Abstract

"Decolonizing GM: Joint Ventures and Globalized Automobile Production in the Late Twentieth-Century"

Jessica Levy, Purchase College, SUNY (jessica.levy.a@gmail.com)

The year was 1975. Things were not going great for the world’s largest automobile company, General Motors, which faced growing competition from foreign imports and labor unrest on the home front. In Nairobi, where GM announced it was building a new factory, local newspapers wrote only of progress. The factory was part of a new joint venture between GM and the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation on a 51-49 basis with GM serving as the minority partner. Referencing the partnership, GM’s first (and only) Black director, Leon Sullivan, who signed the deal, described it as part of the company’s plans to establish “plants…in several…Black African countries.” When they do, “[I want] to see General Motors get more involved” in empowering Black Africans, who, according to Sullivan, stood to prosper alongside General Motors from the company’s expansion into post-colonial Africa.
Sullivan’s comments speak to the central role that automobile manufacturing played in post-colonial visions of economic development. Across the Third World, politicians, entrepreneurs, and pundits expressed a strong desire for automobile industrialization as a key vehicle, marking their arrival as modern, independent nations. Like earlier waves of automobile industrial expansion, those with aspirations for national automobile industrialization had to contend with the capital and technological power of global automobile companies like GM. One consequence of this confluence of visions was the formation of a series of joint ventures between GM and state-owned development corporations and Third World industrialists in places like Kenya, South Korea, and, later, Eastern Europe. Taking up the conference theme of co-creation, this paper examines several resulting partnerships involving GM in the developing world, paying particular attention to the political negotiations and corporate re-structuring undertaken by the various parties involved.