You know, and I have to say that in contrast to all these wonderfully prepared fluent and elegant papers and and and both Andy and Jeremy's remarks,
mine are going to probably seem a bit scattergun.
And this is really because I'm a historian of international relations and I've been working in the field of the sort of new,
newer histories of international institutions in the 19th and 20th century that in some way should connect to undo,
connect to the history of capitalism. But I'm also full in 1919 mode with the founding of the League of Nations.
And what's been very striking there is the way that markets are absent.
So last week I was at an event in Lisbon where they had originally a hundred and thirty five submissions of papers on the League of Nations.
It's kind of I was shocked at how much history you could get out of, although you know about to be entirely digitised archive.
But really, the challenge and for me, one of the core framings of my own work is the relationship,
you know, formed by Andy Warhol's work between states, markets and civil society.
When we're trying to understand global order and how that's institutionalised and
the kind of emergence of global governance from the mid-19th century onwards.
And what's very striking in discussions about the history of the League of Nations on the United Nations and all of its 91 different institutions,
as well as NGOs, is in that field of writing. You get the interaction of civil society and states.
But how that then connects to markets is much less well developed.
So I sort of in that sense, my reflections pick up where where Jeremy's ended.
And of course, partly the drive has been to understand where these institutions come from and what drives them from the inside.
And what that's revealed, on the one hand, is the interplay and the primacy of interstate relations from the late 19th century international
markets as an inter national with a hyphen in between rather than transnational currents.
That's one thing that's there, and it's strongly asserted,
but it's also a contradiction in the writing of these new international organisations is also it's clear that they are spaces,
whether they're on a kind of global level or on a regional level.
Also, for claims to be made and for new worlds, new world orders to be imagined and articulated.
So these two sort of fields are a way of connecting also to the history of of of of the divergence and the history of of capitalism.
It's where public policy is debated and contested. It's where imperialism is challenged, sometimes in very weak forms.
But nonetheless, the archives of these institutions are a way of really retrieving that dynamic.
And, of course, international organisations in the history until very recently are also a kind of forcing ground
for for capitalism to have that sort of deeper trends that have been driving that history,
on the one hand, have been to look at legal norms because this is a place at which global governance a world order hits the ground because it,
you know, the legal norms are then the basis of contestation.
And you know, I've been engaged in some bizarre conversations with international lawyers.
Why I suddenly realised that international lawyers thinks that international law de-politicize is the global order.
Well, it does absolutely the opposite. It actually just becomes a new field of contestation.
And of course, living here, you know, BRICS is absolutely that you just think like going to lose your mind.
But, you know, in particular, one of the areas that where it would connect very particularly.
I think this sort of the importance of legal norms is to some of the issues that surfaced that surfaced in the last panel in particular,
because on the one hand, the narrative of the, you know, the emergence of global capitalism.
We talked yesterday in particular about free trade, of course, is about legal norms,
particularly the most favoured nations clause being used as a way of liberating and opening up trade.
But of course, the other side of that, to me, is paper.
It was very clear that you also have at the same time as that's operating the emergence of enormous discrimination against the labour market.
And we tend to write that history separately. But of course, those conversations are happening in dialogue with one another.
And I remember listening years ago to a paper presented in Australia, which actually oddly brought that out,
though the the the person who was writing about labour discrimination against the Chinese didn't
realise that the Chinese critique was actually using the language of free trade around it.
So there's quite a lot of work there that we could still do.
The other element in that, too, is the other kind of stand, apart from looking at new legal norms,
is also focussing on practises that's shaped in particular from the field of AI.
Also looking at the practise term it practise turn.
In the way that institutions, non-governmental organisations, international institutions,
regional institutions operate, so how they establish ways of working the international,
the global and of course, what that's really brought out on the one hand in relation to global capital is the
importance until very recently of the growth paradigm that that's there all over the place.
And it's a way of of stabilising, stabilising capital, stabilising and shaping markets.
And of course, you know, resolving conflicts over distribution of resources of different kinds and.
And I suppose the further strand is the primacy of economics in that, you know,
that economists also serve economic serves as the dominant scientific paradigm,
and economists start to proliferate in states and in all sorts of organisations in different ways.
And people who were writing in different fields become economists in the period that I'm that I'm studying.
But also, of course, the challenge to the growth paradigm emerges in international organisations, particularly.
So of course, I'm thinking of the OECD's report on the limits of growth and the way that that's now destabilising.
The purpose of international organisations and also their priorities.
And in that dynamic to the relationship between expert advice.
I mean, this is something that's a very live issue in the League of Nations and what they're called representative advice.
So the dynamic in the relationship between science, what science is doing and then the elected or empowered representatives.
And however, however, that might be configured. So, yeah, so I suppose that's also something it's not so much the place of economics,
but also the place of economists and economic thinking in in in the in the in the global order that is
now being challenged and the roots of an alternative version of the rules based international system.
In terms of the kind of architecture of international relations and understanding the place of capitalism,
one of the things that in my own work is especially striking is the way that
from the in the wake of really crisis after crisis in the 1920s and 1930s,
the management of capitalism becomes the dominant focus of the organisation of the League of Nations,
which is a multipurpose organisation, and that becomes the basis on which a new liberal order, a new world order, is imagined after 1945.
But what distinguishes that world order is the separation of the management of capital
from the management of labour markets in the sense that goes and is remains in the ILO.
Whereas you have the Bretton Woods institutions which are about managing capital, and then you have the GATT,
which is about managing trade and you have the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is about managing food.
So there's also a compartmentalisation of capitalism and how it operates that is now we know
is challenged by some of the issues that were raised in the last panel about labour rights,
about racism because that also sort of stabilises capitalism, but it stabilises it in a very particular form.
Inside those organisations, though, it's often the discourse is not necessarily about stability or about capital.
It's about security. It's about the origins of war.
And I think that's also one of the risky territories that we're entering into now because of the language around conflict and conflict resource.
You know, the world now is finite. It has finite resources.
I mean, this is a kind of classic trope of the 1920s, the 1930s, whether those are hard commodities or soft commodities.
They are now finite, whereas there were periods after 1945 where there was a sort of sense in which they might be infinite,
that you could just keep developing, you could keep growing and these problems would resolve themselves.
And I think that that's also just to finish on something that came up a number of times yesterday and today I was
thinking particularly of Rebecca's very sort of sharp interventions about gender because and authority in these debates,
really, because that's very, you know, that's a that's a very marked something I'm sort of engaged with at the moment.
And I was really shocked when Patricia Owens bomb a year ago presented some of her research on the place of women in international relations.
And she did this kind of schema of women being cited when it comes to the history of war and peace, which is really what drives much of I thought.
And she discovered that only three women are cited as authorities in the field of AI are Susan Strange,
who writes Actually on the political economy Rosa Luxemburg, and I've just managed to forget the third one, which is really terrible.
Hannah Arendt, of course, those those three, those three and even those three only make up,
I think, nine and two point nine, seven percent of all citations.
It's just shocking. And of course, that's where the history of capitalism and actually the history of war and peace animates so many women.
But women in the history of in the kind of states and civil market version of international history,
their interventions are described as humanitarian. All they're described as being preoccupied with women's rights.
No, they are writing about the effects of capital and capitalism on the prospects of,
you know, of their families and on the prospects of war and peace and so on.
That little homily I will on the Sunday morning and thank you.