My project focuses on the disjuncture between international trade and migration regimes during the interwar period. After 1918, a sharp division emerged between institutions governing the trans-border movement of people, on the one hand, and the flow of goods and capital, on the other. The League of Nations specifically excluded migration from its program of general free trade, in an attempt to avoid the intense conflict over this issue after 1918. It delegated responsibility for managing freedom of movement to a semi-autonomous affiliate, the International Labor Organization (ILO). Historians of the ILO and the League generally have not questioned the separation between free trade and labor mobility in these institutions, treating as a natural principle of economic policy. My research examines how this principle was contested and constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.

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