Chapter 4 traces how the German firms, big business and bazaar exporters alike, reentered India after World War I. It shows how the postwar situation triggered a joint sense of victimhood among Germans and Indians who both felt mistreated and exploited by the British, laying the groundwork for a mental map of nationalism that highlighted their parallel history. Both Germans and Indians experimented with new sensemaking offers, among them the bold idea of an Indo-German “Aryan” community that claimed a joint heritage of both people. However, this “identity work” required constant effort and investment. And, many of the Indian suggestions seemed too audacious for most German businesspeople to approve. While they often advocated political neutrality towards the goals of the Indian Independence movement and other independence movements around the world, they also took notice of the similar national aspirations of countries, which otherwise had little in common and started discussing them as a cluster.

Chapter 8 follows the Indo-German collaborations to the 1980s. Indias primary development goal was rapid industrialization and it invested heavily in imports from abroad, including from Germany, which turned into one of its most important trading partners. However, India also struggled with a chronic foreign exchange crisis, requiring development aid from abroad. The underlying mental map of nationalism changed during this period, stressing a policy direction focused on a predetermined path to growth and development. Grappling with the relationship between nations was less a matter of interpreting ideas derived from politics and ideologies and more an exercise of mastering development science. In this framework, nation states with a unique history and identity increasingly turned into building blocks of a worldview that prioritized countries development stage over its unique national features. While top-level strategy of German multinationals reflected these abstract and universal models of the world, strategy on the ground in India was shaped not by predictable categories but by one-off and specific negotiations with Indian officials, especially since the mid-1970s in the context of changes to the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act and anti-monopoly legislation.

German business in India advanced not only in the business-to-business sector, as seen in the previous chapter, but also in the Indian bazaar, and many observers testified to the universally available and very visible products “Made in Germany.” Chapter 2 shows how German exporters entered the Indian bazaar by tracing two of the most competitive export industries in detail: cutlery and gramophones/recorded music. In both, German and British manufacturers went head to head, with competition unfolding over price, distribution channels, product specifications and (legal battles over) trademarks. The label “Made in Germany,” forcefully introduced by the British in the 1880s to stigmatize German low-quality products, eventually turned into a political advantage when anticolonial protests increased the perceived value of “non-British” products in some areas of India, most notably in Bengal during the anti-partition protests. While short-lived and with limited immediate impact on business, the nationalist upheaval in the bazaars taught German firms that presenting themselves as “outsiders” of the British-Indian colonial economy had advantages for them and inspired first debates about a strategy that leveraged the Indian nation’s history, aspirations and relationship to Britain.

Chapter 5 follows German business strategy and Indo-German collaboration through the Great Depression and its aftermath. The depression ended India’s open-door policy and introduced preferential tariff treatment for British goods. At the same time, the German political landscape changed significantly with the Nazi Regime (1933–1945), re-shaping both German economic policies but also MNE’s export strategies. There was widespread antipathy in India towards the lawlessness and anti-Semitism of Hitler’s government, including some boycotts against German goods. But German businessmen also became savvier in understanding the fine-grained differences of economic nationalism in India and developed more targeted strategies to exploit them. It was at this time that they invested heavily in business intelligence as a basis for strategic decision-making. Moreover, the German Reichsbank started a system of subsidizing German exporters, which helped them to regain some competitiveness despite Germany staying on the gold standard. Giving up much of the bazaar business, German business in India focused more than ever before on the industries that were seen as complementary to Indian activists’ agenda, most notably chemicals, electrical goods and machinery.

Continuing the chronology, Chapter 6 focuses on World War II, and the year immediately leading up to it. It focuses on the extensive investments in cloaking and “Indianization,” and how these efforts failed to protect German companies from renewed expropriation once the war broke out. Despite intense planning, the war put a temporary end to German firms’ efforts in India. However, corporate diplomacy still mattered. German businesses had a plan for dealing with internment in India and were better able to cope with this challenge. They also reflected back on their experiences with the rise of nationalist movements in the interwar period and synthesized their learnings into a new strategy for competing in “markets with strong nationalist movements,” including India. These formerly or currently dependent territories were identified as having similar goals, ambitions, and needs, which German decision-makers planned to address using a unified strategy; one that only emerged slowly out of several decades of engagement with different types of nationalism around the globe.

Indian Independence in 1947 marked a new beginning for Indo-German collaboration. Yet, it came first and foremost with continuities rather than abrupt change in the context of volatile political conditions. A host of unresolved problems awaited both newly independent India and post-war Germany. The growing tensions between Hindus and Muslim in India culminated in its partition into two states rather than one and led to Gandhis assassination. At the same time, in West Germany, after the unconditional surrender, large stretches of Germany lay in ruins and millions of refugees roamed the country looking for new homes. The parallels in the historical path India and Germany had taken were not lost on worldly observers and some mobilized them to legitimize collaboration. The hope that the end of war and colonial subjugation marked a new beginning was tempered by turmoil and turbulence that led both Germans and Indians to fall back on familiar relationships and tested patterns of economic interaction.

The introduction argues that while globalization and economic nationalism are both important forces shaping how businesses act in the world, history and business scholars have paid significantly more attention to globalization than to economic nationalism. What we are left with is a historiography moving at two speeds. Whereas our understanding of globalization and business has been transformed over the past thirty years, the impact of nationalism on business strategy – including but not limited to the risk management strategies – remains rather obscure. To mitigate this shortcoming and untangle the convoluted processes by which nationalism shapes business strategy, the book explores in detail German businesses’ strategies in India in the context of the slowly unfolding process of decolonization. To that end, the introduction offers both a theoretical framework – Friedrich List’s elaborations on nationalist ideologies – and previews the main arguments of the book.