Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940 by Gijs Mom (review)

This is a big book, in every sense of the word. Gijs Mom, a leading scholar of transnational interdisciplinary mobility and one of the driving forces of this new sub/meta field — as a founder of the T2M (the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility) and founding editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility (est. 2010) — is an academic in absolute command of his scholarly landscape. A trained engineer with a background in literature who has also had a career in policy, Mom has provided a vast synthesis that seeks to answer one of the most fundamental questions of modern life: Why the car?

As we know, the automobile has had the most profound impact as a technology in history, a great contributor to human advancement while simultaneously a bane of the social and natural environment. Here, however, Mom is not addressing directly the political, economic, environmental, or social influence of the car, but is focused on the cultural, using belletristic literature to examine the “Interbellum phase” of automobilism (which, he points out, is not the same as automobility, or other terms to describe the car’s ascendance, such as “motordom”).

In doing so, Mom interrogates the usual historical master narrative ascribed to the car’s impact upon nations: first, a wealthy elite enjoy the car as a luxury item; quickly, it is democratized through the “American model” of mass production and practical use; this spreads the car to other countries, including white settler nations as close and as far as Canada and Australia; then the car comes back to Europe, where it can no longer be a product solely for the rich. Mom examines this narrative on a number of fronts — that the car’s spread was unchallenged, that it was a uniquely American phenomenon, or that it emerged as a “toy-to-tool” plaything that only later became a utilitarian device.

Methodologically, Mom takes an approach grounded in literature, scouring hundreds of novels, poems, and other expressions of art to gain a sense of the broader impact and culture of automobilism. This exhaustive literature analysis is supplemented by some first rate history: Mom’s extensive historiographical essay in the introduction is probably one of the best overviews of any similarly complicated subfield that I have ever read, and should itself be required reading for any historian interested not only in the automobile, but in technology, narrative, literature, and culture, more broadly.

In terms of his geographic scope, Mom’s approach is explicitly transnational, but he limits his study to seven countries (the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The transnational approach allows the book to overcome, to an amazing extent, “the deplorable chauvinism of American automotive historiography” (11), in no small part owing to Mom’s multilingual prowess.

A massive undertaking, the book is divided into two main sections, the first examining the emergence of the car between 1895 and 1918, and the second exploring its persistence during the interwar period until 1940. Balancing nations, medias, methods, languages, and multiple histories together like a confident ring-master, Mom is able to give convincing coherence and a narrative spine to what in another author’s hands would be an unwieldly circus. Literature is augmented by statistics where necessary, while a diversity of subtopics — from film, war, the role of experts, depression, and travel — are given new life as Mom grapples with the deeper meaning of the car in modern existence.

The examples are endless, but the lessons are profound, and only a few of these can be related in such a short review. Echoing Peter Norton’s path-breaking work, Mom shows convincingly that the idea of the car was not suddenly and uncritically embraced, but that acceptance was a difficult and contested process. Lively challenges to the car emerged across a range of nations and languages. He also shows in great detail that motorization itself...