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.
Zielinski and Poast applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War, and reported the following:
How do allies coordinate economically during war? What happens to their efforts once the wartime crisis is over? These are the big questions Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War addresses in the context of World War I. And, lucky for us, we passed the Page 99 Test! Page 99 provides an example of the nature of cooperation problems allies face during wartime (for page 99 its allied shipping).Learn more about Wheat at War at the Oxford University Press website.
Wheat at War explores how the allies (led by the British, French, and Italians) coordinated wheat and shipping during World War I. By 1915 the war had destroyed French and Italian wheat fields and cut off Russian wheat imports leaving the European allies in peril. Turning West, the allies had to rely on wheat from the Americas, yet this solution was not without its problems as German attacks on shipping made transporting tonnage difficult and crop disease in 1915 created additional shortages. Something had to be done. The British and French decided they must hang together or hang apart. By 1916 they solved this wheat crisis by creating an impressive organization, the Wheat Executive. Here a handful of bureaucrats were given the power to decide all aspects of grain purchases, shipments, and deliveries for countless countries and millions of people.
Page 99 lands right in the middle of the book and at the apex of our narrative. While the wheat crisis was solved, a new and bigger crisis emerged, shipping. In 1917 shipping was in increasingly short supply. In April 1917 one out of every four vessels that left the United Kingdom for a foreign port failed to return due to German attacks. Exacerbating the problem was American entry into the war. As Edward Hurley, who would become Chairman of the US Shipping Board, wrote in his memoir, “We realized that transportation was the life-blood artery of the Army, the Navy and of essential industries. The United States needed raw materials required for producing military supplies. Farmers demanded nitrates from Chile, and so did manufacturers of explosives. Steel plants wanted manganese ore from Brazil and chrome from Australia. The World had to be scoured for essential raw materials, which had to be carried in ships under our control. Every industry was crying for coal, which of necessity had to be carried by water so far as that was possible because of railway congestion” (quoted on page 99!).
How did the allies solve this shipping problem? Did they invoke the lessons and institutions of the Wheat Executive, or did they go another way now that Americans were now officially part of the coalition? Start on page 100 to find out!
The Page 99 Test: How States Pay for Wars.
--Marshal Zeringue
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