War Finance

2018

The Great War required war-making states to mobilize and sustain the financial resources for a global war on an unprecedented scale. What made war finance during the conflict so special is that this challenge had never been confronted in a world economy as large, deeply interconnected, and sophisticated as that which existed in 1914. This article outlines the monetary politics of the global “system” of war finance. It will incorporate perspectives on national economies, but integrates these to sketch the international and transnational aspects of financing the war. The article sets out the basic elements of the pre-war financial system and its global dynamics; examines the different modes of war finance adopted by the belligerents; considers the Central Powers and the Entente as financial alliances operating in the global monetary system; describes the interaction of public and private entities; and surveys the long-term consequences of war finance on the world economy.

2020

PhD ThesisThis thesis identifies and analyses the sources of finance that provided the resources allowing Britain and its allies to achieve victory in the First World War. The research uses, for the first time, the previously unopened ledgers at the Bank of England containing the identities of individuals and businesses buying War Loans 1914–32. Using random sampling technique, the research tracks over 6,000 investors in three series of War Loan to form a picture of capital providers over the period. The thesis concludes that the nature of these providers changed significantly. At the outbreak of war, London-based wealthy individuals and financial houses disproportionately provided capital, but by the years 1919–32, the source had shifted to the English North East, North West, and Scotland. That geographic shift reflects, in part, the re-cycling of large profits earned on war industries during 1914–18 into safe government securities in the years after. Drawing on files at the Bank o...

2005

This unique volume offers a definitive new history of European economies at war from 1914 to 1918. It studies how European economies mobilized for war, existing economic institutions stood up under the strain, economic development influenced outcomes, and wartime experience influenced postwar economic growth.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance We detect common forces that impinged on US monetary and fiscal policies during two 20th century world wars and now during the War on COVID-19 and then compare government and market responses to these forces. The US government had to finance large wartime surges in its expenditures by taxing, borrowing, or printing money. We document and interpret consequences of the choices that the government made in these three world wars.

La mobilisation financière pendant la Grande Guerre, 2015

Business History Review, 1992

Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines

In every great war monetary calculation was disrupted by inflation.... The economic behavior of the belligerents was thereby led astray; the true consequences of the war were removed from their view. One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier." 1 "[Governments] know that their young men will readily sacrifice their lives and limbs and that their old men will readily sacrifice the lives and limbs of their sons and grandsons, and that their women will readily sacrifice the lives and limbs of their husbands, their sons, and their brothers in what they believe to be a noble cause, but they have a deadly fearsometimes, but not always, well founded-that women and old men will shrink from pinching the stomachs of themselves and the young children, so that warlike enthusiasm will decay if it once gets about that the association of war with abundance to eat, drink, and wear is delusive, and that there is still truth in the old motto of "Peace and plenty" ... True that to be pinched by high prices rather than by small money incomes and large taxes made the people rage in the first place against the persons who were supposed to profit and often did profit-most of them quite innocently-by the rise of prices instead of against Government... ." 2 "[T]he true costs of the war lie in the goods sphere: the used-up goods, the devastation of parts of the country, the loss of manpower, these are the real costs of war to the economies.... Like a huge conflagration the war has devoured a huge part of our national wealth, the economy has become poorer ... However, in money terms the economy has not become

1914- 1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2017

This article presents the main characteristics of organization and functioning of war economies in South East Europe, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Montenegro and Albania, during the First World War. It outlines the efforts invested in the organization of war production and the problems related to state finances and trade through a summary of basic economic indicators.

The Historical Journal, 2021

This historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the First World War. It first considers how, over the last decade, there has been a move to emphasize the war's imperial dimensions: in reconsiderations of the war in Africa, the experience of soldiers and workers from across Europe's colonial empires, and the German ‘global strategy’ of fomenting unrest within the Allied empires. It then suggests that new global histories of the First World War give further attention to its economic aspects, particularly in two ways: first, by recovering understudied global financial aspects of the war, including the effects of the 1914 financial crisis and wartime inflation on economies and societies far outside of Europe; and second, by investigating wartime histories of primary production, both in colonial territories and sovereign states in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It argues that these approaches can offer an important correctiv...

2004

During the twentieth century the world experienced two deadly global wars followed by a “cold war” of unparalleled expense and danger. World War I opened this brutal epoch. To many who took part the experience was little less than apocalyptic; it seemed like an end, not a beginning. They saw it as putting a stop to history, progress, and civilisation. They called it the “Great War”. They did not know that it would be followed twenty years later by World War II and that the second war would be greater and more dreadful than the first.