Do everyday encounters with foreign brands shape political attitudes? We argue that brand origin cues activate national identities, producing different responses among nationalists and cosmopolitans. In an online shopping experiment, U.S. participants were randomly assigned to compare American (control), European, or Asian (treatment) sport utility vehicles without explicit mention of brand origin. Exposure to foreign brands increased opposition to trade and immigration and support for Donald Trump among nationalists. Cosmopolitans generally showed little change. These effects are not reducible to partisanship, revealing within-coalition divides among Republicans and among Democrats and Independents. Our findings show that subtle consumer experiences spill over into politics, creating a bottom-up channel of polarization that links nationalism and populism to support for neomercantilist and nativist policies.

This article examines the career of Mūsā Gul, a Jewish merchant from Herat, to understand how Afghanistan’s economic modernisation in the first half of the twentieth century transformed the commercial position of Jewish merchants. It traces his path from itinerant trader (maḥalla-gard) to one of the most prominent Jewish entrepreneurs in Afghanistan—participating in state-sponsored companies, establishing the country’s first private industrial complex in Mazar-i Sharif, and advising the state on monetary policy—and his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to secure state support for large-scale industrial projects in the 1930s. Drawing on previously unexplored documents from the National Archives of Afghanistan, oral histories, and printed sources, the article argues that his marginalisation resulted not from any single cause but from the convergence of imperial legacies, nationalist economic reform, and local resistance, which gradually narrowed the space available to minority merchants within Afghanistan’s modernising economy. Mūsā Gul’s career is examined as a case study in how structural processes—imperial, economic, and nationalist—intersected to reshape the commercial position of a minority community.

The global diffusion of sewing machines required concerted efforts from manufacturers, sales agents, and, most significantly, local consumers, who rendered the machine legible and desirable across diverse social settings. As this article shows, however, in politically volatile contexts, it was manufacturers who most decisively shaped these processes. Focusing on the Singer Company—the largest and most influential of its kind—the article examines how this process unfolded in the Ottoman empire during the Armenian massacres of the 1890s. Occurring when ethnic and religious homogeneity was becoming central to the political order, the Ottoman case offers an especially important early example of global firms’ responses to the emerging pressures of exclusionary—and often violent—political and economic reordering. The article traces how Singer tested adaptive strategies that not only sustained its regional presence but also recalibrated its business model. In doing so, it contributes to global history by demonstrating how seemingly localized episodes of political violence became formative sites of adaptation, attuning global corporations to a world increasingly structured by systemic violence, warfare, and demographic homogenization.

After the two world wars, numerous Germans were forcibly removed or fled their homelands in eastern Europe, resettling in Germany. In both postwar periods, the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany established compensation systems to indemnify the material losses and damages suffered by these refugees: the Gewaltschädengesetze (Violent Damages Laws) of 1921 and the Lastenausgleichsgesetz (Equalization of Burdens Law) of 1952. The article offers a unique comparative insight into the functioning of the two compensation mechanisms, examining six cases of applicants (or their heirs) who lost their homes twice in their lives and applied for compensation twice: first after the end of the First World War and then following the Second World War. The diachronic comparison reveals the complex nature of German national belonging, the persistence of the term Volksgemeinschaft in modern German history, and the role of class status in the context of compensation after both wars.

This article explores the long roots of swadeshi (economic self-reliance) in nineteenth-century India, focusing on attempts at industrial revival through pedagogical institutions, exhibitions, and associations. These roots, which influenced the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhian swadeshi activity in the early twentieth century, demonstrate how it is impossible to understand swadeshi without taking an extensive global perspective. Indian thinkers engaged in contemporary global economic debates and with British imperial deliberations on free trade and protection; they fine-tuned comparative perspectives on the Indian economy through international travel and their readings of global history. In a similar spirit, Indians forged core swadeshi techniques through observing associational, institutional, and technological innovations across the British empire and the wider world. History was a powerful motivating force. Popular conceptions of deindustrialization under colonial rule fired Indians’ imaginations about a past when the country was a global powerhouse for manufactured exports—and directly stimulated specific swadeshi endeavours. Situated at the confluence of profit-making and patriotism, swadeshi enterprise in the nineteenth century created some unexpected alliances: between Britons and Indians, colonial officials and nationalists, and urban intellectuals and small-town entrepreneurs.

Following Max Weber’s emphasis on a fundamental change in ethical values behind the modern capitalistic economy, this paper offers an ideational explanation for China’s economic modernization since 1978. It argues that China’s economic reform, which first and foremost changed the official rhetoric about profit-making, endowed the economic preoccupations of ordinary people with a special dignity. Since then, the Chinese masses have been allowed to proudly connect their personal prosperity with China’s national wealth and international status. This dignifying connection, in turn, led them to invest in sustaining the growth of their personal prosperity and national wealth. In other words, it converted the Chinese masses to economic nationalism that prioritized economic development as the chief means for the achievement of China’s glory. The conversion of the Chinese masses to economic nationalism marked the Chinese society’s reorientation to “the spirit of capitalism,” hence China’s economic modernization.

The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

Over the last decade, a new developmentalism has taken root across Africa, centred on promoting local production and industrialisation. One unintended consequence of this has been the proliferation of economically nationalist policy measures that have increasingly come into tension with the aims of regional integration in Africa. This article sets out to offer insights as to why these tensions are emerging by focusing on the East African Community (EAC) and the growing trend of economic nationalism among its members. Contrary to what rationalist and structuralist accounts might presume, this article argues that this rise in economic nationalism is instead reflective of a weakening of the discursive imperative – or social purpose – that had initially converged various actors around the EAC's integration agenda when revived in 2000. While drawing from the EAC's experience, it concludes by highlighting a broader legitimacy dilemma facing African regional organisations within this ‘new developmentalism’.

This article contributes to the comparative literatures on varieties of financial capitalism, economic nationalism and bank resolution with a focus on Spain and Italy's management of bank insolvency and resolution between 2008 and 2018. Both countries' alternative banks faced enormous challenges through prolonged economic decline and declining loan repayments, both turned to depositors to become investors in lieu of attracting arm's-length investors to inject capital, and both had strong connections with local political authorities that resisted bank reform. But Spanish banks were restructured successfully in accordance with EU law while local government ties complicated Italian resolutions. We explain this outcome through two factors: state strength buttressed by outside assistance from the European Stability Mechanism; and strong international marketization, which enhanced the drive to restructure quickly. Spain's decision to ask for loans from the European Stability Mechanism to help restructure its heavily marketized savings banks allowed it to finish reforms after 2012.