Regulating Conflicts over Strategic Raw Materials After World War I

Raw materials were a central issue in international trade debates coming out of the First World War. The war had highlighted the strategic value of raw materials as well as the processing capacity and commercial relationships that underpinned resource supply chains. Governments had placed heavy restrictions on strategic materials - usually through quotas or full prohibitions. After the war, these restrictions became a key source of leverage in trade wars, for example between Poland and Germany. This paper will offer the first systematic analysis of the efforts by the League of Nations to constrain governments’ ability to use quotas and prohibitions to put political pressure on trade partners.

This treaty project never produced a comprehensive regulatory framework, but it did help reshape the geography of trade politics in the League of Nations. Resource politics had a wide global reach and brought new non-members into the League’s trade debates, most notably the United States. In fact, the United States was one of the only countries to sign and ratify the League’s final agreement on quotas and prohibitions, and Cordell Hull continued to refer back to it as he turned the country towards a more internationalist trade policy in the 1930s. At the same time, primary exporters in the Middle East, Latin America, and the British Empire began to demand greater regulatory distance from the new rules that were being set in the North Atlantic. They argued that they should not be bound by commercial constraints that stemmed from the geopolitical aftermath of the First World War. Instead, they demanded flexibility in international commodity regulation to permit experimentation with local development strategies. This attitude stands in contrast to the more active stance that primary producers later adopted under UNCTAD, when they pushed for more forceful international intervention to rebalance global commodity markets.