency; it also points to the path dependent nature of interwar monetary policy: the hyperinflation of 1919-23 and the crisis of 1925 created the belief that any easing of monetary policy would trigger an inflationary spiral. When the Great Depression struck, exchange rate stability trumped all other macroeconomic and financial policy objectives.

The enforced disarmament of Germany enshrined within the Treaty of Versailles was a cornerstone of the post-war order. It provided the essential foundation upon which all other calculations regarding security on the European continent were based. The problem was how to enforce it. Three inter-allied control commissions would have free access throughout German territory to monitor the implementation of the land, sea and air provisions, with all their costs to be borne by Germany. The land disarmament clauses provoked the most controversy and anxiety. Serious difficulties confronted the Allied inspectors on the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IMCC) trying to judge the good faith of a government, military and indeed people acting under duress. More significantly, British and French authorities came to different views on the purpose and focus of disarmament. These differences shaped the work of the IMCC, hindered the shared understandings necessary to develop a stable disarmament order, and limited the capacity of the League in the later 1920s to broaden disarmament agreements.

Chapter 3 focuses on the League of Nations Health Organization (LHNO) epidemiological intelligence service and the organization’s relationship with the Chinese government. Using Rockefeller funding, the LNHO strove to lead international health collaboration by creating an international health statistics reporting system. The organization’s statistical authority, however, was a patchwork, as it had to negotiate with stakeholders individually. The epidemiological intelligence service devised a tiered network for generating and sharing statistical standards and data. North Atlantic countries were included in the standard-making process, whereas other regions were relegated to the receiving end. A focus on the Chinese government’s strategies of cooperation with the service is illuminating as to the geopolitical context, which played a salient role in the epidemiological reporting network, especially given that the Republic of China saw its collaboration with the LNHO as a way to recover customs controls from the imperial powers.

This chapter traces Japan’s status concerns from the late 19th century leading up to the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. It examines Japan’s approach to naval power after the First World War and derives expectations for how Japan would react to an international agreement such as the Washington Naval Treaty from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account of Japan’s approach to the Washington Conference of 1921–1922. It finds that although Japan faced a growing threat from the United States in the Western Pacific, Japan accepted greater restraints on warship construction in order to maintain its access to the great power club, alongside Britain and the United States, as part of the ‘Big Three’ at the conference. Subsequently, the US Immigration Act of 1924, which unprecedentedly banned Japanese immigration to America, served as a major betrayal of Japan’s sacrifices for the sake of the international order, thus altering Japanese perceptions of the openness and fairness of the Washington system. It convinced many moderates that the West would never consider Japan its equal, and it empowered anti-treaty factions begin the costly process of abrogating Japan’s commitment to the Washington system.

Who are these Romanian Germans? This chapter maps out the materials from which Romanian Germans constructed their identity from the late nineteenth century into the interwar period. It starts with an overview of the history of Germans in the region before engaging in detail with three key identity myths that emerged from and around that history. The final section embeds those identity narratives in a transnational web of reception and affirmation spanning interwar Europe. In making sense of their experiences in the twentieth century, this chapter argues, Germans in Romania used long-standing narratives that had been important to the two communities of Saxons and Swabians, picking and choosing older ‘foundation myths’ from these groups according to the needs of the circumstances in which they found themselves. These myths were highly malleable and usable by a variety of actors in the community, not just elites. Romanian Germans thus returned to three key themes time and again: Saxon privilege and superiority, a sense of being under siege, and the Swabian path of ordeal.

This introduction sets the stage, describing the evolution of the international monetary system during the 1930s and the tenets of the Tripartite Agreement, as well as providing a literature review.