In this survey of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the near present, Robert Fitzgerald explores how global companies transformed the modern world economy. By weaving together the individual histories of firms and mapping out their interactions with political, governmental, and military forces, the book demonstrates that multinationals were dynamic historical agents that actively altered the political and social contexts in which they operated. For two centuries, global mining, agricultural, manufacturing, and service companies forged interdependencies between countries and shaped the contours of international relations, acting both as the “bringers of modernity” and the instruments of empire and hegemony (p. 23). This book, while overly thin in its theoretical engagements and thick in its descriptions of particular industries, offers an impressively eclectic and broad-ranging account of the entwined history of multinationals and the global economy.
The principal theoretical contribution of Fitzgerald's work is his periodization of the history of globalization. Fitzgerald divides the past two centuries into four distinct phases, each of which he explores in a chapter. During the age of imperialism (1870–1914), early multinationals such as Jardine Matheson and Russell & Co. played a vital role in the creation of the first international economic system, which drew both undeveloped and developing regions into an interdependent process of economic and political change. These companies developed competitive capabilities in management, finance, and logistics, which they used to forge international chains of production and distribution. By facilitating the extraction of raw materials from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and feeding them into the growing industrial cores of Western Europe and America, multinationals also served as “trusted agents of government policy,” which furthered the economic and political interests of their home governments and facilitated the spread of imperialism in their host countries (p. 502).
In the first half of the twentieth century (1914–1948), the repeated “setbacks” of the Great Depression and two world wars led to a fundamental reconfiguration of the global political economy. As increasingly nationalistic governments turned away from the international system of free trade and capital mobility, multinationals came to be viewed with suspicion and hostility. Major firms such as General Motors, Standard Oil, and Credit Suisse sought accommodations with dictatorial regimes to protect their investments (or occasionally their employees). Many companies operating in Latin America and Eastern Europe had their concessions revoked and their capital nationalized. This downturn in globalization exposed the deep influence of governments on the activities of multinationals and showed how issues of national sovereignty could conflict with assertions of private-property rights and free trade.
Even in the postwar global economy (1948–1980), the operations of multinationals and flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) continued to be constrained by superpower rivalry and the geographic boundaries of Cold War alliances. While the Communist bloc suffered as a result of being excluded from the international economy, the rapid expansion of chemical, computing, and machinery multinationals (particularly those from the United States) facilitated the reconstruction of western Europe and the integration of global markets. But even within this growing international economy, as former colonies gained their independence, the investment strategies and activities of multinationals had to be reconciled with a development sense of national sovereignty; as history proved, companies operating in “Third World” countries could no longer resist acts of nationalization or regulation (p. 414). The most recent wave of globalization (1980–2010) witnessed further increases in flows of FDI, which outpaced growth in trade and became a major driver of global economic growth. As the gradual spread of industrialization to low-income countries provided multinationals with the opportunity to reap efficiencies from outsourcing production, the locus of investment continued to shift from developed to developing economies.
Fitzgerald's work offers a timely critique of developmental narratives that portray globalization as an evolutionary force eroding political boundaries and pushing civilizations toward convergence. As Fitzgerald argues, the process of globalization has experienced cycles of expansion and contraction, which were driven as much by international diplomacy and politics as by economics and technological change. Moreover, in response to changes in the international political economy, multinationals adopted a wide array of strategies and organizational forms. At any given time, even within sectors, firms pursued radically different strategies. There was never a single set of managerial approaches that functioned across all social and political contexts, nor a superior organizational form toward which all multinationals evolved. This understanding of globalization as a contingent, negotiated process lies at the center of Fitzgerald's situated approach to business history.
However, readers will find that Fitzgerald's attendance to contingency comes at a cost: the book ultimately lacks the analytic clarity that one finds in the works of other scholars of globalization such as Geoffrey Jones and Mira Wilkins. The myriad examples of interactions between global companies and governmental, political, diplomatic, and military actors demonstrate the author's encyclopedic knowledge of the field. But the chapters often become inundated with purely descriptive accounts of individual firms or industries. While interesting, these wide-ranging explorations do little to progress the general thesis. Despite Fitzgerald's explicit reluctance to identify “overall explanations and long-term patterns in the development of the multinational enterprise,” for the sake of readers looking for a more direct and concise account, the book would have benefited from clearer synthesis of information and more attempts to generalize across individual cases.
This critique aside, Fitzgerald's opus represents an important contribution to both the study of multinationals in particular and the history of globalization in general. The book's eclecticism, its temporal scale, and its spectacular scope of inquiry provide a unique vantage from which to understand the historical rise of global companies and the changing political and social contexts in which they operated.
