Introduction

The Great Depression was the second major dislocation to hit the world in the twentieth century. The crisis, like the Great War before it, was half-global, although this one was substantially transnational, crashing through state and imperial borders, for most of a decade wreaking havoc in half the world’s economies. In this chapter, we see a negative, disintegrating globalization.

States responded by attempting to withdraw a little from the global economy, intensifying nation-state cages. Because its epicenter was in what was now the biggest national economy – the United States – I focus most there. Compared to all other capitalist recessions, the Great Depression was off the scale in its depth and longevity, and was perceived at the time to be a crisis of capitalism itself. The left was encouraged, mistakenly seeing it as beginning of capitalism’s death-throes, but the sense of crisis was also widespread among capitalism’s greatest supporters – investors and entrepreneurs, conservative politicians and economists. They called for a major effort to save capitalism, and eventually, after a series of political compromises between right and left, capitalism was saved, but by being changed for the better into a more regulated, social democratic or lib-lab version of capitalism embodying social citizenship for all.