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Abstract: At this seminar I will circulate an introduction to a book project tentatively entitled “More Multinational Than Most”: MNCs, business organisations and the national interest in Swedish economic diplomacy, ca 1950-2000”. The study deals with the role of multinational companies in national politics during the second half of the 20^th century, an era of accelerating globalization. More precisely it focuses on how Swedish business organisations, dominated by a number of large multinational companies, developed and used transnational networks to influence Sweden’s economic diplomacy and the international system in which it played out. The study proposes that a study of these influential private multinational actors over almost half a century sheds important historic light on the ongoing negotiations over, and power dynamics surrounding, where to draw the boundary between “the economy” and “the nation and between “markets” and “states”. By the 1970s Swedish industry was publicly promoting the country as “more multinational than most” and this study asks how, over time, this understanding of the nation translated into political interventions and institutional change.

Bio: Nikolas Glover is an associate professor and senior lecturer at the Department of Economic History, Uppsala University. His research has above all sought to shed fresh light, from various angles, on the cultural history of the 20th century Swedish export economy. He is particularly focused on interactions between state and organised business in export promotion, development aid and foreign policy. From this vantage point he has engaged with business history, marketing history, international history.