LEADERSHIP UNDER THE CLASSICAL GOLD STANDARD

*I am very grateful to Libby Assassi, Marc Flandreau, and the various anonymous referees and editors of the Review of International Political Economy for their valuable comments and suggestions. Conventional theories of international hegemony all agree on the fact that the stabilizing functions of hegemons (i.e., nations which use their power to maintain orderly relations in a given issue-area) are positively correlated with their power. The public goods logic upon which this vision is founded posits that as any potential leader becomes more powerful in a given issue area, it will increasingly see its own welfare as synonymous with order in the entire constellation of relations within the issue area itself, and consequently have an incentive to provide the necessary public goods (i.e., the components of stability) to bring such order about. Monetary relations under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), however, demonstrated an entirely different set of circumstances. The principal financial actor of the period (the Bank of England) showed little interest in stabilizing monetar