Book Review: 1931: debt, crisis, and the rise of Hitler by Tobias Straumann

1931 was an inflection point in history, a year in which so much of such consequence happened that, nearly a century later, one still strains to make sense of it all. On 19 September 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, an act of aggression that the League of Nations opposed to no avail, thereby demonstrating how little collective security meant. That very same day, thousands of miles away in London, the British government decided to go off the gold standard. After months of expending enormous sums to stem the flight from the pound, the British concluded that the battle could not be won. With this surrender, any remaining hopes for an international economy pivoting on the classical verities of gold and free trade vanished; economic nationalism became the order of the day.