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As a tool of globalized mobility, the car provides a useful barometer for charting the global development of socio-cultural, economic, technical, and political modernization. Shaped by prevailing gender and racial norms and popularized by a Western-driven car culture, it is a commodity whose access and use embodies wider inequalities. In this comprehensive world history of (auto)mobility, Gijs Mom draws upon his extensive research into the field to assess the past and present of road cultures, and hypothesize their future. Ranging from the impact of climate change to decolonization, this volume spotlights how profoundly ‘automobilism’ impacts our sense of identity and imagination.
“The social construction of road technology presented here offers an enlightened reading of one of the fundamental elements of modernity, and of the prosperity and crises of our societies.” • Mathieu Flonneau, Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, SIRICE, IAES-EDS
“Gijs Mom’s trilogy on world mobility history is a monument in the field. Vast in scope, it integrates global problems in transport, technology, society and culture, defying boundaries of nationality, language and discipline. As at great architectural monuments, however, dimensions may intimidate. But now, in A World History of Mobility, we have the architect himself to guide us on an insider’s tour. Mom has distilled decades of global mobilities scholarship into a readable essay. Specialists will savor it, and newcomers will find it the best available introduction to the field.” • Peter Norton, University of Virginia
Gijs Mom is Associate Professor Emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology, specializing in the history of mobility. He is the author of Atlantic Automobilism (Berghahn Books, 2015), Globalizing Automobilism (Berghahn Books, 2020), and Pacific Automobilism (Berghahn Books, 2022). He was a co-editor, with Georgine Clarsen and Mimi Sheller, of the Berghahn Books series “Explorations in Mobility,” and the founder and first editor of Transfers, Interdisciplinary Journal of New Mobility Studies.
Preface
Introduction: Making World Mobility History
Chapter 1. Imperialist And Colonialist Mobilities, 1850-1918
Chapter 2. Migratory And Other Subversive Mobilities, 1920-1940
Chapter 3. Decolonization, Development, and the Globalization of the Car Society, 1940s-1970s
Chapter 4. The Global Shift to Pacific Automobilism and the Epidemiology of the Car, 1970s-2010s
Chapter 5. The End of the Car and its Alternatives
Conclusion: Past to Future, Atlantic to Pacific
Annotated Canon: Introducing Mobility History
Bibliography
Index