New York City’s Forgotten Left-Wing Globalist Politics, c. 1850–1950

This presentation explores how between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century New York City evolved into a radical center of left-wing globalist politics. It consisted of a remarkable international cast of characters that included liberal radicals, Marxists, feminists, and Christian pacifists from the mainland United States, China, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Finland, and Soviet Russia. For these international residents of New York City and their pacifistic allies, freeing US and world trade remained a central tenet of international peace and anti-imperial activism owing to free trade’s close left-wing association back then with cheap food, peaceful market interdependence, and democracy promotion amid a century of extreme economic nationalism, imperial expansion, and war. Combining global urban history, globalization studies, peace history, anti-imperial history, and global intellectual history, this presentation highlights how New York City became a mecca for left-wing globalist radicals and organizations such as the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Woman’s Peace Party, the Women’s Peace Society, and the YMCA. Their century-long efforts to free world trade would thereafter play a crucial but, until now, neglected role in liberalizing the global economy after 1945.