“Sodabi Calamity Number One”: The Production of Palm Alcohol in Dahomey and its Repression, 1840–1975

This article analyses the evolution of French economic and social policy over the past 50 years. The key shift occurred in the 1980s, when France largely abandoned its state-led or dirigiste model of economic modernisation. As part of this shift, state authorities expanded social and labour market programmes in order to pacify and demobilise the potential victims of economic liberalisation. The transformation of the dirigiste state into what I term the ‘social anaesthesia state’ enabled French firms to reorganise on a more market-rational basis, but also sent state spending soaring and dampened labour force participation. The challenge for French reformers, including President Sarkozy, is to prune the social anaesthesia state and make it more employment-friendly without triggering widespread social protest and hardship.

The great economic depression of 1929, which is one of the most important economic crises ever in the history of the world economy and continued its effects for decades, first appeared in the United States of America and caused some economic, sociological, and political consequences by affecting almost the whole world. It would not be wrong to attribute the causes of the great depression that emerged in 1929 to the economic developments and policies in the United States. To put it more clearly, the stock marketStock market crash because of speculative and credit purchases, the decrease in consumption compared to overproduction, abundance of money, declining trust in the economy and bank panicsBank panics, inexperienced economy management, applied customs tariffs caused the crisis. The practices of other world countries deepened the crisis and turned it into a world economic depression. This chapter aims to give detailed information about the great economic depression of 1929, which has an important place in the history of the world economy and has led to the emergence of a new economic approach. The historical development of the Great Depression, the reasons for its emergence, its effects on the selected countries in various ways, the changes in the economic policies, and the strategies of selected countries implemented to exit the Great Depression constitute the main parts of the study. Pre-depression and post-depression economic data of both the USA and selected countries are incorporated to reveal the historical development of the Great Depression, the reasons for its emergence and its consequences. Thus, the effects of the Great Depression on world economies were explained through data such as unemploymentUnemployment, growth, interest rates, trade volume. In many countries, with the Great Depression, the gross domestic product fell at high rates, the world trade volume decreased significantly, and unemploymentUnemployment rate increased. The effects of crisis lasted for years, and it took a long time to recover. The Great Depression also played an important role in the political structures and economic policies of the countries. The classical economicClassical economics approach, which was accepted until the Great Depression, has been replaced by the Keynesian economic approach. The new approach that foresees direct state intervention in the economy influences the world economy for about 40 years after the Great Depression. The negative effects of the Great Depression were tried to be eliminated by applying exit strategies from the crisis within the framework of Keynesian economic policiesKeynesian policies in both the USA and other countries.

Neoliberal turn in economic policy involved an attack on the welfare state in some countries but not in others. This article provides an institutionalist explanation of the causes of this variation through a comparative analysis of the transformation of British and French economic policy from the end of the Second World War through the end of the 1980s. The author shows that in both nations the transition to neoliberalism accompanied the economic crisis that took place in the 1970s. However, consistent with the differences in the way the two countries came to diagnose the nature of their respective crises; the policy manifestations of neoliberalism remained different in each. In Britain, where the crisis was diagnosed as one of Keynesianism, neoliberalism emerged as a radical antiKeynesian movement that sought to dismantle major Keynesian institutions and policies.In this context, the welfare state, a fundamental Keynesian institution, was identified as a part of the ‘problem,’ and became subject to the neoliberal ‘solution.’ On the other hand, in France, where the crisis was perceived to reside in the declining competitiveness of the dirigiste policies, the neoliberal reorganization of the economy focused on industrial policy. The welfare state was not associated with the problems of dirigisme, and remained largely resilient. Through this analysis, the author attempts to develop a general theory of the relationship between neoliberalism and national policies and provide insights into the process through which paradigmatic ideas such as neoliberalism translate into concrete policy preferences in different national contexts. Data for this study come from a combination of content analysis of major government documents concerning the economy and social policy, political party election manifestos, opinion papers, OECD statistics and secondary literature.

Speaking of French gold and currency policy in 1930, John Maynard Keynes told the Macmillan Committee, Both in official and academic circles in France it is hardly an exaggeration to say that economic science is non-existent. French thought on these matters is two generations out of date.'1 Five years later, French thought might have been three and a half generations out of date by Keynes's accounting. In 1930 the French economy was benefiting from an undervalued franc, with industrial production increasing, no unemployment, and rising gold reserves, while the rest of the world slid deeper into depression. By 1935 the French economy was in a severe slump, seemingly immune to recovery despite a reviving international economy. The French government was committed to defense of the franc and to a price deflation which produced stagnation as economic activity contracted. At the same time, protectionist measures on behalf of French agriculture and industry helped render deflationary efforts ineffective.2 French tenacity in defending the 1928 franc Poincare was the most striking error in French economic policy during the Great Depression. Explanations have rightly focused on French currency experience in

