The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market
Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971

Tells the story of how the Soviet Union helped bring about the financialized world of capital we live in today.

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony (Author)

9781108834544, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 September 2023

290 pages
28 x 19 x 2.3 cm, 0.651 kg

'Oscar Sanchez-Sibony's new book is about the role of the Soviet Union in, as he puts it, 'the dismantling of our previous era.' To describe it as a contribution to the new wave of economic history does not do it justice. It is that, but also so much more - more capacious and more precise, more provocative and more satisfying, and engagingly written too.' Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History, Michigan State University

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today.

List of Figures
Introduction
Prologue: The Grain Crisis, 1963
Chapter 1. Italy, Cold War Maverick
Chapter 2. Great Britain: Bretton Woods and the Financial Fix
Chapter 3. Austria: Bretton Woods and the Soviet Politics of Liberalization
Chapter 4. West Germany: Betrayal, Stagnation, and the Triumph of Capitalization
Chapter 5. France: The Travails of Institutionalization
Coda. Italy, Cold War Straggler
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], The Cold War [HBTW], European history [HBJD], General & world history [HBG]