The I Index

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

Next in the queue

58

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

46/100

Critics

40/100

Scholars

88/100

Author:

Tara Zahra

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

Date:

January 24, 2023

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. Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century.

What The Reviewers Say

Jennifer Szalai,
The New York Times Book Review
... lively and ambitious.
Tunku Varadarajan,
The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Zahra’s narrative shows us how closely—even eerily—our present-day world resembles the state of the globe roughly a century ago.
Brendan Driscoll,
Booklist
Tacit within this illuminating account is a cautionary rebuke of those historians who, prematurely and perhaps aspirationally, announced a world that had moved beyond the nation-state..

Kirkus
... a history that holds relevance for today.