ABSTRACT
Aluminium was widely recognized as one of the most cartelized industries before the Second World War. From 1886, when the modern production process of aluminium was discovered, to 1939, four official cartels appeared one after the other. Much scholarship has underlined the power of these organizations, for better or worse, in controlling the global output of aluminium. Both supporters and detractors pointed out the paradigmatic ability of aluminium cartels to suppress the emergence of outsiders and to maintain control over markets. 1 In this chapter, I will retrace the more intricate interplay between firms, cartels, and governments in order to scrutinize the processes of technology transfer in the industry and the ways in which cartelization reshaped the global diffusion of aluminium production.
