What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape today’s world? To solve this riddle economic historians usually point to the emergence of business-friendly values, the emergence of consumer markets and new forms of applied knowledge in early European modernity, which led to innovations in industrial organization, shipping, logistics and trade (which, among other things, enabled and were driven by the transatlantic slave trade). This book focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries and zooms in on the moving image as a factor of economic development and the history of global capitalism. In a series of in-depth cases studies at the intersection of film and media studies, science and technology studies and economic and social history, Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film presents an in-depth, global perspective on the dynamic relationship between film, industrial organization and economic development. Bringing together new research from leading scholars from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, this book combines the state of the art in the field with an agenda for future research.