Andrew N. Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor eds., "The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Summary

Andrew Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor, The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 2025)

This ambitious edited collection encourages readers to think in bigger ways about the global Second World War. That includes a wider frame in space and time, but also a larger geopolitical perspective of the war as a world-system crisis and an expanded social perspective on who fought the war and why. A team of international scholars take on this task in chapters ranging from the global alliance system and colonial mobilization to studies of particular cities and dockyards.

In a wide-ranging conversation with both editors, we discuss questions of imperialism, the rise and limits of US global hegemony, the 'ragged ends' of the war, and the social movements of a window of global possibility in 1945–46. 

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Mark Baker

Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.
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