{"id":221,"date":"2020-02-03T11:46:59","date_gmt":"2020-02-03T11:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=221"},"modified":"2020-02-03T11:47:06","modified_gmt":"2020-02-03T11:47:06","slug":"women-thinkers-of-the-world-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2020\/02\/03\/women-thinkers-of-the-world-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Thinkers of the World Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Professor Patricia Owens<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In International Political Economy: An Intellectual\nHistory<\/em>, Benjamin J. Cohen (2008) argued that a \u2018magnificent seven\u2019\nindividuals shaped the modern discipline of \u2018IPE\u2019 when, in reaction to the\nturmoil of the Oil Crisis of 1973, it was founded as a separate academic\nsubfield of IR within Political Science. On this account, IPE was a necessary\nand belated unification of political-economic thought after the historical\nseparation between the academic disciplines of Political Science and Economics.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Susan Strange<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

But as with the omissions and erasures that characterise IR\u2019s more general disciplinary history, discussed in earlier blogs and WHIT research, so with IPE. In dating IPE\u2019s beginning to the 1970s, numerous women international economic thinkers are easily erased from the wider history of thought on the world economy. International economy is a field so fundamental to understanding international relations that it ought to be thought ludicrous that the earliest women thinker to be reckoned with is Susan Strange, one of the \u2018magnificent seven\u2019, who founded both IPE in Britain and co-founded the British International Studies Association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus far, most, but not all, of the works we have recovered\nand analyzed in this domain can be understood as examples of \u2018white women\u2019s\u2019\ninternational economic thought (Owens,\n2018<\/a>), drawn largely\nfrom thinkers with advanced academic training, most often at the London School\nof Economics. Most were middle or upper class and were activist intellectuals\nor academics; some primarily working inside academe, others beginning their\ncareer inside the academy and re-joining after diplomatic or other public\nservice; one began her career as a journalist and, another, the first woman to\nbe hired to an IR department, left academe to follow her husband and never\nreturned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsurprisingly, women international thinkers encompassed\nthe ideological range, from Marxist analyses of imperialism and liberal\nand \u2018realist\u2019 readings of the relation between states and markets, from\ndevelopment economics to one of the earliest formulations for a \u2018developing\neconomy\u2019 of what is now referred to as \u2018neoliberalism\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, in this short blog post, we just briefly consider two examples of women\u2019s international economic thought, Sudha Shenoy (1943-2008) and Edith Penrose (1914-1996).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Sudha Shenoy<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One of major strands of Economic thinking that dominated\nearly- to mid-twentieth century LSE is associated with the so-called \u2018Austrian\nSchool\u2019, promulgated by, among others, Friedrich von Hayek, who taught at LSE\nfrom 1931 to 1950. Opposing any form of planned economy as an unjustified and\ndangerous infringement on the spontaneous economic order generated by\nindividual economic action and innovation, the Austrian School is one of the\nintellectual progenitors of what is now commonly referred to as neoliberalism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the scale of interest in this \u2018ism\u2019, including work on the global intellectual history of neoliberalism, this work has all but ignored Sudha Shenoy (Slobodian, 2018; Harvey, 2005). Yet, she claimed \u2018the longest connection to the Austrian movement of anybody ever\u2019 (Shenoy, 2003); attended the 1974 conference in South Royalton, Vermont, where the contemporary historical resurgence of the Austrian School is said to have begun; and her intellectual work prefigured the contemporary neoliberal transformation of India. Born in India, Shenoy received her PhD at LSE where her father, B. R. Shenoy (1905-1978), member of the Mont Pelerin Society, also studied with Hayek. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
