In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Tara Zahra – author of the new monograph Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars – discusses the common features of anti-globalist agendas between the 1910s and the 1930s; explains what the main phases of anti-globalism looked like and how its various forms related to globalization; shows why centering women – as key actors as well as objects – and focusing on Central Europe amount to fruitful approaches; reflects on the long-term consequences of interwar anti-globalism – and how our present predicament may help us reconsider this history.

Tara Zahra is Homer J. Livingston Professor of East European History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and questions of humanitarianism. She is the author of four books and several edited volumes, including the recent monographs The Lost Children. Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (2011) and The Great Departure Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (2016).

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars is published by Norton.

In cooperation with Lucie Hunter.