The World in Blocs: Leo Amery, the British Empire and Regionalist Anti-internationalism, 1903–1947

Liane Hewitt

Journal of Global History, 2023, vol. 18, issue 2, 236-258

Abstract: A new liberal international order was born in 1918. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. Amery’s exploits demonstrate that one of the most significant revolts against the liberal international order originated not only from the revisionist powers—the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—but also from the supposed heartland of liberal internationalism itself: the British Empire.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jglhis:v:18:y:2023:i:2:p:236-258_5

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Global History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().