Th e dramatic events of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression that followed have attracted no shortage of scholarly attention, a focus that has obscured some of the political and ideological dynamics of the years before the Depression and following the Great War. Th e choice to focus this book on the early 1920s to the exclusion of later years does not take away from this period’s relevance to understanding the Depression; as readers will fi nd, a study of austerity serves to untangle the precipitating factors that promoted the crash and exacerbated the Depression.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1619