F.A. Hayek<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Though her research focussed primarily on India, Shenoy contributed to the history of\neconomic thought, compiling and introducing a selection of Hayek\u2019s writings, A\nTiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation<\/em>, a work described as \u2018as\nmuch Shenoy\u2019s book as it is Hayek\u2019s\u2019 (Salerno, 2009: xiii; also see Shenoy\n[1972] 2009 and Becchio, 2018).\nShe worked at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, was a Research Assistant\nat Oxford\u2019s Institute of\nCommonwealth Studies, and in the early 1970s became a Lecturer in\nEconomics, at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title of Shenoy\u2019s 1966 essay, \u2018The Coming Serfdom in India\u2019<\/a>, was an obvious play on Hayek\u2019s 1944 The Road Serfdom<\/em>. It was published in The Freeman<\/em>, a libertarian magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education published between 1950 and 2016.The essay draws a distinction between two types of liberals, \u2018advocates of liberty\u2019 and \u2018statists\u2019. The former are the \u2018true\u2019 liberals because they understand that freedom is indivisible. It is not enough to have free elections if the conditions of economic freedom are strangled by the political intervention of the state. The concentration of economic power in the hands of state administrators, she argued, was a form of political exploitation, \u2018the politically strong ex\u00adploiting the politically weak\u2019. In India, state-led economic planning, particularly preferential treatment for the industrial sector, consolidated the oligarchic power of ruling-party officials, civil servants, and favoured businessmen. Government-sanctioned industrial production enriched those able to reap the rewards of private monopolies or protected internal markets at the expense of \u2018the starving, ill-clothed, and unsheltered Indian masses\u2019. Foreign aid from the industrialized West only made things worse. \u2018Given in order to \u201cfeed starving orphans in Orissa\u201d \u2026or to \u201ckeep India from going com\u00admunist\u201d\u2026, it is in fact one major cause why orphans in Orissa are starving and why India is now so firmly set down the road to serf\u00addom\u2019. International economic development, emerging out of colonial economic administration, was included among the fields encompassed within the British International Studies Association established in 1975. Shenoy had no links to BISA. But Edith Penrose was instrumental in the establishing development studies at LSE and SOAS and was one of the six speakers at the 1975 inaugural BISA Conference held at Oxford. Yet she appears in no disciplinary history of IR. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Edith Penrose<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Penrose was born in Los Angeles, studying at UC-Berkeley,\nthen Johns Hopkins, where she received her PhD and later taught and researched\n(Penrose, 2018). She crossed academe and policy\nworlds with ease, from assisting Eleanor Roosevelt at the UN Human Rights\nCommission to advising international tribunals on the oil industry. Appalled by\nthe McCarthyite treatment of her colleague and friend Owen Lattimore – accused\nof spying for the Soviets and complicity in the so-called \u2018loss of China\u2019 –\nPenrose and her husband quit the United States. They pursued academic careers\nfirst in Australia, then Iraq, but were expelled  after the 1958 Iraqi Revolution, eventually\nsettling in Britain. Her most influential work was The Theory of the Growth\nof the Firm<\/em>, considered one of the most influential works of economics in\nthe second half of the twentieth century. She co-edited New Orientations: Essays in International Relations <\/em>(1970) and co-wrote Iraq: International Relations and National Development <\/em>(1978).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it is Penrose\u2019s, The Large\nInternational Firm in Developing Countries: The International Petroleum\nIndustry<\/em> (1968), a synthesis of economics, politics, and history, that is\nprobably her most important contribution to the history of IPE. At the end of World War II, the\nworld\u2019s crude-oil reserves were under the control of seven international\ncorporations colluding to ensure high prices. However, by the 1950s, there was\na new story to tell of major structural\ntransformation in the global economy: the\nincreasing power of the crude oil producing countries themselves. In telling\nthe story international petroleum industry in historical and comparative\ndetail, Penrose offered what one reviewer\ndescribed as \u2018the raw material and direction for a new theoretical approach to\ninternational economic relations… Few books in the currently arid field of\ninternational economics can claim as much\u2019 (Murray, 1969: 517). Penrose showed\nthe confluence of international political and economic forces shaping oil\nprices and the prospects for international regulation of the industry. \u2018The\ndeeper root of the problem\u2019, she argued, \u2018is simply that international firms,\nincluding the oil Companies, have not yet found a way of operating in the\nmodern world which would make them generally acceptable as truly international\ninstitutions\u2019 (1968: 263). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither Shenoy nor Penrose explicitly focussed on the gendered nature of the global economy. But, of course, the recovery and retrieval of these earlier women writers, whether explicitly feminist or not, is a feminist project and part of the gendered intellectual history of international political economy as a field. It constitutes a significant part of what Elias and Roberts in their excellent Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender <\/em>conceive of as the \u2018multiple and diverse roots and influences\u2019 on feminist IPE (2018: 1). Yet the absence of earlier women thinkers in the Handbook <\/em>reflects a more general tendency to assume that, barring the exceptional figures of Rosa Luxemburg (Hutchings, forthcoming) and Susan Strange, there were no important historical \u00a0women thinkers on the world economy before the emergence of feminist IPE or they are not precursors to contemporary approaches to the IPE of gender. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Rosa Luxemburg<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

