Overview

Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

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9781836953890

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Reviews

“[Mom presents two] distinct yet well-integrated perspectives, that of the historical and the methodological craftsman. The effective nexus of those perspectives allows Mom to tell a story too often overlooked and even blatantly ignored by Western-centric texts on the same subject. Despite its considerable length, this text is a dense work of research best suited for academics who are serious about mobility studies and/or non-Western 20th-century (or postcolonial) history.” • Choice “… a nuanced and complex account of the histories of mobility… [Some chapters] are real gems for the outline of a diverse world often invisible in mobility literature, as well as for a detailed anatomy of motorization and development practices.” • TSEG- The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History “Mom has access to an extraordinarily broad palette of source materials and methods. There is no other monograph in the field of such vast comparative scope.” • Peter Norton, University of Virginia

Author Information

Gijs Mom is Associate Professor emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology. His monograph Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940, was published by Berghahn Books in 2015. He is a co-editor, with Georgine Clarsen and Mimi Sheller, of the Berghahn Books series “Explorations in Mobility.”

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