ONLINE: Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest Over the Industrial Order
UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture.
press release: 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. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive 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.
Brandon Bloch and Judd Kinzley from the UW-Madison Department of History will provide brief comments and questions before opening the floor to a broader discussion.
About the speaker: Stefan Link is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is working on a global history of the Great Depression.
Please see https://creeca.wisc.edu/event/