Feeding the World: Connecting Europe and Asia, 1930-1945

In the first half of the twentieth century, economic and social science was critical to the expansion of transnational and international relations. But this economic and social dimension in the international history of the period--or the international history of ideas about economy and society--was subsequently lost in the search for the origins of two world wars and the Cold War. Here, Amrith and Clavin seek to recover these lost connections between the ideas and practice of economic and social development. They explore the networks facilitated by the League of Nations, which were later institutionalized in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. They focus in particular on the work of the League of Nations in linking the fields of nutrition, health, and rural development: the discussions of its Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition, established in 1935; the subsequent 1937 League-convened conference on Rural Hygiene in South East Asia; and the abortive 1939 conference in European Rural Life. They also identify the big, global stories that emerged in the wake of the global economic depression after 1930, and which revived old and embodied new ways of thinking about the world for national and international institutions, and their associated networks of expertise.