Wheat at War

The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation.

Wheat at War describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours.

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Substantively, this book brings together and draws upon the research I performed for my first three books.  It is squarely a story about the economics of war, specifically how war belligerents supply their civilians and armies.  It is also a book about alliance politics, specifically the manner by which allies are reluctant to fully cooperate -- militarily, diplomatically, or economically --  until the situation is dire. And then it is also a book about international organizations, and how democracies leverage international organizations, in this case a newly created a powerful organization, to solve their collective actions problems and ensure their political survival.

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Methodologically, this book is mixed methods on the sly.  While some texts (including my own) have a chapter presenting quantitative analysis and then a series of chapters presenting qualitative case-study analysis, this book appears to be fully a single case study.  But it's more than that.  First and foremost, it can be thought of as a qualitatively investigation of a quantitative pattern.  That pattern, for which the replication materials below can be used to reproduce, are the statistically significant "breaks" in the price of wheat purchased on the Chicago Board of Trade. While that portion of the book, which is presented near the very beginning of Chapter 1, allowed me to wear my "economic historian" hat, the remainder of the book's empirical analysis is a series of interconnected case studies that rely on archival and primary source materials.  Some of those materials are also available below. 

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