Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System [Hardcover]

Cinema and the Wealth of Nationsexplores how media, principally in the form of cinema, was used during the interwar years by elite institutions to establish and sustain forms of liberal political economy beneficial to their interests. It examines the media produced by institutions such as states, corporations, and investment banks, as well as the emergence of a corporate media industry and system supported by state policy and integral to the establishment of a new consumer system. Lee Grieveson shows how media was used to encode liberal political and economic power during the period that saw the United States eclipse Britain as the globally hegemonic nation and the related inauguration of new forms of liberal economic globalization. But this is not a distant history.Cinema and the Wealth of Nationsexamines a foundational conjuncture in the establishment of media forms and a media system instrumental in, and structural to, the emergence and expansion of a world system that has been—and continues to be—brutally violent, unequal, and destructive.

Lee Grievesonis Professor of Media History at University College London. He is the author ofPolicing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century Americaand coeditor of a number of volumes, includingInventing Film Studies,Empire and Film, and, most recently,Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex.

"Lee Grieveson’s cultural-materialist tour de force ruthlessly examines the global history of movies and money, detailing the sordid global backstory behind the uncertain and unequal balance between art and commerce. This rigorously researched and deeply felt radical media study evinces a perceptive and thoroughgoing analysis of a medium that has from its outset served an exploitative political economy."—Jon Lewis, author ofHard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

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