But\nenquiring into the conditions and reception of historical women\u2019s work – who is\nrecognized when and by whom, who is not recognized by whom and how – might\nreveal something quite important about the conditions of this subfield\u2019s\nintellectual reproduction. After all, that only Susan Strange, as an\nexceptional founding figure, is the only thinker in histories of international\nthought to receive the recognition they deserve, was itself gendered, and is\nsurely part of the context for the later production and reception of feminist\nIPE. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Joanna\nRuss has argued, \u2018If\nyou are women and wish to become pre-eminent in a field, it\u2019s a good idea to\n(a) invent it and (b) locate it in an area either so badly paid or of such low\nstatus that men don\u2019t want it\u2019 (1983: 101). As economic history enjoys a \u2018global\u2019 turn, both feminist\nIPE and women\u2019s and gender history are thriving, and IR is renewing itself, in\npart, through investigating its intellectual and disciplinary history, now is a\ngood time for these fields to start speaking with and learning from one\nanother.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Becchio,\nGiandomenica (2018) \u2018Austrian School Women Economists\u2019 in Kirsten Madden\nand Robert W. Dimond (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women\u2019s\nEconomic Thought <\/em>(London: Routledge), pp.309-324<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cohen, <\/em>Benjamin J. (2008) International Political\nEconomy: An Intellectual History<\/em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University\nPress)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elias, Juanita\nand Adrienne Roberts (2018) \u2018Introduction: Situating Gender Scholarship in IPE\u2019\nin Elias and Roberts (eds.) Handbook on the International Political Economy\nof Gender <\/em>(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harvey,\nDavid (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism <\/em>(Oxford: Oxford University\nPress)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hutchings,\nKimberley (2020 forthcoming) \u2018Revolutionary Thinking: Luxemburg\u2019s Socialist\nInternational Theory\u2019 in Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler (eds.) Women\u2019s\nInternational Thought: A New History <\/em>(Cambridge University Press) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murray,\nRobin (1969) \u2018Review of The Large\nInternational Firm in Developing Countries: The International Petroleum\nIndustry.<\/em> by Edith T.\nPenrose\u2019, International\nAffairs<\/em>,Vol.45, no.3<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Owens, Patricia (2018) \u2018Women and the History of International Thought\u2019 International\nStudies Quarterly<\/em>, Vol.62, no3, pp.467-481<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Penrose, Angela (2018) No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith\nPenrose<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Penrose, Edith (1968) The Large International Firm in\nDeveloping Countries: The International Petroleum Industry<\/em> (London, Allen & Unwin)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Penrose, Edith and\nErnest Penrose (1978) Iraq: International\nRelations <\/em>and National\nDevelopment<\/em> (London: E. Benn\nPublishers)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Penrose, Edith, Ernest\nPenroseand Peter Lyon (ed.) (1970) New Orientations: Essays in\nInternational Relations<\/em> (London: Cass)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russ, Joanna (1983) How to Suppress\nWomen\u2019s Writing<\/em> (London: Women\u2019s Press)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salerno, Joseph T. (2009 [1972]) \u2018Introduction to the Third\nEdition\u2019, A Tiger by the Tail: A 40-Years\u2019 Running Commentary on\nKeynesianism by Hayek <\/em>(third edition) (London: The Institute of Economic\nAffairs) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shenoy, Sudha (2003) \u2018The Global Perspective: An Interview\nwith Sudha Shenoy\u2019, Austrian Economics Newsletter<\/em>, Vol.23, no.4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shenoy, Sudha\n(2009 [1972]) \u2018The\nDebate, 1931-1971\u2019 in A Tiger by the Tail: A 40-Years\u2019 Running\nCommentary on Keynesianism by Hayek <\/em>(third edition) (London: The Institute\nof Economic Affairs), pp.1-14<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slobodian, Quinn\n(2018) Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism <\/em>(Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Professor Patricia Owens In International Political Economy: An Intellectual History, Benjamin J. Cohen (2008) argued that a \u2018magnificent seven\u2019 individuals shaped the modern discipline of \u2018IPE\u2019 when, in reaction to the turmoil of the Oil Crisis of 1973, it…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[123513],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}