Stefan Link

At CASBS, Stefan Link will work on a global history of the Great Depression. The Depression marked the terminal crisis of the first age of globalization, which imparted on colonies and the raw-material-exporting periphery a profound lesson: that economic development requires political sovereignty. The resulting bids for statehood created the 20^th-century map of nation-states and paved the way to the geopolitical competition we are witnessing today. What emerges is a genealogy of institutional learning from the South, with important implications for how we approach the challenges of globalization today. 

Link is a historian of political economy at Dartmouth College. His prize-winning book Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest Over the Industrial Order (Princeton University Press, 2020) explores how the 20^th-century automobile industry took shape as activist states confronted America. His article “How Might 21^st-Century De-Globalization Unfold Some Historical Perspectives” reconfigures current debates over the reshaping of the global economy. In other work he has addressed questions of US economic development and the political history of corporations.