Adam Tooze

The economics of the war with Nazi Germany

The entanglement between war and economics revealed by the First World War was to become one of the defining features of the first half of the twentieth century. Never before had war been so resource-intensive, never before were economies so self-consciously reorganized around the needs of war. The war economies of the First World War were novel and unanticipated improvisations, experiments in organization. In 1914 the sense of a break was dramatic and shocking, but it had the virtue of clarity. There had been peace and then there was war. After the First World War the victorious powers struggled to restore the clarity of this boundary between war and peace. The new self-conscious ideology of peacefulness that was such a characteristic feature of international relations in the 1920s had its counterpart in the effort to restore the international economy. The relationship between economic restoration and pacification was reciprocal. Curbing arms expenditure and restoring the ‘knave proof’ discipline of the international gold standard were conjoined aims. Perhaps this nexus was best exemplified by the British ‘ten year rule’ adopted in 1919. To create the conditions necessary for fiscal consolidation and a return to the gold standard, this mandated that military budgeting should proceed on the assumption that no major war should be expected within ten years. In 1928 Churchill had it made self-perpetuating. Generalized across the international system in the 1920s, the manipulation of these relationships between finance and strategy was one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of the liberal powers. But acknowledging this connection also implied a new and terrifying vulnerability. A breakdown in the security system would involve a rupture in the balance of the

The Cambridge History of the Second World War

The conflict that ended in 1945 is often described as a ‘total war’, unprecedented in both scale and character. Volume III of The Cambridge History of the Second World War adopts a transnational approach to offer a comprehensive and global analysis of the war as an economic, social and cultural event. Across 27 chapters and four key parts, the volume addresses complex themes such as the political economy of industrial war, the social practices of war, the moral economy of war and peace and the repercussions of catastrophic destruction. A team of nearly 30 leading historians together show how entire nations mobilized their economies and populations in the face of unimaginable violence, and how they dealt with the subsequent losses that followed. The volume concludes by considering the lasting impact of the conflict and the memory of war across different cultures of commemoration.

Wars of displacement: exile and uprooting in the 1940s

Issues of war finance engaged Japan, republican or nationalist China and the Chinese Communists throughout all fourteen years, and for the Japanese also included Southeast Asia between 1941 and 1945. This chapter shows that long periods of war and occupation in Asia could be financed by printing money because the demand for it held up sufficiently well that hyperinflation was largely avoided and confidence in money was not entirely destroyed. Japan, although its mobilization for war was badly managed and often poorly executed, never had any difficulty in financing war, starting with the so-called Peking Incident in 1937 and continuing until the Pacific War ended in 1945. Finance for both the Sino-Japanese and the Pacific War was at the expense of much higher inflation than for other major combatants, drastic cuts in civilian consumption, and considerable repressed inflation. In China and Southeast Asia, the financial techniques Japan adopted to finance occupation avoided any real payment.

Battles for morale: an entangled history of total war in Europe, 1939–1945

A fresh material history of the Second World War can throw into relief neglected questions of meaning and understanding of the nature of modern war, and of the basis of military power. In older treatments and tabulations of the material side of war, two sets of numbers stand out: first, the comparative production of various weapons, and second, measures of control of certain raw materials. This chapter focuses on the three great raw materials of the twentieth century: coal, in a class of its own, and iron ore and oil. There were close connections between coal and iron ore, and some between coal and oil. There were good economic reasons for consuming bulky and cheap raw materials close to centres of production, but all typically travelled long distances. The history of the control of raw materials in wartime is as much a history of the control of transport, as of production.