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This chapter examines the production and marketing of aluminum as a carrier of uneven global modernities, thus highlighting the ways in which mobility and immobilization were simultaneously created in the world of traveling commodities, transport systems, and tourism. More specifically, it considers the role of aluminum, the “speed metal,” in modernization by linking the North American world of mobility, speed, and flight to the heavier, slower Caribbean world of bauxite mining, racialized labor relations, and resource extraction. The chapter first looks at the emergence of U.S. air power in the early twentieth century before discussing the cultural motions of Caribbean modernity and the complex constellations of mobility and immobility that structure transnational American relations. It also discusses the role played by companies like Alcoa in promoting innovation in the United States in the use of aluminum and imagining the light modernity of the future.

Mimi Sheller's essay reminds readers that underlying the cultural geographies of the American Tropics there is a physical geography of mining and resource extraction which has aluminium at its very core. She depicts the relation between North America and the American Tropics as two inextricably linked faces to aluminium: the North Atlantic's dreams of mobility, speed and communication systems represent the gleaming side of modernity, while the harsher tropical reality of mining, labour exploitation, and environmental devastation represent the dark side of modernisation. Rather than a literary history, Sheller here offers a visual analysis of graphic illustrations that drew on literary tropes of the tropics, from botanical collection to ethnological depictions of racial types, music, and dance. Through her analysis of the transnational cultural geographies of the American tropics represented in these advertising images, Sheller also shows how the images testified to a cultural vitality and to a potentially threatening ‘mobility’. Despite the damage done to people and environment by bauxite mining, Caribbean countries remain active in planning for the expansion of aluminium production, attesting to the ongoing power of world economic processes to shape the region.

This chapter examines how the Alcoa Steamship Company promoted its Caribbean cruises from 1948 to 1958 with advertising that involved the representation of Caribbean popular cultures of music and dance as well as the sale of sound recordings. The company operated three “modern, air-conditioned ships” which departed every Saturday from New Orleans on a sixteen-day cruise, making stops in Jamaica, Trinidad, Venezuela, Curaçao, and the Dominican Republic. One series of advertisements, which ran in luxury magazines such as Holiday from 1954–1955, is a striking set of folkloric portrayals of musical performances, parades, or dances by the graphic illustrator James R. Bingham. The chapter reads this campaign in the context of other forms of Caribbean musical circulation, such as the recordings made by Alan Lomax in 1937–1938; and the use of Caribbean music in American popular culture in this period. It considers how touristic consumption of musical performances from across the Caribbean helped to construct Caribbean people as outside of modernity, but available for modern cruise ships to visit while also tracing the complex economic relationships that impinged upon the production of Caribbean music, its recording history, and its circulation in North American consumer markets.

From the late 1930s through the 1970s, the US innovation economy operated under a weak patent regime. This patent-skeptical climate was best illustrated by antitrust enforcement actions resulting in the compulsory licensing of leading US firms’ patent portfolios. Concurrently, the federal government instituted an implicit compulsory licensing regime through a dramatic infusion of R&D funding into the private sector, accompanied by constraints on firms’ legal exclusivity over technology developed using those funds. The US economy exhibited robust innovation activity for part of this period, followed by a slowdown commencing in the mid-1960s. During this period, R&D funding flowed mostly to large firms, market concentration remained high, and firms targeted by compulsory licensing generally maintained market leadership. The postwar regime of weak patents and public subsidies favored larger firms that could capture returns on innovation through vertically integrated structures and access to government funding. Case studies of two firms targeted by compulsory licensing suggest that this regime may have distorted organizational structures and the mix of innovation projects that were undertaken.

The opening decades of the twentieth century were a period of great change in international politics. The First World War led not only to a reallocation of territorial possessions—the empires of the great powers had reached their zeniths—but also to a reallocation of power in world politics. Leadership began to flow from Great Britain, the “weary titan,” to the comparatively wealthy and vibrant United States. The newly formed League of Nations sought to manage international conflict but, with the United States refusing to join, was soon overwhelmed by rising violence. Nations turned inward, no longer willing to pursue the economic interdependence of the late nineteenth century. In E. H. Carr’s famous words, a “twenty years’ crisis” began at the close of the “war to end all wars”; the crisis culminated in the onset of another, even deadlier, war in 1939. These were also decades of ferment at home. The Progressive movement was recasting American politics, while the voting franchise expanded. At the same time the federal government was becoming a much more significant force in American life. The role of the federal government had long been limited. What scholars call the administrative state was quite small until the early twentieth century. By the 1940s, by contrast, the federal government comprised a rich and powerful array of agencies and departments, many devoted to regulating economic and social relations. These regulatory agencies, and the laws they implemented, provided a new frontier in the development of norms and rules of territoriality. The onset of comprehensive national regulation had many causes. Industrialization, the nationalization of the economy, and the Depression and its associated political upheaval—all these and more contributed to a remarkable shift in the role of government. In a wave of lawmaking that began in the 1890s, and accelerated dramatically with the New Deal, the United States promulgated a myriad of new laws aimed at subjecting economic and social activity to government power. One of the first examples of this new genre of statutes was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.