The Finance of Fascism: Lessons from History with Dr. Philip Fliers

How did European dictatorships and occupations finance their power, and what lessons does this have for today’s world? In Mussolini’s Italy, fiscal illusion and propaganda masked debt and decline, turning economic management into theatre. In wartime the Netherlands, Nazi fiscal coercion and bureaucratic compliance enabled the systematic transfer of wealth. The truth fits neither heroic nor moralizing accounts. Fascism did not merely repress or deceive. By merging state, business, and technocracy into a corporatist order, it transformed cooperation into compliance and dependence into virtue. In sum, fascism masked domination with the language of expertise, service and collaboration. The result offers a warning for today’s world of technocratic power and depoliticized governance. The Finance of Fascism is a discussion on red flags and where to find them.

Philip Fliers is an economic and financial historian who specializes in the long-run evolution of the Dutch and British economies. Trained as a financial economist, he answers questions about how firms, markets, and states interact across time, how they finance growth, manage crises, and shape capitalism’s institutional fabric. His research combines archival and quantitative methods to study corporate financing, banking, and governance from the late nineteenth century to the present. Currently Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Finance at Queen’s University Belfast, he is a Research Associate at the Centre for Economics, Policy and History and a Council Member of the Economic History Society. His recent work spans topics from corporate failure and financial flexibility to taxation under occupation and the evolution of managerial power.