Against the World

Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars

By: Tara Zahra

Narrated by: Natasha Soudek

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

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

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.

Fascinating content narrated like a bad YA novel

A lot of this book's substance will stay with me. Unfortunately, so will the narration. The cartoonishly stereotypical accents for any Germans, Austrians, Brits, etc. were bad enough, distracting the listener from the actual content of the quotes. Czechs sound like Russian aristocrats. Italians somehow sound like the Count from Sesame Street. The Gandhi voice is mortifying. Maybe even worse is that, while this book also excels at incorporating some of the most influential and bold women of the early 20th century, the narrator turns almost all of them into what sounds like the same breathless ingénu from some 1990s WB drama. It all came across as someone who thought the performance was more important than serving the text. It's a shame because the history within, where it parallels our own times and where it doesn't, is expertly presented in easily accessible language. Wish I had the eyes and time to read it in print.

It is a series of stories.

A series of stories with no clear, to me, themes. I am also not sure why the reader needs to “imitate” the “accent” of the author of most quotations. No one can guarantee they would talk in these ways. Neither did most authors even speak English. So, it does not help create a historical environment. In contrast, it makes the quotations hard to follow.