The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp

TL;DR — An economist’s account of the market that grew up among Allied prisoners in WWII: cigarettes became money, with prices, inflation and middlemen.

Economica, November 1945. Radford, an economist who was a prisoner of war, describes how Red Cross parcels led to trade, how cigarettes became the currency, and how the camp developed prices, arbitrage, credit and inflation when cigarette supply rose and fell.

What it is: a classic of economics teaching, an eyewitness account of a market emerging on its own. Copy via the Wayback Machine.

Where this came from

• r/obscurePDFs post, September 2022 — “The Economic Organization of a POW camp”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit
• Link as posted: http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp.pdf

11 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.