Christina Lubinski. Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise: A Century of Indo-German Business Relations
本书研究了19至20世纪德国企业在印度的活动，涵盖西门子、拜耳等大型企业及小型制造商，探讨民族主义如何影响国际商业战略，适合对商业史和国际商务感兴趣的学者。
Historical books on business are not always widely read by organization scholars and are often unfairly equated with hagiographical corporate biographies commissioned by firms.Lubinski's carefully researched study of German business activities in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a very different book as it offers insights into a variety of German firms, from the major engineering and chemical ventures such as Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben to small enterprises, such as the cutlery manufacturers from Solingen (which rivaled Sheffield's trade) and gramophone companies.Adding to this kaleidoscopic overview are the various international cloaking companies, often Swiss, that aided German corporate interests during two world wars, when German firms were associated with a hostile home state.By taking such a long and broad lens, the book presents the shifting tides of economic and political trends that affected international business and shaped corporate strategies in ways that are rarely discussed in business research.Underpinned by historical research in several international archives and contextualized effectively with both present-day concepts and historical ideas and their reception in India, Germany, and the UK, the book offers an easy, smooth read, bringing not just events and people but also their life worlds and mental maps into a cohesive argument about the complex interaction between nationalism and international business.Lubinski draws on modern conceptions of nationalism, such as the historian Benedict Anderson's (1993) influential notion of imagined communities, but also historical ideas of the way nations and economic development interact.Some of the latter ideas include the German economist Friedrich List's work in the nineteenth century, which many Indian thinkers considered relevant, as well as American academic and political adviser Walt W. Rostow's later influential conception of economic development as a ''take off.''These two ideas frame the radically different ways in which nationalism can be the fulcrum of anticolonial notions of economic development.List's notion was deeply political, framed by Anglo-German industrial and imperial rivalries, and considered nations as almost fated communities that needed to invest in their shared future.In conjunction with the status of Germany as one of the most successful late-industrializing European powers, this idea was both appealing and legitimate to Indian nationalists and fit well into the emerging Swadeshi movement, which was a consumer movement exhorting people to buy local, or at the very least not from the British colonial masters.The chapter on bazaar goods is particularly interesting, as there are few business histories of the companies that provided consumer goods to informal