UCL Americas Research Network 2024 Conference – Historical Roots, Modern Realities: Nationalism Across the Americas

The US Antimonopoly Tradition in Global Perspective The news media is currently awash with articles, op-eds, and think-pieces on monopoly, antitrust, and democracy’s fraught relationship with big corporations in general, and with Big Tech in particular. President Biden’s Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American Economy, issued on 9 July 2021, prompted a new wave of commentary on this topic. Writing in the New York Times, the distinguished labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein traced the lineage of Biden’s antitrust initiative all the way back to the Boston Tea Party and to abolitionists’ attacks on the slave power. “The nation’s antimonopoly tradition,” he wrote, “arises once more.” Much of this commentary, however, is resolutely national in its framing. It presents antimonopoly’s history almost as if it were hermetically sealed, and as such impervious to the global character of capitalism. Americans, of course, are not the only people around the world worried about […]