Overview

Why has ""car society"" proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

Full Product Details

Author:   Gijs Mom
Publisher:   Berghahn Books
Imprint:   Berghahn Books
ISBN:  

9781836953890

ISBN 10:   1836953895
Pages:   688
Publication Date:   01 February 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Questioning the Car: Prolegomena for a Historical Analysis of Global Mobility      New Perspectives, New Questions      Looking Back: Emergence and Persistence of the Adventure Machine      Extending Adventure: The Car as Possession and Status Symbol      Producing Commodification: Status, Narcissism, and Self-Development      Diversifying Automotive Identities: The Non-Hegemonic Self      New Mobility Studies: Bodily Senses, The Car as Medium, and the Challenge of Representation      The Trouble with Travel Writing: Meandering between Fictionality and Representation      This Study: Sources and Terminology Part I. Emergence and Persistence (Again): The Shaping of Mobility Layerdness beyond the West Chapter 1. Modernizing without Automobilization: Subverting and Subalternizing Mobility History (1890–1945/1950)      Imperialist Mobilities: Japan and the Modernization of Manchuria      Urban Mobilities: The Rickshaw and the Motorization of Asian Cities      Between Long March and Long-Haul: Rail and Road Network Building in China      Dual Networks of Rails and Roads: The Modal Configuration in Other Asian Countries      Migration, Colonialism and the Struggle between Rail and Road: The Case of Africa      More than Modern: Constructing a Latin American Adventure Machine      The Rest and the West: Subversive and Subaltern Mobilities? Part II: Exuberance, with a Twist: Spreading the Gospel of Automobilism Chapter 2. Fragmenting Automotive Adventure: Western Exuberant Automobilism and Middle-Class Guilt (1945–1973)      “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”      A Multimedia Feast: Folk, Beat, Rock and Other Mobilities      Motorizing the Worker: Fragmentation and Convergence of Western Car Cultures      The Attack on Public Transport: Hegemonic Car Cultures in a Cold War Setting      Experiencing the Car in a Fragmented Culture: Shifts in Autopoetic Adventures      Songs and Movies: Rejuvenating the Adventure Machine in Popular Culture      Flow Interrupted: Crash and the Systemic Aspects of Automobilism Chapter 3. Layered Development: The Transnational Construction of a World Mobility System (1940s–1970s)      What is ‘Layered Development’?      Alternative Developments: Soviet Mobility and the Modernization of China and India      Conceiving ‘Development’: Mobilizing the ‘Rest’      Mediating Modernization: Japan and Asian ‘Development’      Constructing ‘Circulation’: The IRF and the ""Development"" of Africa      Developmentalism vs. Dependentismo: Latin American Mobilities and the Frustrations of Middle-Class Modernity      Conclusions: Road, Rail, and Development Layered, Fragmented, Subversive, Subaltern: Conclusions Bibliography Index

Reviews

“[Mom presents two] distinct yet well-integrated perspectives, that of the historical and the methodological craftsman. The effective nexus of those perspectives allows Mom to tell a story too often overlooked and even blatantly ignored by Western-centric texts on the same subject. Despite its considerable length, this text is a dense work of research best suited for academics who are serious about mobility studies and/or non-Western 20th-century (or postcolonial) history.” • Choice “… a nuanced and complex account of the histories of mobility… [Some chapters] are real gems for the outline of a diverse world often invisible in mobility literature, as well as for a detailed anatomy of motorization and development practices.” • TSEG- The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History “Mom has access to an extraordinarily broad palette of source materials and methods. There is no other monograph in the field of such vast comparative scope.” • Peter Norton, University of Virginia

Author Information

Gijs Mom is Associate Professor emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology. His monograph Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895-1940, was published by Berghahn Books in 2015. He is a co-editor, with Georgine Clarsen and Mimi Sheller, of the Berghahn Books series ""Explorations in Mobility.""

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions