• Against the World

  • Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
  • By: Tara Zahra
  • Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
  • Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (2 ratings)

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Against the World  By  cover art

Against the World

By: Tara Zahra
Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
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Publisher's 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.

©2023 Tara Zahra (P)2023 Kalorama
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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  • 12-23-23

Outstanding book! Marvellous author!

Captivating storylines based on deep historical research. One can tell Zahra has undergone fascinatingly massive archive work to complete it.

The audio performance was cringy. Could not understand why the narrator kept on mimicking foreign accents. I am sure non-English speaking historic figures communicated amongst themselves in their own languages and hence did not have accents while speaking. Accent making was so notorious that i switched to the paper based book

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Reactionary sovereign-i-ty

The book’s argument is great and quite original: that the 19th C dreams of internationalism (on the left and right) underwent a backlash in the interwar years. But, the narrator reads quotes in weird ‘European’ accents and consistently mispronounces the word ‘sovereignty’ (seemingly using the French pronunciation for the many occurrence of this word in the English text), which I found quite irritating after the umpteenth time.

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