Maps
Manchukuo
The Horn of Africa in the mid-1930s
People
Pu Yi
Benito Mussolini
Haile Selassie
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The League at Its Worst, 1929-1936
History 300 / September 3, 2013
I. The “end of globalization”
A. The disruption of global finance
1. America's bubble drains liquidity elsewhere
2. Wall Street crashes, industrial production plummets
3. The banking crisis of 1931
4. Britain drops the gold standard (September 1931)
B. The disruption of trade: “beggar thy neighbor”
1. America’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff (June 1930)
2. Britain’s turn toward imperial preferences
3. Germany negotiates bilateral trade arrangements
C. German war reparations lifted (July 1932)
II. The League in shambles
A. Japan’s aggression in Manchuria
1. Background: Japanese control of the Chinese E. Railr.
2. The Mukden Incident (September 1931)
3. The fiction of “Manchukuo” (March 1932)
4. The Lytton Commission report (October 1932)
B. The farce of the World Disarmament Conference (1932-33)
III. The Abyssinian Crisis
A. The Walwal incident (Dec. 1934)
B. The failure of deterrence
C. The failure of sanctions
D. Italy’s use of poison gas
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Images
Rep. Hawley and Sen. Smoot
The "Mukden Incident"
Japanese soldiers enter Mukden
Haile Selassie at the League of Nations
Documents
Debate in Britain's House of Commons on the Lytton Report, Nov. 1932
Haile Selassie's speech to the League, June 1936
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Further reading
Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (Oxford, 1992)
Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Harvard, 2001)
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