Through the 20th century, Australians punched above their weight in the invention of the international order, as we have hardly known it. This lecture aims to go deeper into that international past—what we know and don’t know—by investigating Australians as international economic thinkers. In particular, it explores how, when, and why, international economic thinkers - businessmen and women, as well as economists and statesmen - exerted influence on the ambitions and plans of international organisations. From the businessman-prime-minister Stanley Bruce, to the dried fruit entrepreneur-informal diplomat Frank McDougall, to the consumer expert Persia Campbell, Australian men and women were crucial conceptualisers and enablers of the wide economic dimensions of international politics and international organisations. This same history, Sluga argues, underscores both the international dimensions of Australia’s national past and the inextricably bound political and economic dimensions of international history. It also provides us with new ways of understanding the history of globalisation.

Professor Glenda Sluga is Joint Chair in International History and Capitalism, in History and the Schuman Centre at the European University Institute; she is also ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and Professor of International History at the University of Sydney. She is most recently the author of The Invention of International Order (Princeton University Press, 2021), Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (ed. with P. Clavin, Cambridge University Press, 2018). In 2020, she received a European Research Council Advanced Grant, overseeing a five-year research program on “Twentieth Century International Economic Thinking and the complex history of globalisation.

Professor Sluga's presentation will be followed by refreshments in the Foyer of the RSSS Building at 8:00 pm.

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