Macroeconomic Expertise and International Organization. Generalized knowledge in European-African relations 1940s-1960s

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In the middle decades of the 20th century the organizational structure of the international world changed. New kinds of international institutions emerged, both governmental and non-governmental. Concurrently, the social science of economics reached an unprecedented degree of pervasiveness. Economic expertise started to compete with legal scholarship as a resource for collective self-organization.
The rise of economics and the reshaping of international organization were two closely interrelated processes. Our research reconstructs this double historical trajectory by looking at the way in which international relations between Europe and Africa were re-negotiated after 1945. The main hypothesis is that macroeconomic expertise offered a generalized medium of communication which entangled diverse experiences and allowed for the articulation of clashing interests. Material from four international organizations forms the empirical basis in observing the interaction between knowledge production and institution building: the Organization of European Economic Cooperation, the European Economic Community, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity. Together they formed a heterogeneous body of economic internationalism which enables us to construct a comparative research framework. The leading questions are how global economic interactions and outlooks have been framed in the concepts of international development; how this expertise has been put to political use; and how the new institutions have influenced global economic knowledge production.
We approach questions of global political and economic inequality through the history of knowledge. Findings will form innovative contributions to the history of decolonization and of the North-South conflict. Concurrently, the contextualization of macroeconomic knowledge production in the field of international policy advice will constitute a major contribution to the history of economic thought. Such an inquiry can enrich international development discourse by reassessing its historical complexity.