World Resources and Peace

World Resources and Peace brings together a series of lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939 under the auspices of the Committee on International Relations, probing the fundamental links between global resource distribution, international trade, and the conditions for peace. At a moment when the world stood on the brink of war, leading scholars of geography, economics, and history interrogated the relationship between natural endowments, population pressures, and geopolitical conflict. The collection explores how imbalances in raw materials and territorial control—what Franklin C. Palm terms the problem of the “unsatiated states”—shaped demands for colonial redistribution and drove the imperial rivalries destabilizing Europe and beyond.

The volume examines these pressures from multiple vantage points: Jan O. M. Broek on global population and resources; Melvin M. Knight on the economic and political stakes of colonial claims; Herbert I. Priestley on mandates as an alternative to outright imperial annexation; Robert D. Calkins on the structural ties between trade regimes and peace; and Frederic L. Paxson on the stark choice between organization and anarchy in world affairs. Together, these essays frame resource distribution not merely as a background condition but as a central determinant of international order. By situating colonial, economic, and political struggles within a material geography of scarcity and need, World Resources and Peace offers both a snapshot of interwar intellectual debates and a prescient reminder that the pursuit of stability cannot be disentangled from the global management of natural wealth.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1941.