Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Martin Bemmann

After the First World War a new form of international economic statistics emerged which I propose to call ‘world economic statistics’. They, I argue, buttressed the notion of an actual existing, highly dynamic ‘single world economy’, helped to widen the meaning of ‘the world’ and revealed the ‘real-time’ development of border-crossing economic entanglements in an unprecedented way. At the same time, ‘world economic statistics’ mandatorily required to clearly distinguish between single ‘economic units’ and to treat them equally as comparable ‘statistical areas’, irrespective of their political organisation or economic structure. This, in turn, opened up the possibility to formulate in a rational-scientific manner the massive economic inequalities between different parts of the world, which then could be problematized, addressed, and exploited in a political, economic, social and moral way.