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Professor Patricia Clavin

Professor Patricia Clavin

Professor of Modern History

Worcester College

patricia.clavin@history.ox.ac.uk

My research and teaching centre on the history of Europe’s transnational and international relations from 1850. I am especially interested in the relationship between states, civil society and markets, nationally and internationally. It has led me to write on the history of Europe in the Great Depression; the origins and outcomes of the two world wars; transnational methodologies; the international history of law, and the League of Nations and United Nations. I am writing a book on the history of ‘human security’ in Europe (which includes Britain). It recovers how notions of security concerned the habitability of the environment, the stability of the capitalist order, and the ‘intactness’ of the human body. I have a new project on the history of food systems.

I am Co-Director of the Oxford Martin School funded research programme on 'Changing Global Orders, and Co-Director of a research programme on Global (Dis)Order supported by the British Academy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Research Interests

  • History of regional and global organizations, and international activism
  • History of Food
  • History of Capitalism
My published work includes books on The History of the Great Depression in Europe, 1929-1939 (London, 2000), The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Britain, Germany, France and the USA, 1931-1936 (London, 1996), and a History of Modern Europe Since 1850 (London, 1996 and 2003), co-authored with Asa Briggs. My book, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations (Oxford, 2013) won the British Academy Medal. I published an edited collection with Glenda Sluga, Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2017).I am a Fellow of the British Academy; a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; and an Associate Researcher of the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. I am a Fellow of the Oxford Martin School and an Associate Member of the ‘Future of Food’ programme. I serve on the editorial board of Past and Present.

Publications

Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years: Polemics and Policy
Featured Publication

Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years: Polemics and Policy

(CUP, 2023)

The Economic Consequences of the Peace is one of the most famous books in the history of economic thought. It is also one of the most polemical. Published as a response to what Keynes saw as the grave errors of the Treaty of Versailles, the book predicted that war reparations and other harsh terms imposed on Germany would lead to its collapse, which in turn would lead to devastating consequences for Europe and the wider world. Predictions that we now know to have been all too accurate. 

DPhil Students

Guillermo Elgueda Labra

DPhil Student

Brittany Gittus

DPhil Student

Markus Gstoettner

DPhil Student

Michael T. Roberts

DPhil Student

In the Media