In Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, Stefan J. Link challenges narratives that depict the interwar period as a time of American international withdrawal, arguing that U.S. economic dominance, accelerated by the Great Depression and World War II, propelled Fordism's movement. He traces Fordism's diffusion by locating connections between the United States and the development of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Link uncovers affinities among Ford's postliberal populism, National Socialism, and Communism, revealing the different strategies that Nazi Germany and the Soviets used to collaborate with Western corporations. By mapping the flow of ideas, institutions, and production processes on a regional, national, and global scale, Link delineates the political history of mass production. He draws on regulation theory's understanding of Fordism as a political economic regime of accumulation (Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience [1979]); “Americanization” literature's focus on mass production's soft power—liberalism and mass consumption (Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity,” Journal of Contemporary History [1970]); and business and labor histories of how Fordism changed the organization of firms and production processes (David Nye, America's Assembly Line [2013]). Using archives in Germany, Russia, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Link studies state and industry reports, business and labor publications, company records, and personal correspondences. He successfully bridges disparate literature, capturing perspectives from the factory floor, the halls of national statecraft, the global spheres of intellectual debate, and the arena of international finance.

Link shows how Henry Ford's ideology facilitated Fordism's migration. In chapter 1, he argues that Fordism embodied a postliberal populism that clashed with the elitism of Frederick Winslow Taylor's management science and General Motors’ financial orientation. He contrasts Fordism's emphasis on mechanization with Taylorism's focus on worker control, showing that the former championed the lowly shop-floor mechanic while the latter promoted the college-educated elite engineer. Moreover, Link highlights the distinction between General Motors’ collaboration with American financiers and Ford's efforts to avoid outside capital. Together, Link demonstrates, Fordist organization and Ford's contention with financial elites exemplified a postliberal development model that attracted foreign planners hoping to challenge U.S. hegemony.

In chapter 2, Link studies the reception in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia of Ford's book, My Life and Work (1922), arguing that the global right was drawn to its postliberal populism while the global left sought to apply its techniques and dismiss its ideology. Link shows that the Nazis fancied Fordism because its assembly line mirrored the ideals of National Socialism by allowing workers to see how individual efforts contributed to the production of a grand whole. Alternatively, Communists debated how to apply Fordist mechanization, which they believed provided the means to overcome human limits and a model for a planned economy, while dismissing its capitalist ideology. Thus, Link shows that despite their ideological differences, National Socialists and Communists thought that Fordism was the development model best suited for challenging the United States.

Link then turns to Fordism's implementation. In chapter 3, he argues that Soviet industrialization was driven by and dependent on the United States. Situating his study of automotive technology transfer within global forces of uneven development, Link holds that the USSR collaborated with Ford to challenge U.S. control over finance capital and export markets by applying American production techniques. Although the Great Depression intensified this unevenness, the USSR continued to purchase Ford's technology to build its factories despite canceling contracts with other Western firms. In chapter 4, Link argues that Nazi Germany also relied on U.S. technology transfers to match American power. However, it differed from the Soviet experience. Instead of purchasing mass production technology directly, Germany incentivized Western corporations to establish production facilities. Thus, Link argues that it industrialized without accruing debt by directing foreign firms to serve its national ambitions. In chapter 5, Link focuses on the factory floor, arguing that World War II accelerated the spread of Fordism by driving Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to increase industrial output while confronting a skilled labor shortage. In Germany, engineers, mediating relationships between private firms and the state, reorganized aircraft production with Fordist principles to match U.S. industrial output using unskilled free and forced labor. Similarly, Soviet engineers organized Fordist assembly lines to produce military equipment with battered soldiers returning from the front. Hence, Link reveals that despite ideological differences, when viewed from the factory floor, National Socialism and Communism used Fordism to meet wartime demands.

Link effectively rethinks development narratives that emphasize how centers subjugate peripheries, holding that German and Soviet elites shaped their development regimes in response to U.S. hegemony. Thus, he demonstrates the agency of engineers, businessmen, and bureaucrats from semiperipheral nations operating within the global economy's structural forces. However, this prompts a question: Was the spread of Fordism a one-way diffusion or a bidirectional exchange? Following Amy Offner's argument in (Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas [2019]) that economic practices created for Latin American states were later deployed as neoliberal policies on the U.S. welfare state, did Fordist applications in Germany and the USSR influence how production was conducted in the United States? Furthermore, Link does not account for how these developmental models impacted the environment. Thinking with Thomas Fleischman's work which shows that socialist and capitalist factory farming had indistinguishable and severe environmental consequences (Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall [2020]), it might have been fruitful to examine how Fordist principles in German and Soviet economic models organized nature.

Overall, I recommend this book as an exemplary case of transnational history that emphasizes relationships between ideological frameworks and political economy. Scholars wanting to know more about how multinational firms and national governments engage in technology transfer, domestic investment, and the organization of export markets would find this book compelling. Lastly, Link's ability to tie the reorganization of factory floors with the global dynamics of finance and the national politics of governments competing for economic dominance is especially intriguing.