Prejudice against Jews was part of the political, cultural, economic and social landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted approximately 4.5% of the country’s white or European population. Racial discrimination in a country with diversified racial elements and intense political complexities was synonymous with life in the Union long before Apartheid, with its strictly enforced legal, political and economic segregation, became the country’s official policy with the accession to power of the National Party under Prime Minister Dr Daniel Francois Malan in May 1948. Although the Jews, while maintaining their own sub-cultural identity, were classified within the country’s racial hierarchy as part of the privileged white minority, the emergence of recurrent anti-Jewish stereotypes and themes became manifest in a country permeated by the ideology of race and white superiority. This was exacerbated by the growth of a powerful Afrikaner nationalist movement, underpinned by conservative Calvinist theology. Fear of Communism in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the First World War; disquiet over the arrival of what was seen as disproportionately large numbers of Jewish immigrants during the 1920s; and the effects of the severe world-wide economic depression after the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929, set the scene for an unprecedented period of antisemitic activity. This was reflected, in part, in legislation aimed at curbing Jewish immigration and the emergence of several antisemitic movements. This dissertation, which covers the period between the First and Second World Wars, explores the perception that South African antisemitism was a foreign import. Based on an examination of archival sources and contemporary publications, the study concludes that prejudice against the Jews was evident in the weltanschauung of right-wing and extremist Afrikaner nationalists long before the influence of Nazism became apparent and was not dependent on the influence of Nazi propagandists in the country. Aggressive Afrikaner nationalism along with economic antisemitism characterised the years between the end of the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. Antisemitism became a significant issue in elections and towards the end of the 1930s opposition to Jewish immigration was included as an official plank in the political platform of the opposition Purified National Party. Jews were also banned from party membership in the Transvaal, where most Jews resided. Attempts by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and its affiliates together with several non-Jewish organisations to counter the increasing influence of antisemitism, principally among the Right and Radical Right in the ranks of the Afrikaner nationalists, also marked the inter bellum period on which this study focuses.

The Great Depression is one of the most important economic incidents in the twentieth century. A significant and long-lasting impact of this event is the rise of the government intervention to the economy. Under the catastrophic downturn of the economic condition worldwide, people required their government to play an active role for economic recovery, and this mentalite prolonged even after the Second World War. Social science textbooks taught at Korean high schools mostly referred to the Great Depression for explaining the reason of government intervention in economy. However, the mainstream view commonly found in the textbooks provides a misleading theological interpretation. It argues that inherent flaws of the market economy causes over-production/under-consumption, and that this mismatch ends up with economic crisis. The chaotic situation was resolved by substitution of the governments for the market, and the New Deal was introduced as the monumental example (‘laissez-faire economy→over-production→the Great Depression→government intervention→economic recovery’). Based on economic historians’ researches for past three decades, I argue that this mainstream view commits the fallacy of ex-post justification. Unlike what the mainstream view claims, the Great Depression was neither the result of the ‘market failure’, nor the recovery from the Great Depression but was due to successful government policies. For substantiating this claim, I suggest three points. First, blaming the weakness or instability of the market economy as the cause of the Great Depression is groundless. Unlike what the textbooks describe, the rise of the U.S. stock price during the 1920s cannot be said as a bubble, and there was no sign of under-consumption during the 1920s. On the contrary, a new consensus emerging from the 1980s among economic historians illustrates that the Great Depression was originated from ‘the government failure’ rather than from the ‘market failure’. Policymakers of European countries tried to return to the gold standard regime before the First World War, but discrepancies between this policy and the reality made the world economy vulnerable. Second, the mainstream view identifies the New Deal as Keynesian interventionism and glorifies it for saving the U.S. economy from the crisis. However, this argument is not true. The New Deal was not Keynesian at all. What the U.S. government actually tried was not macroeconomic stabilization but price and quantity control. In addition, New Deal did not brought about economic recovery that people generally believe. Even after the New Deal, industrial production or employment level remained quite low until the late 1930s. Lastly, studies on individual New Deal policies show that they did not work as they were intended. For example, the National Industrial Recovery Act increased unemployment, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act expelled tenants from their land. Third, the mainstream view characterizes the economic order before the Great Depression as laissez-faire, and it tends to attribute all the vice during the Industrial Revolution era to the uncontrolled market economy. However, historical studies show that various economic and social problems of the Industrial Revolution period such as inequality problems, child labor, or environmental problems cannot be simply ascribed to the problems of the market economy. In conclusion, the remedy for all these problems in high school textbooks is not to use the Great Depression as an example showing the weakness of the market economy. The Great Depression should be introduced simply as a historical momentum that had initiated the growth of government intervention. This reform of high school textbooks is imperative for enhancing the right understanding of economy and history.

