by WILLIAM SAAS & SCOTT FERGUSON
Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024).
What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.
With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, Odious Debt explores how discussions about the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America. Ultimately, Corredera reveals how Latin American jurists developed a powerful global critique of economics and international law which, in rejecting the political violence promulgated in the name of unjust debt, continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral world economy.
Corredera is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Lecturer in History at Spain’s National Distance Education University.
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Transcript
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Scott: Edward Jones Corredera, welcome to Money on the Left.
Edward Jones Corredera: Thanks, Scott. Big fan of the show. Thanks for having me.
Scott: We invited you to talk to us today about your recent book titled Odious Debt, Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America. To start us off, we usually like to ask our guests to tell our audience a little bit about themselves, whether personally or professionally, about their background. In this case, how did your life history lead you to start thinking about the history and politics of debt in Latin America?
Edward Jones Corredera: I was born and raised in Madrid, Spain. I’m half Spanish and half English, and when the 2008 financial crisis hit and really started to bite in 2010, I found myself studying politics at the London School of Economics in London. I had always grown up with seeing cultural misunderstandings about Britain and in Spain and in Spain and Britain.
2008 really showed me that cultural ideas around economics really did matter—it wasn’t just sort of day-to-day anecdotal stuff where people from different countries travel and they don’t fully understand each other’s cultures. In this case, I just watched stereotypes about the country I’d grown up in turn into the basis for economic forecasting. It might be useful to remember the use of the term “PIGS” to describe Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain during this period. That feels like a long time ago, but it happened. I also remember seeing weekly assessments of Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio. In Spain, this turned into a sort of ritualistic health check on the nation’s future – it was studied religiously, and it was a strange way of assessing the economic health of a nation. My sense was that the history of economic ideas in the Spanish speaking world was not well understood, and it was particularly misunderstood in the anglophone world. I did a couple of jobs—I worked in Shanghai for a year—but I went back to academia to do a Ph.D. at Cambridge. The morning after I landed, I was jetlagged and woke up around 6am right as the Brexit referendum results were being announced. I was worried that Spain—which is to this day one of the most Europhile countries in Europe—would lose faith in in the EU. If it happened in Britain, could it happen in Spain? What if this support that you saw in Spain for the EU was just superficial? What if that right-wing sentiment redolent of Franco’s Spain could recover lost ground? So, this background certainly informed my doctoral thesis. I set out to write a history of the pursuit of a European federation in Spanish political thought. It was through that that I got into ideas of how credit was originally seen as a way to deliver peace in the Enlightenment.
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