Debates over the rise and fall of US empire continue to pervade headlines as well as academia. More recently, many scholars have come to recognize the history of capitalism as its own field of inquiry. In his book, Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism (HUP, 2021), Brendan Goff seeks to bring these two timely and evolving fields together through a close examination of the origins, growth, and expansion of Rotary clubs throughout the world during the first half of the twentieth century. When placed within the pre-war context of local and regional forms of boosterism, transnational business and social networks, civic and managerial discourses, and racialized and gendered forms of economic citizenship, local Rotary clubs proved to be anything but local, serving instead as nodal points for internationalist ambitions from towns and cities to nations and empires, from small businessmen to multi-national corporations.

That thousands of independent clubs operated worldwide through Rotary International, their administrative core based in Chicago, rather than through any formal arrangement with the US government, the US military, or its foreign policy elites proved invaluable in maintaining a strategic distance from the state. At the same time, what Goff calls Rotary’s civic internationalism promoted an idealized form of small-town, Main Street values that helped re-brand corporate capitalism as the central driver of progressive change in the world by mid- century. In this manner, Rotary International—a non-governmental organization—helped stabilize and advance both US national interests as well as US-based corporations and industries in a period of rapid global ascendancy.

Brendan Goff received his PhD in history at the University of Michigan in 2008. Before moving to New College of Florida in 2011 as a Visiting Assistant Professor, Dr. Goff held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan and was a lecturer in the Great Books Program at the University of Michigan. From 2014 to 2021, Dr. Goff also served as Assistant Professor at New College of Florida. Before entering the PhD program at Michigan, Dr. Goff worked as a freelance English teacher in Madrid, at a major bank in New York City, and in the Government and Community Affairs Division at the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, DC. He also studied philosophy at the University of Glasgow as an Ambassadorial Scholar with Rotary International and attended seminary shortly after graduating from Hamilton College. Dr. Goff’s book, Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism, was published by Harvard University Press in July of 2021.