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Abstract
Two U.S.-based international corporations (Singer Manufacturing Company and International Harvester) fared differently in Russia during the first two decades of the twentieth century. An examination of how and why provides an important historical context for understanding the unevenness of globalization, drawing on insights provided by the “relational turn” in economic geography and the “material turn” in cultural geography. Analyzing commercial embeddedness and materialities of landscapes and commodities helps explain the differences in the fates of these two corporations. In addition, broadening notions of embeddedness to include analyses of material landscapes, of local corporate reputations, and of the materiality of the products themselves contributes to our understandings of the messy and complex ways that economic power is imposed and resisted.
Muy diferente resultó para dos compañías internacionales de los Estados Unidos (Singer Manufacturing Company e International Harvester) su desempeño en Rusia durante las primeras dos décadas del siglo XX. El examen del cómo y el porqué nos proporciona un importante contexto histórico para entender la desigualdad de la globalización, con el apoyo de iluminantes ideas aportadas por el “giro relacional” de la geografía económica y el “giro material” de la geografía cultural. Analizando la inserción comercial y las materialidades de paisajes y mercaderías ayuda a explicar la diferencia en las experiencias de estas dos corporaciones. Adicionalmente, la ampliación de las nociones de arraigo o inserción para incluir los análisis de paisajes materiales, de reputaciones corporativas locales y de la materialidad de los propios productos, habrá de contribuir a que entendamos el modo desordenado y complejo como se implanta el poderío económico, y cómo éste es resistido.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to several colleagues and friends who supported my research in Russia and who have commented on drafts of this article. It would have been much more difficult to locate the Singer and International Harvester archival materials in Moscow had it not been for the guidance of Irina Potkina, and Elena Trufanova served as an excellent translator. Vladimir Kolossov helped create an important scholarly and social environment while I was in Russia. Robert Argenbright, Chris Sneddon, and Matthew Sparke read and commented on earlier versions of this article and provided much-needed advice and criticisms, as did the two generous anonymous reviewers and the editor, Audrey Kobayashi. The research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation, grant number 0647818. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. I also received funding from the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.
Notes
1. Singer avoided immediate nationalization by establishing what was called an “extraordinary committee” comprised of Bolsheviks who were sympathetic to Singer and who were former employees. This committee “ran” the company, although the committee basically was run by Otto Myslik, who was the head of Singer's operations in Russia after Dixon left the country. This maneuver worked until January 1919, when, according to Myslik, “the Bolsheviks turned over our business to aGovernment Management, which succeeded the ‘Extraordinary Committee’ which I had caused to be organized” (CitationMyslik 1921). There is some contention about this claim. Historian McFadden (1993) suggested that Robins negotiated in 1918 with Lenin on behalf of both Singer and IH, but this does not seem to be the case. My analysis of all the documents Singer used in its claim to receive compensation for its losses in Russia tells a very different story. According to their claim, the company was taken by the state in early January 1919. In addition, government documents, including memos and letters of Robins, that had been collected and published in 1920 under the title Russian-American relations 1917–1920 (Cumming and Pettit 1920) make no mention of negotiations for Singer, only IH. This agrees with the arguments made by CitationDavies (1976).
2. These negotiations were not only informal but by all accounts fairly chaotic and arbitrary. Before June 1918 there really was no plan for how to go about nationalizing industries and properties in Russia. See Malle (1985).
3. For a detailed analysis of how contemporary economic and political commentators have obscured the messiness of American dominance, see Sparke (2003, 2004).
4. These files are from the State Historical Archive of Moscow. The files are in the form of scrapbooks, with newspaper clippings about Singer shops arranged fairly haphazardly (at times by region, other times chronologically). All are in Russian. It is not clear who collected these files. They form part of a very large collection of Singer materials at the archive. Most of that material was seized when Singer's offices in Moscow and Podolsk were taken over by the government in 1918. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that this material was collected originally by Singer officials, but this is not confirmed.
5. It is interesting to note the geographical expanse of these protests, and hence of the Russian and Singer empires: Kishniev is in Moldova, Odessa is in the Ukriane, Irkutsk is in Siberia, and Harbin is in Manchuria.
6. Singer did, however, experience a series of strikes at its Podolsk plant and its Clydebank plant, outside of Glasgow. See Domosh (2008).
7. Dixon makes reference to payments made to a local architect, but he never mentions the name. See Dixon (1902).
8. ollowing a restriction on travel of American Jews to Russia, the U.S. Senate and the House voted to abrogate the commercial treaty that had stood since 1832. See Carstensen (1984, 198).
9. CitationCarstensen (1984)4pt argued that the company's preoccupation with trying to influence state policies took valuable time and energy away from actually running their overseas operations: “One of the penalties that International Harvester paid for its presumption that working with the Russian governments was the first priority was poor management of its Russian business” (188). See also CitationCarstensen and Werking (1983).
10. National City Bank became Citibank in 1976(CitationCleveland and Huertas 1985).
11. This information was obtained from a set of files concerning IH held at the State Historical Archive of Moscow. These files contained newspaper clippings, letters, and memos pertaining to the company's factory, shops, and offices during the revolutionary era.