THE NEW DEAL

THE NEW DEAL provides a radically new interpretation of a pivotal period in U.S. history. The first comprehensive study of the New Deal in a global context, the book compares American responses to the international crisis of capitalism and democracy during the 1930s to responses by other countries around the globe--not just in Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Work creation, agricultural intervention, state planning, immigration policy, the role of mass media, forms of political leadership, and new ways of ruling America's colonies--all had parallels elsewhere and unfolded against a backdrop of intense global debates.

By avoiding the distortions of American exceptionalism, Kiran Klaus Patel shows how America's reaction to the Great Depression connected it to the wider world. Among much else, the book explains why the New Deal had enormous repercussions on China; why Franklin D. Roosevelt studied the welfare schemes of Nazi Germany; and why the New Dealers were fascinated by cooperatives in Sweden--but ignored similar schemes in Japan.

Ultimately, Patel argues, the New Deal provided the institutional scaffolding for the construction of American global hegemony in the postwar era, making this history essential for understanding both the New Deal and America's rise to global leadership.

Kiran Klaus Patel is the Jean Monnet Professor of European and Global History at Maastricht University, where he also serves as head of the Department of History. Before joining Maastricht University, he held a professorship of EU History and Transatlantic Relations at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and an assistant professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin. He has been (inter alia) a visiting fellow/professor at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris and the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies. He is presently a member of an international team of historians researching the history of the German Ministry of Labor during the Third Reich.