Awards

• Long-listed for Cundill History Prize 2023

Overview

"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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9780393651966

Table of Contents

Reviews

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. The years between the world wars also brought calls to bring the supply chains home and sparked efforts for local food security, domestic manufacturing, and even autarky. Through vivid portraits of contemporaries from Czech shoe baron Tomas Bat'a to Hungarian-born feminist Rosika Schwimmer she reminds us that the politics of separation spawn new conflicts of their own. - Quinn Slobodian, author of GLOBALISTS--Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists Uncovering for the first time the first ever popular revolt against globalism, Against the World represents a new and better kind of global history. Unusually rich with the lives and times of ordinary people and brimming with fresh interpretations and insights, this is the best book about the mass politics of globalization yet written.--Jonathan Levy, author of Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States 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, which positively brims with relevance for our troubled times. Zahra convinces us that unless the defenders of open societies and open borders address head-on the inequalities at the heart of globalization, those who would put up walls are likely to triumph again.--Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters Deeply researched, timely, and erudite, Against the World illuminates why, after 1918, the world took an anti-global turn. Interrogating the myriad relationships between nationalism and globalization, Tara Zahra moves deftly between local histories and macro trends, producing a page-turning account that is a must-read for anyone interested in how and why the world's current conditions are not unique.--Caroline Elkins, author of Legacy of Violence

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, which positively brims with relevance for our troubled times. Zahra convinces us that unless the defenders of open societies and open borders address head-on the inequalities at the heart of globalization, those who would put up walls are likely to triumph again. -- Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters Deeply researched, timely, and erudite, Against the World illuminates why, after 1918, the world took an anti-global turn. Interrogating the myriad relationships between nationalism and globalization, Tara Zahra moves deftly between local histories and macro trends, producing a page-turning account that is a must-read for anyone interested in how and why the world's current conditions are not unique. -- Caroline Elkins, author of Legacy of Violence 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. The years between the world wars also brought calls to bring the supply chains home and sparked efforts for local food security, domestic manufacturing, and even autarky. Through vivid portraits of contemporaries from Czech shoe baron Tomas Bat'a to Hungarian-born feminist Rosika Schwimmer she reminds us that the politics of separation spawn new conflicts of their own. - Quinn Slobodian, author of GLOBALISTS -- Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists Uncovering for the first time the first ever popular revolt against globalism, Against the World represents a new and better kind of global history. Unusually rich with the lives and times of ordinary people and brimming with fresh interpretations and insights, this is the best book about the mass politics of globalization yet written. -- Jonathan Levy, author of Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States

Author Information

Tara Zahra is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a professor of history at the University of Chicago. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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