Stefan Link specializes in the history of global political economy and the intellectual history of capitalism. His book, Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, came out with Princeton UP in 2020. The book explores how the 20th-century automobile industry took shape as activist states confronted America, competed over industrial development, and clashed over the terms of globalization. It also talks about the ideological origins of mass production in Midwestern Populism, the Soviet context of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and how the Nazi state harnessed American corporations to its purposes.
In current research I ask how the Great Depression, understood as a global crisis, shaped the history of globalization, and how the economic history of the United States looks from the perspective of state-led development. He continues to be interested in how social theory, politics, and ideology might be leveraged for understanding business history.
