Against the World

November 15, 2022
Historical analysis of the interwar period and "the legacy of anti-globalism," a history that holds relevance for today. MacArthur fellow Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, begins by quoting 1920s pundits who mourned the golden age before 1914 when internationalism flourished and one traveled the world after simply buying a ticket. This may have been true for the (largely White) affluent class, but deep poverty and inequality affected the majority. The devastation of World War I produced worldwide demands for justice. Unfortunately, true justice was hard to come by, and readers will often squirm at Zahra's excellent yet unnerving history of an era when nationalism--always more powerful than ideology, economics, or brotherly love--exploded. Those who assume that mass murder began with Hitler will learn their error as Zahra recounts how the torrent of new European states created after the Treaty of Versailles proclaimed the superiority of the ruling ethnic group and expelled "foreigners." By 1926, this situation had created 9.5 million of "a new kind of migrant: the refugee." Though many historians don't portray Hitler and Mussolini as anti-globalists, they justified their wars as a means of acquiring resources from a world that they thought was depriving their citizens. Autarky, or national self-sufficiency, became a worldwide passion. Passports appeared; tariffs soared; and governments promoted cottage industries to replace foreign imports and a return to the land to allow the unemployed to feed themselves and the nation. Zahra points out that these sentiments slowed during World War II and the Cold War. Globalism became a buzzword in the 1990s, when "a certain kind of free-market capitalism and global integration appeared to be the unstoppable victors of history" after the collapse of communism. McDonald's had opened in Moscow, and the new World Wide Web was uniting the world. Then came the 21st century, when the bottom seemed to fall out, and supernationalists proclaimed that they had been right all along. Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.

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December 5, 2022
The interwar decades witnessed “a contest over the future of globalization and globalism,” according to this eye-opening history. MacArthur fellow Zahra (The Great Departure) explains that pre-WWI trade expansionism, global mobility, and international social movements provoked simmering resentment among those who felt their political and economic interests were not best served by the new global order. In the war’s aftermath, activists and politicians fueled a drive toward self-sufficient national economies designed to be less vulnerable to exploitation by foreign powers. Central to this drive was “internal colonization,” as seen in the founding of 160 Fascist “New Cities” throughout Italy between 1928 and 1940. On the left, anticolonial activists in India and Ireland boycotted the purchase of English goods, while socialists and progressives in Europe and America advocated for workers’ gardens and back-to-the-land projects to buffer the working classes against the hazards of urbanization and industrialization—a campaign intensified by the Great Depression. Throughout, Zahra embodies these changing dynamics through profiles of such fascinating figures as Czech shoe magnate Tomáš Bat’a, who opened factories and stores in Egypt, India, and Indonesia in the 1930s. Firmly grounded in historical scholarship yet speaking clearly to today’s anxieties over globalization, this expert study has much to offer. Illus.

Starred review from December 1, 2022
This history of anti-globalism before, during, and after WWI examines economic pressures and social anxieties that persist today. Beginning in response to the globalization of international trade and finance in the nineteenth century, the first anti-globalist movements were largely a response to economic shocks experienced locally or nationally. But the emergence of mass political parties, coupled with the deprivations of the war and the Great Depression, intensified anti-globalist sentiments across the political spectrum. Both right- and left-wing movements would leverage these grievances in pursuit of their own ends and in doing so remake the international sociopolitical order. Zahra, whose previous works examined mass migration and families fragmented by war, identifies Central Europe as a key geographic lens through which to observe both the heady hubris of globalist thought and the carnage of its antithesis. She is also intrigued by Henry Ford, a complicated man who was famously "at the vanguard of the anti-global turn," yet "profited greatly from global trade and immigrant labor." Tacit within this illuminating account is a cautionary rebuke of those historians who, prematurely and perhaps aspirationally, announced a world that had moved beyond the nation-state.

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