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This article explores the work of the little-studied Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations. It offers a sustained investigation into how this international organisation operated that assesses the transnational aspects of its work in relation to its inter-governmental responsibilities, and demonstrates the wide-ranging contribution of the organisation's secretariat. The second part of the article establishes the way in which transnationalism enabled the United States, the League's most influential non-member, to play a crucial role in shaping the policy agenda of the League. It also shows how a growing sense of frustration in its work prompted EFO to attempt to free itself from inter-governmental oversight and become an independent organisation to promote economic and financial co-operation in 1940 – a full four years before the creation of the Bretton Woods agreements.

The article examines the origins and relationships between global, transnational history and international history, and the potential of these fields of enquiry to reshape European history. Divided into three parts, and drawing on a range of global and European examples, the article examines some of the ways in which transnational history holds the potential to blur established chronological boundaries and offer new approaches to the mapping of time. Global and transnational history has also helped to identify new processes and relationships in modern history, posing, in particular, new questions of comparative history and of Europe's relations with the world. The article concludes by identifying new sites of historical enquiry in European history and proposing additional ones.