Globalizing the Second World War

Abstract

Abstract Entrenched within national histories, the Second World War has largely resisted the ‘global turn’ despite its eminent globality. The broad reconceptualization presented here views the Second World War as a paroxysm of worldwide war (December 1941−September 1945) embedded within a capacious cycle of regional wars and revolutions beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and ending in Korea in 1953. This expanded temporal frame is intertwined with a broadening of spatial horizons that allows the assimilation of world regions from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa, facilitates the integration of transnational flows of matériel, people and ideas, and underscores hybridity and popular agency. These conceptual shifts challenge the reified imaginary of the war of 1939–45, blurring ‘war’ and ‘post-war’ and allowing us to picture an American-led world order emerging directly from the war while illuminating the fighting that continued uninterrupted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This approach explores the tension between global and national histories — itself a reflection of the contradiction between capitalism’s push for worldwide markets and the nation states within which it is organized — and views American hegemony as the primary outcome of the long war while highlighting the qualifications posed by the Chinese Revolution, the strengthening of the USSR, and the rise of anti-colonial struggles.