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A New History of World War II - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/world-war-ii-empire-colonialism/629371/Archived: https://archive.ph/BZ2OO
This is an incredibly good read describing the basis for WW-II, before and after, as a result of empires and colonialism.
What was the Second World War about? According to Allied leaders, that wasn’t a hard question. “This is a fight between a free world and a slave world,” U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace explained. It is “between Nazidom and democracy,” Winston Churchill said, with “tyranny” on one side and “liberal, peaceful” powers on the other.
Would that it were so simple. The Allies’ inclusion of the Soviet Union—“a dictatorship as absolute as any dictatorship in the world,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once called it—muddied the waters. But the other chief Allies weren’t exactly liberal democracies, either. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and (depending on how you view Tibet and Mongolia) China were all empires. Together, they held, by my count, more than 600 million people—more than a quarter of the world—in colonial bondage.
This fact wasn’t incidental; empire was central to the causes and course of the war. Yet the colonial dimensions of World War II aren’t usually stressed. The most popular books and films present it as Churchill did, as a dramatic confrontation between liberty-loving nations and merciless tyrants. In the United States, it’s remembered still as the “good war,” the vanquishing of evil by the Greatest Generation.
Would that it were so simple. The Allies’ inclusion of the Soviet Union—“a dictatorship as absolute as any dictatorship in the world,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once called it—muddied the waters. But the other chief Allies weren’t exactly liberal democracies, either. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and (depending on how you view Tibet and Mongolia) China were all empires. Together, they held, by my count, more than 600 million people—more than a quarter of the world—in colonial bondage.
This fact wasn’t incidental; empire was central to the causes and course of the war. Yet the colonial dimensions of World War II aren’t usually stressed. The most popular books and films present it as Churchill did, as a dramatic confrontation between liberty-loving nations and merciless tyrants. In the United States, it’s remembered still as the “good war,” the vanquishing of evil by the Greatest Generation.
...
hat impelled Germany, Japan, and Italy on their conquering missions? Given how reckless and ruinous their belligerence was, pathologizing it is easy. Madness clearly abounded in the high command, but three countries going insane in the same way at the same time isn’t exactly a satisfying explanation. A better one, Overy suggests, lies further in the past.
The 19th century had seen a “veritable steeplechase for colonial acquisitions,” as Italy’s foreign ministry described it. Britain won that race, with other countries that would eventually join the Allies taking secondary prizes. The Axis powers, late out of the gate, got the leftovers. Worse, the winners locked the losers out, rebuffing Japan’s attempts to join the great powers’ club and stripping Germany of its meager overseas holdings after World War I. Going into the 1930s, the Allies held 15 times more colonial acreage than the Axis states did.
Japan, Germany, and Italy were rising economies without large empires. Was that a problem? Today, it wouldn’t be; 21st-century countries don’t require colonies to prosper. But different rules applied in the first half of the 20th century. Then, industrial powers depended on raw materials from far-off lands. And without colonies, they had every reason to worry about ready availability. Hitler never forgot the World War I blockade that largely cut Germany off from such materials as rubber and nitrates and caused widespread hunger. The global Depression, which shrunk international trade by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932, threatened a new form of blockade.
The 19th century had seen a “veritable steeplechase for colonial acquisitions,” as Italy’s foreign ministry described it. Britain won that race, with other countries that would eventually join the Allies taking secondary prizes. The Axis powers, late out of the gate, got the leftovers. Worse, the winners locked the losers out, rebuffing Japan’s attempts to join the great powers’ club and stripping Germany of its meager overseas holdings after World War I. Going into the 1930s, the Allies held 15 times more colonial acreage than the Axis states did.
Japan, Germany, and Italy were rising economies without large empires. Was that a problem? Today, it wouldn’t be; 21st-century countries don’t require colonies to prosper. But different rules applied in the first half of the 20th century. Then, industrial powers depended on raw materials from far-off lands. And without colonies, they had every reason to worry about ready availability. Hitler never forgot the World War I blockade that largely cut Germany off from such materials as rubber and nitrates and caused widespread hunger. The global Depression, which shrunk international trade by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932, threatened a new form of blockade.
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