New ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant in Economic History: Spoils of War: The Economic Consequences of the Great War in Central Europe

Tamás Vonyó is an Assistant Professor
 at Bocconi University in Milan
Dr Tamás Vonyó has been awarded €1.49 million to conduct research on a ‘Spoils of WAR’ project, which aims to set a new standard in the economic history of the world wars by investigating how the First World War affected regional economic development and industrial organisation in the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. We can directly account for the impact of wartime resource allocation, independent from the outcomes of postwar political disintegration, using abundant, yet understudied, primary data on war contractors. We can detect how war spending affected the spatial concentration of industry, the economic structure of Habsburg regions, and business networks. Case studies on key industries can help to demonstrate how they perceived these changes and what strategies they developed to address them. The project will break through traditional boundaries between economic and business history and integrate the analytical tools of both disciplines. It will shift focus in the recent economic history of the wars from the Second to the First World War and use modern methods in historical economic geography and comparative business history.

The Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy at Bocconi University will host the project between 2019 and 2023. The research team will include two post-doctoral researchers in economic history and two junior research fellows in business history. The vacancies for the two post-doctoral researchers are available here and here (deadline 1.December 2018).