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As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. This book traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. The book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. The book uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. It explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. The book challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post-World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.

This book is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. The book shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a mid-century developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980. From the mid-twentieth-century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth-century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the mid-century built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade. The book highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

In the interwar years, the United States grappled with economic volatility, and Americans expressed anxieties about a decline in moral values, the erosion of families and communities, and the decay of democracy. These issues prompted a profound ambivalence toward modernity, leading some individuals to turn to Italian fascism as a possible solution for the problems facing the country. This book delves into why Americans of all stripes sympathized with Italian fascism, and shows that fascism's appeal rested in the image of Mussolini's regime as “the machine which will run and has a soul” — a seemingly efficient and technologically advanced system that upheld tradition, religion, and family. This book focuses on four prominent American sympathizers: Richard Washburn Child, a conservative diplomat and Republican operative; Anne O'Hare McCormick, a distinguished New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, an Italian-American publisher and Democratic political broker; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, a Columbia University professor of moral philosophy. In fascism's violent squads they saw youthful glamour and impeccable manners, in the megalomaniacal Mussolini they perceived someone both current and old-fashioned, and in the corporate state they witnessed a politics that could revive addled minds. They argued that with the right course of action, the United States could use fascism to take the best from modernity while withstanding its harmful effects. Investigating the motivations of American fascist sympathizers, the book offers provocative lessons about authoritarianism's appeal during times of intense cultural, social, and economic strain.

The rise of nation-states is a hallmark of the modern age, yet we are still untangling how the phenomenon unfolded across the globe. This book offers new insights into the process of nation-making through an account of nineteenth-century Latin America, where, it argues, the identity of nascent republics was molded through previously underappreciated means: the creation and sharing of knowledge. Drawing evidence from Argentina, Chile, and Peru, the book traces the histories of these countries from the early 1800s, as they gained independence, to their centennial celebrations in the twentieth century. It identifies how public exchange of ideas affected policymaking, the emergence of a collective identity, and more. It finds that instead of defining themselves through language or culture, these new nations united citizens under the promise of widespread access to modern information. The book challenges the narrative that modernization was a strictly North Atlantic affair, demonstrating that knowledge traveled both ways between Latin America and Europe. And it looks at how certain forms of knowledge came to be seen as more legitimate and valuable than others, both locally and globally; suggesting that all modern nations can be viewed as communities of shared knowledge, a perspective with the power to reshape our conception of the very basis of nationhood. The book opens new avenues for understanding the histories of modern nations — and the foundations of modernity — the world over.

After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. This book is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. The book shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities, such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a “velvet” empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. The book demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. It sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. It also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.