Liane Hewitt is a transnational historian of European political economy and international order from the emergence of industrial capitalism through to our contemporary era. Her work gravitates around the core question of how international corporate power emerged as a major rival and challenger to sovereign state power. How have different European societies, as well as various institutional actors—from international trade unionists and consumer cooperatives to powerful industry groups, intellectuals, government technocrats, international organizations, and anti-colonial nationalists—contested the rise of international corporate power? And what alternatives did they proffer to the rising specter of monopoly power, from the grassroots democratization of corporate governance through worker-owned cooperatives, to state nationalization of major industries or resources, through to the highly technocratic enterprise of international competition law? Blending new international, legal, intellectual, and political histories with older questions of business and economic history, her research seeks to shed new light on classic questions of political economy, including the nature of and relationship between state and corporate power.
Her first manuscript, tentatively titled Monopoly Menace: The Rise and Fall of Cartel Capitalism in the Twentieth Century offers a particular angle on this question by investigating how international cartels—or private monopolistic business agreements—used to function as a sanctioned tool of global economic governance before 1945. International cartels, alongside states and even empires, ruled the global economy between the two world wars by literally setting the terms for nearly half of world trade. Yet suddenly after 1945, governments across Western Europe, Japan and Latin America began adopting new laws prohibiting cartelization. Monopoly Menace unearths the causes and consequences of this anti-cartel revolution that transformed the legal and ideological regime governing contemporary global capitalism.
A second book project will investigate the long history of economic democracy. Another side-project interrogates the historical relationship between cartelization, tariffs, and deglobalization.
Her research has been supported by numerous awards and institutions, including the Social Sciences Research Council, the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, the Centre for History and Economics Paris, the Business History Conference and Princeton University.
Before starting at Penn, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics Paris, in collaboration with the Joint Centers for History and Economics at Harvard and Cambridge Universities.
She looks forward to teaching courses at Penn to a broad set of students on the global history of the corporation and the state, modern Europe, international relations, empire, democratization, and the history of capitalism.