Pierpaolo Barbieri is the Executive Director at Greenmantle.
Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, he studied at Harvard University, where he did research with the support of the Weatherhead Center for International Studies, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Real Colegio Complutense. His senior thesis, part of which appeared in Tempus, the Harvard College Historical Journal, was awarded a Thomas Hoopes ‘14 prize. Later, Pierpaolo was a Lt. Charles Henry Fiske III Harvard-Cambridge scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he obtained an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History and was a research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics.
His first book, Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War is published by Harvard University Press in 2013. On the 75th anniversary of the war, it explores the economics of Nazi Germany in the midst of the monetary wars of the 1930s Depression and the shipwreck of globalization. The book seeks to elucidate what the economic model implied for Hitler’s first true military intervention — his decisive support for dictator-to-be Francisco Franco and his Nationalists. It argues the Nazis sought to create an informal empire in Spain to profit from the economic dislocations created by the civil war in an attempt to extend power in Europe in a radically different way than the formal empire that they sought in World War II.
Pierpaolo has worked for Goldman Sachs and Soros Fund Management, and his writing has been featured in the the New Republic and the Weekly Standard, among others.
