Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great 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.

Rosella Cappella Zielinski specializes in the study of conflict with an emphasis on how states mobilize their resources for war. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University and non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University. She is the author of How States Pay for Wars (2016), winner of the 2017 American Political Science Association Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award in International History and Politics. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and held fellowships at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.

Paul Poast is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he specializes in alliance politics and the political economy of security. An award-winning author, he holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, a MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from Miami University. He has taught at a variety of universities, including Rutgers University and The Ohio State University.