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Introduction
The debate over the past two decades about the disciplinary history of International Political Economy (IPE) has left the field richer and more aware of its disciplinary origins,1 intellectual roots2 and institutional organisation.3 This stands in marked contrast to the situation Susan Strange encountered in 1970 when she first called for a new field of enquiry to understand the growing complexity of the international political and economic system.4 Despite the disagreements at play in this lively debate, IPE scholars have learned much about their field, including how at its origins IPE was an effort to understand and comprehend the global political economy as a holistic field of activity. Although its subject contains seemingly separate political, economic, and social currents, IPE-inflected research is an attempt to weave these together to generate an integrated terrain of study. Understanding the contours of this intellectual history promises to enrich our current research efforts by making scholars aware of the lineage of their ideas and concepts, and by pointing to where this heritage continues to resonate with current research.
At the same time, there remains a curious gap in our newfound appreciation of IPE's disciplinary and intellectual history. Many follow Benjamin Cohen in accepting that IPE more or less emerged as an institutionalised field of study in the 1970s.5 Those who contest this dating either locate the roots of IPE in the eighteenth or nineteenth century,6 or point to non-Western thinkers as important contributors in their own right.7 The interwar period, however, remains something of an enigma. There were of course individual minds of brilliance at work during this period, but these scholars and intellectuals either worked alone or outside of what we would today recognise as a modern IPE frame of reference.8
But as I will establish, there is strong evidence of a recognisably IPE-inflected debate during this period. In particular, I highlight the contributions of three scholars and public intellectuals who are rarely grouped together, and who themselves have an uneven presence in the academic history of the discipline: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They were concerned to understand and chart the future of what they considered to be a world market economy, and they used...