Laura Levine Frader’s synthesis of labor history and gender history brings to the fore failures in realizing the French social model of equality for all citizens. Challenging previous scholarship, she argues that the male breadwinner ideal was stronger in France in the interwar years than scholars have typically recognized, and that it had negative consequences for women’s claims to the full benefits of citizenship. She describes how ideas about masculinity, femininity, family, and work affected post–World War I reconstruction, policies designed to address France’s postwar population deficit, and efforts to redefine citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that gender divisions and the male breadwinner ideal were reaffirmed through the policies and practices of labor, management, and government. The social model that France implemented in the 1920s and 1930s incorporated fundamental social inequalities. Frader’s analysis moves between the everyday lives of ordinary working women and men and the actions of national policymakers, political parties, and political movements, including feminists, pro-natalists, and trade unionists. In the years following World War I, the many women and an increasing number of immigrant men in the labor force competed for employment and pay. Family policy was used not only to encourage reproduction but also to regulate wages and the size of the workforce. Policies to promote married women’s and immigrants’ departure from the labor force were more common when jobs were scarce, as they were during the Depression. Frader contends that gender and ethnicity exerted a powerful and unacknowledged influence on French social policy during the Depression era and for decades afterward.

After a long period of catch-up growth that began after the Second World War, France has now reached a technological frontier in many sectors of its economy. Why is it then that the French economy ranks so low in various rankings of the world’s most innovative economies? Why is it so difficult for France and its economic agents to transform the output of its world-class scientific talent and fundamental research – of which it is a net exporter – into industrial applications that can fuel economic growth?We believe that France has reached a turning point and that there is today a substantial risk that the “institutions” (as defined by Nobel Prize winning economist Douglass North) of the French economy, which have remained stuck in the past, no longer serve the needs of a modern economy whose growth will depend on its ability to innovate. In order to promote innovation and economic growth in the future, France will need to equip itself with the institutions that will enable the country to cross the technological frontier that many of its economic actors have already reached. Unfortunately, French law as well as French economic policy have too often been captive to politicians that have been navigating France – without a clear compass – through the waves of a rapidly changing global economy. This has created legal uncertainty and a lack of adaptation of the French institutions to the challenges of this changing global economy, both of which are stripping French law of its potential to become a vector for growth and to assume the role of a facilitator in an innovation-based economy. Without any doubt, the reform of Frances’ institutions is one of the greatest challenges the country is facing today. However, only few are aware of the importance of this challenge.In this paper, we outline six basic findings on the state of the French economy and its institutions, as defined by Douglass North – finding, which will enable us to present proposals that will contribute to transform French law into a tool ready to serve a French economy facing the innovations and technological challenges of tomorrow.

M r Coppock and I were originally in broad agreement in our interpretation of the so-called 'Great Depression', but in my short note on this subject in this Review I put forward various arguments suggesting that he (and also myself) had previously exaggerated the U.K.'s 'deceleration' in this period. Mr Coppock now accepts some of my arguments, and doubts whether the period 'has been correctly dated and named'. On the other hand, however, he still calls himself a 'pessimist' on this question, and puts forward arguments to support this point of view. Obviously there are still some substantial differences between us, but I think it should be made quite clear that we are agreed on the fact of 'deceleration' or 'retardation' in the U.K.'s rate of economic growth after about i870. We disagree as to the extent and significance of this deceleration, but we are not, I think, far apart in our views as to its timing, though Mr Coppock suggests we are. In my previous article I quoted Hoffmann's figures to show that there was some deceleration prior to i870, but Mr Coppock goes to some pains to point out inconsistencies in Hoffmann, and to emphasize that there was 'a significant decline in the growth-rate after i873'. I have never disputed this: deceleration was undoubtedly more marked from that date. At the same time, Mr Coppock does not deny that the deceleration began before i873 indeed, he admits that there was 'gentler retardation' in previous years which is the point I was making in my last article. Mr Coppock also agrees with me that there was 'no significant increase in the trend growth-rate of the index, excluding building, between I 896 and I 9 I 3'. I emphasized this fact referring to Lomax's figures to show that from the point of view of industrial growth there was nothing peculiar about the socalled 'Great Depression' that it was not a great trough, but part of a longerterm process of deceleration lasting up to the First World War. I think Mr Coppock would agree with me that a distinction can only be made between the periods before and after I 896 in terms of the trends in prices and profits (though whether or not, or to what extent, profits fell before i896 is debatable). Whether the falling prices of the period i873-96 warrant use of the term 'Great Depression' is doubtful; the effects were not uniformly depressive. Mr Coppock and I also seem to be in broad agreement as to the causes of the retardation during these years, but he is somewhat equivocal on this score. In one place (p. 39i), he admits that my earlier article 'throws a great deal of light' upon the causes of Britain's lower rate of growth; but in another (p. 39X) he tends to suggest that I (unlike Professor Lewis and himself) accept Britain's earlier start in the Industrial Revolution as 'a complete explanation'. On p. 392

