The New Deal: A Global History by Kiran Klaus Patel (review)

In this book, Kiran Klaus Patel approaches the New Deal as a key element of the "critical repositioning of America in the world (2) that followed the Great Depression. As Patel convincingly shows, the New Deal "shared more with processes in other parts of the world than is normally recognized." (300) The New Deal profoundly reshaped the United States but neither its agenda, nor its course, nor its results were merely domestic – it was a product of, and in turn helped create, powerful interconnections with a series of process at the global level; a "global New Deal" that saw the expansion of state intervention in the economy and society to address the failures of capitalism in the wake of the global slump of the 1930s. This is a different narrative of "the American World Order," the title of the book's fifth chapter, to the one that many are accustomed to: a world order based on the expansion of US corporate capitalism, military power, and Hollywood.

The book is clearly in dialogue with the "global turn" in historiography and is intended as a corrective to historical interpretations of the New Deal that view it primarily or even exclusively as a domestic issue or that privilege its study from a local perspective. Instead, Patel shows that the New Deal needs to be understood in the context of much broader global response to the impact of the Great Depression and indeed in the context of the widely-shared perception in the 1930s that the evident failures of capitalism needed to be addressed if capitalism and liberal democracy were to survive. Correctly, Patel sees this global response as being not only a question of the changing role of government but also of what Michel Foucault called governmentality: the process whereby "the population came to be seen as amenable to management through the deployment of specific rationalities and technologies of power." Such an approach leads Patel to examine the New Deal and its connections to the world in numerous ways, combining economic, political, social and cultural perspectives. As a result, the New Deal that is examined in this book is not simply a series of state policies, or an alphabet soup of acronyms (tva, aaa, ccc, nira, pwa, wpa, etc.). Instead, it is the subject of a more profound examination of how state-society relations were reframed in the wake of the Great Depression in the United States but also across much of the world.

Two short chapters, respectively on the origins and character of the Great Depression and on the new world order that the New Deal helped create, flank three meatier chapters. In Chapter 2, Patel shows that the solutions to the impact of the Great Depression on a range of sectors, from banking, to agriculture, to industry, to work creation, that Roosevelt's New Dealers devised, need to be examined in the context of, to use Sebastian Conrad's useful term, synchronous developments elsewhere in the world. This is not simply a story of how transnational ideas and policies of state management of the economy circulated in this period. Instead, it is a careful examination of how the response of the United States to the Great Depression was shaped not only by domestic considerations but also by how the New Dealers viewed the responses of other countries, including Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and indeed countries in Latin America and Asia. As Patel explains, "transnational learning and linking mainly served as a means to find a better national solution to the double crisis of democracy and capitalism." (114)

In Chapter 3, Patel turns his attention to changing relations between the United States and rest of the world during the 1930s. He explores how the "national solution" to the crisis represented by the New Deal, and its implications in terms of domestic economic management, impacted on other parts of the world and also reshaped US foreign relations. The chapter ranges widely, exploring the consequences for the rest of...