Against the World
Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
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A brilliant, eye-opening work of history that speaks volumes about today’s battles over international trade, immigration, public health and global inequality.
Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath.
In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalization forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi’s India to America’s New Deal and Hitler’s Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the “other” became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.
Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra’s unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today’s extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present.
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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.
