Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars

Summary

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 this sweeping work of history, 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. The impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Immigration restrictions, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the "other" became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.

Millions sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy; new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization.