Histories of Liberia are often criticized for focusing only on the Americo-Liberian elite, ignoring the indigenous majority. This chapter reconstructs what is known about the economyand political institutions of the region that became Liberia before the arrival of migrants from the United States. Drawing on both qualitative evidence from historical accounts and anthropological research as well as more recent techniques for the quantitative comparison of precolonial economies, it provides a new account of what was known as the Grain Coast and its hinterland. National averages and later proxy data show that Liberia was less densely populated, with poorer soils and less centralized states than other parts of West Africa. However, these averages mask considerable variation in levels of commercialization and the organization of institutions within what became Liberia, particularly as migrations from other parts of West Africa during the medieval and early modern period helped connect the interior to regional trade networks.

The final three substantive chapters of this book focus on the ways in which the Americo-Liberian elite leveraged Liberia’s sovereignty during the twentieth century to generate rents which helped sustain their rule over the indigenous majority. Chapter 8 examines the flow of foreign aid to Liberia beginning during World War II. During the 1940s, Liberia became one of the leading recipients of American aid, beginning with Lend-Lease in 1942. In scale, its aid was comparable in per capita terms to Asian countries like Korea or Marshall Plan recipients like the United Kingdom. As in other countries, what began as military aid through Lend-Lease to support the development of an airfield and a port to be used by US forces became a larger aid program and an important part of American economic diplomacy after the war. Histories of American policies during this period are generally told from the perspective of the US government. The history of Liberia offers the opportunity to view the rise of foreign aid from the perspective of the recipient country. The chapter shows that while Liberian officials often bristled at American interference, they continued to solicit aid as part of efforts to expand service provision while at the same time restricting political competition.

The final chapter draws out conclusions from a century of Indo-German relations. It shows the deep limits of treating nations and nationalism simplistically as barriers to international integration. The growing interconnectedness of the world did not challenge the ideas of nationalism but rather reinvigorated it. Nationalism is not the opposite of globalization but a part of it. To better integrate nations into our understanding of international business history and strategy, this chapter shows that we need to move beyond a transactional view of international business steeped in the assumption that nationalism introduces political risks and increases transaction costs, towards a relational view in which multinationals are understood as integral players in an evolving geopolitical landscape comprised of national communities. Such a view considers how multinationals navigate two sets of relationships that characterize nations: the relationships that define the nation as an imagined community with a collective past and an aspirational future and the relationships that define the nation in relation to other nations. These relationships allow us to consider the ways in which the economics of international business are inseparable from the politics and ideology of the global economy.

World War I sanctioned the economic rivalry between Germany and Great Britain by officially declaring the Germans political “enemies.” This created new lines of distinction in India, when the newly defined enemies were shunned from social clubs and saw their assets expropriated. German businessmen were rounded up in internment camps, supervised by Indian soldiers – a fact that challenged the (perceived) cohesion of the group of “white Western Europeans” in India. While many Indian nationalists supported Britain during the war, some took the war as an opportunity for rebellion and found support for their revolutionary aspirations in Germany. While the Indo-German conspiracy schemes during the war yielded few immediate results, they had a number of longer-term consequences, such as Germans and Indians openly reflecting on their joint interests and complementary ambitions, nationalistic Indians physically settling (and remaining) in Berlin to collaborate with German political and economic leaders, and the launch of targeted publications promoting the Indo-German alliance.

The first chapter explores the market entry of Germany’s large multinationals, exemplified by a detailed analysis of the electrical company Siemens and the chemical company Bayer, the two companies that pioneered German business with India in the 1870s. It shows how these large German players initially followed in their British rival’s footsteps and used the institutional advantages that British firms had. In the absence of discriminatory legislation against them, German big business became increasingly more successful as they learned to capitalize on the long-established links that Britain sustained with India. This happened at the same time that they first developed a self-understanding as “German” businesses. The chapter shows that the concept of “nationality” sits uneasily with the realities of these early endeavors in India and traces how nationalism slowly emerged as a topic of discussion.