This is a highly original and revisionist analysis of British and American efforts to forge a stable Euro-Atlantic peace order between 1919 and the rise of Hitler. Patrick Cohrs argues that this order was not founded at Versailles but rather through the first 'real' peace settlements after World War I - the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno security pact of 1925. Crucially, both fostered Germany's integration into a fledgling transatlantic peace system, thus laying the only realistic foundations for European stability. What proved decisive was that key decision-makers drew lessons from the 'Great War' and Versailles' shortcomings. Yet Cohrs also re-appraises why they could not sustain the new order, master its gravest crisis - the Great Depression - and prevent Nazism's onslaught. Despite this ultimate failure, he concludes that the 'unfinished peace' of the 1920s prefigured the terms on which a more durable peace could be founded after 1945.

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Journal Article A Judgment of the Old Régime: Being a Survey by the Parlement of Provence of French Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Close of the Seven Years' War. By Paul H. Bcik, Instructor in History, Columbia University. [Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Number 509.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 1944. Pp. 290. $3.00.) Get access A Judgment of the Old Régime: Being a Survey by the Parlement of Provence of French Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Close of the Seven Years' War. By Bcik Paul H., Instructor in History, Columbia University. [Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Number 509.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 1944. Pp. 290. $3.00.) Beatrice F. Hyslop Beatrice F. Hyslop Hunter College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 50, Issue 2, January 1945, Pages 320–322, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/50.2.320 Published: 01 January 1945

1. Introduction: Women's and Gender History of the First World War - Topics, Concepts, Perspectives Christa Hammerle, Oswald Uberegger and Birgitta Bader Zaar 2. Women Behind the Lines: The Friuli Region as a Case Study of Total Mobilization, 1915-1917 Matteo Ermacora 3. Imagining and Communicating Violence: The Correspondence of a Berlin Family, 1914 to 1918 Dorothee Wierling 4. Love in the Trenches: German Soldiers' Conceptions of Sexual Deviance and Hegemonic Masculinity in the First World War Jason Crouthamel 5. Visualizing 'War Hysterics': Strategies of Feminization and Re-Masculinization in Scientific Cinematography, 1916-1918 Julia Barbara Kohne 6. 'Mentally broken, physically a wreck ...': Violence in War Accounts of Nurses in Austro-Hungarian Service Christa Hammerle 7. Remembering French and British First World War Heroines Alison S. Fell 8. The Baby in the Gas Mask: Motherhood, Wartime Technology, and the Gendered Division between the Fronts During and After the First World War Susan R. Grayzel 9. The Female Mourner: Gender and the Moral Economy of Grief During the First World War Claudia Siebrecht 10. French Boys and Girls in the Great War: Gender and the History of Children's Experiences 1914-1918 Manon Pignot 11. Towards a New Internationalism: Pacifist Journals Edited by Women, 1914-1919 Bruna Bianchi 12. 'A foolish dream of sisterhood': Anti-Pacifist Debates in the German Women's Movement, 1914-1919 Ingrid Sharp 13 . War Activities and Citizenship Rights in and outside the Occupied Zone: Lithuanian Women During the First World War Virginija Jureniene 14. Love for the Nation in Times of War: Strategies and Discourses of the National and Political Mobilization of Slovene Women in Carinthia from 1917 to 1920 Tina Bahovec

If official statistics are to be believed, the fall in output in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe has probably been the largest anywhere in peacetime in modern history. This fall in output was certainly noticeably larger than that which occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s (compare Tables 1 and 2–4), although it was smaller than that during the second World War in countries which served as battlegrounds (France in 1944, Germany and Japan in 1945). In spite of this, during the early transition, investment fell by far less relative to GDP than during the Great Depression, and certain categories of investment in some countries actually increased in absolute terms (e.g. in Poland gross fixed investment in machinery and equipment in industry — Table 3). This is the central paradox of the Great Transition Depression of 1989–93. Our conclusion is that the behaviour of investment shows that in a number of countries the output depression was the result of profound restructuring of the economy, following on shifts in demand resulting from price and trade liberalisation, rather than the result of a reduction in aggregate demand.

Over the cold war period, French economic policy towards sub-Saharan Africa reflected the importance which Paris attached to this region. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, however, Africa lost much of its economic and strategic significance, and France moved some way towards normalising its relations with this continent. Yet France never completed this process and has recently begun to accord greater priority to a part of the world which has been marked by conflict, terrorist activity, and tensions over oil supplies. This article will examine and explain continuities and changes in French economic policy over the global era. It will argue that Franco-African economic relations have not been subject to any major overhaul and will attribute this relative continuity to the complexity of the policy-making process. It will note, however, that important changes have taken place and will explain these in terms of Africa's increasing economic marginalisation and shifts in the wider European and global context.