Rabinowitz sets the populist and nativist surge of 2008 to 2020 beside the turbulent decades before the First World War and argues that the resemblance is causal. Both periods followed a leap in connective technology, railroads and the telegraph in the earlier case, jet aircraft and computers in the later, which knitted together markets, money and information faster than societies could absorb the shock. The book offers a typology sorting nationalism into creative, consolidating and defensive forms, and names the resulting politics defensive nationalism, a national populism that fuses hostility to liberalism and to globalisation with economic protection. Drawing on Polanyi's account of markets tearing free of social restraint and Schumpeter's account of technological disruption, the chapters trace how financial crises, saturated media and fears about immigration and terrorism feed movements on both left and right. Closing studies of the Concert of Europe and Bretton Woods ask how earlier settlements restored stability.