Foreign Direct Investment and Nationalism

Over the past decade, scholars across academic disciplines have lavished attention on transnational and multinational corporations. Anxieties about trade deficits, disemployment, as well as shifting models of organization, including increasing reliance on subcontractors and exploratory firms, have all infused if not sparked the most recent debates. As a result, questions of “distance,” including cultural, institutional, and historical, between these firms and their investments have come to the fore among experts (once again). Seeking to broaden discussions of these questions, this panel engages the theme of “collaboration in business and business history” through historical case studies of foreign direct investment (FDI).
In ideal scenarios, FDI fosters collaboration across myriad economic, social, and political divides by leveraging networks of transport, capital, and expertise to the benefit of all parties concerned. Far more frequently, however, FDI tends to galvanize nationalistic and nativistic opposition, stoking contestation over the place of international business enterprises within the boundaries of sovereign states. Historically, these dilemmas have also grown increasingly complex as a result of mergers, acquisitions of established firms, and the activities of state-owned firms driven by motives other than profit, to name only a few of the most pressing issues.
Emphasizing comparative approaches, the panel explores promising methods of examining FDI historically while also highlighting the limits of single-authored work. Collectively, the three papers speak to present concerns over increasingly uncertain prospects for productive international collaboration. Institutionally, they reflect but do not replicate recent dissertation work completed by three late-stage doctoral candidates from two universities. Geographically, they cover the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, and China. Temporally, they explore nearly the entire twentieth century.