The Growth Concept, Decolonization, and the Global Cold War: A Study of Economic Ideas and Twentieth-Century International History

Abstract This essay stresses the importance of connecting histories of economic thought with twentieth-century international history. It draws on recent scholarship from both fields related to the history of economic growth measured by statistical aggregates such as gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP) to argue that interrelated structural changes of the international system during and after World War II —global decolonization, the ossifying bipolarity of the Cold War world, and the maintenance of US global hegemony—created the conditions for the growth concept to gain a broader political purchase. Yet the essay also shows that international historians have often overlooked the intellectual history of key economic ideas and debates among experts over how to conceptualize and construct the models and metrics that policymakers adopted. The essay concludes by encouraging closer connections between historians of economic thought and the international political history of the twentieth-century world.