David Ekbladh

I am a historian of the US in the world. This means I focus on the way Americans have engaged international issues broadly looking at the whole of society. My prize winning first book, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton University Press, 2010) looked at how the US used development ideas to shape the globe in the twentieth century. My latest book, Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2022) which demonstrates shows that international affairs depend on information and analysis to further the governance of global interaction. However, these tools of governance can be bent to peace or sharpened for war These tools were seen as so critical to the post-World War II world they were built into the postwar order and the United Nations. I am completing a book Look at the World: The Birth of an American Globalism in the 1930s which explains how the prolonged economic and political crisis of the Great Depression reshaped how the US understood and engaged the world, laying foundations for postwar US hegemony.