Publishers Weekly
12/05/2022
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. (Jan.)
Wall Street Journal - Tunku Varadarajan
"[Zahra] sets out to examine antiglobalism and nationalist politics between the two world wars…[she] believes that, by understanding this period better, we can defuse the unresolved tensions between globalism and democracy in our own time…vigorous and informative"
UChicago Magazine - Elizabeth Station
"Drawing lessons from current events, Zahra’s newly published book Against the World builds its case from Zahra’s archival research in seven countries. Using those materials, she shows how anxieties about the perceived and real consequences of globalization fueled wide-ranging efforts to change or slow cross-border flows of people, goods, and capital. The cast of characters includes Benito Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi, and other famous nationalists, as well as people usually at the margins of power, including migrant women."
Jonathan Levy
"Against the World represents a new and better kind of global history.… This is the best book about the mass politics of globalization yet written.”"
Caroline Elkins
"Deeply researched, timely, and erudite… a page-turning account that is a must-read for anyone interested in how and why the world's current conditions are not unique."
New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
"Lively and ambitious…Every story in this book is relevant and absorbing; Zahra plaits her narrative strands together with such deliberation and skill that nothing is out of place."
Quinn Slobodian
"Every day brings another headline about the end of globalization but, as Tara Zahra shows us in her lively and learned new book, we have been here before.… Through vivid portraits of contemporaries from Czech shoe baron Tomás Bat’a to Hungarian-born feminist Rosika Schwimmer, she reminds us that the politics of separation spawn new conflicts of their own."
Sunil Amrith
"Against the World is a tour de force: Tara Zahra brings her formidable talents as a writer and scholar to this elegant, consistently surprising, and richly peopled book."
Samuel Moyn
"Everything Tara Zahra touches turns to gold—and her new masterwork on what happened between the world wars when liberal globalization met mass politics is no exception.… Impossible to put down."
Foreign Affairs - Mark Mazower
"Thought-provoking contribution. . . Against the World is at its best in recalling the unexpected ways in which the collapse of the imperial world of nineteenth-century trade and bourgeois hegemony played out in the era of mass politics. It sketches a convincing and fresh picture of the torment World War I brought to eastern Europe and of the plight of Europe’s Jews, in particular. Zahra also draws out the new forms of mass mobilization that flourished between the wars and the new actors who emerged onto the political scene."
Editor's Choice New York Times Book Review
"In this original, ambitious history, Zahra homes in on the early 20th century to show, with a fascinating cast of nationalists, pacifists, and reactionaries, how globalization prompted resistance and genuine suffering from the outset."
The New Statesman - Gavin Jacobson
"[A] superb history of the interwar period… Zahra has produced one of the best and most timely works of global history of the past few years."
Mae Ngai
"Against the World counterintuitively offers a global history from the perspective of its discontents. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully told."
Financial Times - Duncan Kelly
"A panoramic history of anti-globalisation… Zahra deftly weaves cutting-edge scholarship and human stories into concerns about democracy, markets and nation-states."
Jacobin - Sean T. Byrnes
"It’s impossible in a review of this, or any, length to do justice to the richly layered tapestry Zahra weaves…Reading Against the World against the backdrop of the present makes it hard not to conclude that the path forward lies not in more deglobalization - or more globalization - but in more justice."
Pankaj Mishra
"Against the World not only alerts us to the central intellectual folly of our age. Splendidly timely, it also explains our bewildering present of war and rancorous mass politics, and outlines both challenges and possibilities in our shared future."
Kirkus Reviews
2022-10-19
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.
