Chapter 5 follows German business strategy and Indo-German collaboration through the Great Depression and its aftermath. The depression ended India’s open-door policy and introduced preferential tariff treatment for British goods. At the same time, the German political landscape changed significantly with the Nazi Regime (1933–1945), re-shaping both German economic policies but also MNE’s export strategies. There was widespread antipathy in India towards the lawlessness and anti-Semitism of Hitler’s government, including some boycotts against German goods. But German businessmen also became savvier in understanding the fine-grained differences of economic nationalism in India and developed more targeted strategies to exploit them. It was at this time that they invested heavily in business intelligence as a basis for strategic decision-making. Moreover, the German Reichsbank started a system of subsidizing German exporters, which helped them to regain some competitiveness despite Germany staying on the gold standard. Giving up much of the bazaar business, German business in India focused more than ever before on the industries that were seen as complementary to Indian activists’ agenda, most notably chemicals, electrical goods and machinery.

Continuing the chronology, Chapter 6 focuses on World War II, and the year immediately leading up to it. It focuses on the extensive investments in cloaking and “Indianization,” and how these efforts failed to protect German companies from renewed expropriation once the war broke out. Despite intense planning, the war put a temporary end to German firms’ efforts in India. However, corporate diplomacy still mattered. German businesses had a plan for dealing with internment in India and were better able to cope with this challenge. They also reflected back on their experiences with the rise of nationalist movements in the interwar period and synthesized their learnings into a new strategy for competing in “markets with strong nationalist movements,” including India. These formerly or currently dependent territories were identified as having similar goals, ambitions, and needs, which German decision-makers planned to address using a unified strategy; one that only emerged slowly out of several decades of engagement with different types of nationalism around the globe.

While supersanctions may not have improved the terms of Liberia’s loans very much, they did have unanticipated impacts on the structure of domestic political institutions. This chapter examines these effects, and in doing so offers a new interpretation of one of the more infamous phases in Liberia’s economic history: the 1930 League of Nations investigation into forced labor, when an investigative commission established by the League found that Liberian government officials had engaged in the use and export of forced labor. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, foreign financial controls imposed on the Liberian government as a condition of borrowing expanded from control over customs revenue to include nearly all sources of cash revenue by 1927. This chapter documents the Liberian government’s efforts to develop alternative sources of revenue with which to pay an expanded administrative establishment during repeated periods of fiscal crisis, and their ultimate turn toward a decentralized system of in-kind taxation in the form of forced labor and seizures of goods. These practices led to both domestic political upheaval and international isolation, and the threat of a League of Nations mandate over Liberia. This chapter contributes to a growing understanding of the contributions of forced labor to African government budgets in this period, as well as to work on the impacts of supersanctions on domestic institutions.

This chapter builds on the discussion of migration and trade from the previous chapter. It brings together for the first time a comprehensive dataset of individual-level data on the freed slaves from the United States who migrated to Liberia, and compares the migrants to other African-American communities in the nineteenth century. Options for moving out of the US south were limited even for freeborn African Americans during the decades before the Great Migration of the interwar period. Many sought locations outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States, migrating overseas to places like Haiti or Liberia or overland to what was then Indian Territory or Mexico. This chapter shows the changing composition of the migrants in terms of education and skill level over time, and illustrates how this contributed to economic inequalities and political cleavages within the Americo-Liberian community.

Indian Independence in 1947 marked a new beginning for Indo-German collaboration. Yet, it came first and foremost with continuities rather than abrupt change in the context of volatile political conditions. A host of unresolved problems awaited both newly independent India and post-war Germany. The growing tensions between Hindus and Muslim in India culminated in its partition into two states rather than one and led to Gandhis assassination. At the same time, in West Germany, after the unconditional surrender, large stretches of Germany lay in ruins and millions of refugees roamed the country looking for new homes. The parallels in the historical path India and Germany had taken were not lost on worldly observers and some mobilized them to legitimize collaboration. The hope that the end of war and colonial subjugation marked a new beginning was tempered by turmoil and turbulence that led both Germans and Indians to fall back on familiar relationships and tested patterns of economic interaction.

This chapter presents the first annual estimates of Liberia’s economic performance based on archival data since its declaration of independence in 1847 until 2000. A lack of easily accessible data has been one of the main reasons why Liberia has appeared so infrequently in comparative work in African economic history. The collection of data was a central component of imperial governance, and historians have relied on the legacy of those efforts; independent states had both different incentives and, often, lower capacity. However, this chapter shows that it is possible to reconstruct through qualitative records annual estimates of trade and government finances dating back to Liberia’s foundation. These estimates then form the foundation for the first series of historical national accounts which can be used to compare Liberia to other countries. They show the Liberian economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many other African economies were growing. A period of rapid economic growth began during the 1930s, which continued for much of the next half century before a catastrophic reversal from 1980. This chapter sets the stage for the more thematic chapters to follow.

The introduction argues that while globalization and economic nationalism are both important forces shaping how businesses act in the world, history and business scholars have paid significantly more attention to globalization than to economic nationalism. What we are left with is a historiography moving at two speeds. Whereas our understanding of globalization and business has been transformed over the past thirty years, the impact of nationalism on business strategy – including but not limited to the risk management strategies – remains rather obscure. To mitigate this shortcoming and untangle the convoluted processes by which nationalism shapes business strategy, the book explores in detail German businesses’ strategies in India in the context of the slowly unfolding process of decolonization. To that end, the introduction offers both a theoretical framework – Friedrich List’s elaborations on nationalist ideologies – and previews the main arguments of the book.