The Greater Second World War

Global Perspectives

Andrew N. Buchanan, Ruth Lawlor, Andrew N. Buchanan, Ruth Lawlor

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781501780660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Greater Second World War challenges the traditional temporal and geographic frameworks of World War II, expanding the timeline to include a series of regional conflicts and revolutions that began in 1931 and continued into the mid-1950s. These conflicts bookended a "central paroxysm" defined by the intervention of the United States into every theater of the war, rendering it genuinely global. The essays within this volume bring top-level accounts of US, European, and Axis strategic maneuvering into conversation with social histories of "bottom-up" agency in ways that destabilize conventional narratives.

Working with novel and overlapping scales of time and space and attuned to ongoing and lively debates about the place of the nation-state in global history after 1945, the scholars featured in The Greater Second World War seek to not only describe the war's beginnings in Asia and Africa—rather than in Europe—but also trace its ends to the shatter zones of the Soviet frontier, the struggles for sovereignty in contested spaces, and the long-reaches of US imperialism well into the late twentieth century. Together, their contributions reveal how the cascading imperial and economic crises of the mid-twentieth century triggered a series of discrete local and regional struggles that took on the character of a singular, unified "world war" after the entry of the United States into every theater and almost every corner of the world.

Contributors: Marco Maria Aterrano, Th. W. Bottelier, Pablo del Hierro, Alexandre Fortes, Kelly A. Hammond, Ashley Jackson, Naina Manjrekar, David Motadel, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Martin Thomas

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Greater Second World War
• 1. Subaltern Worldmaking after War: India, Indonesia, and the Indian Ocean Anticolonial Moment, 1945–1946
• 2. Decolonization, the Violence Continuum, and the Greater Second World War
• 3. The British Empire’s Pacific War
• 4. Nodes of Empire, Ports of Solidarity: Decolonization, Racial Capitalism, and the Global War-Work Mutiny of 1946
• 5. Soviet and US Involvement in the Colonial World, 1939–1945
• 6. A Global Metropolis: Tangier during the Second World War
• 7. The “Grand Alliance of Nations”: Making War Global, Waging Global War, 1937–1955
• 8. Civil Aviation and Hemispheric Defense: World War II and International Disputes over Brazilian Airlines
• 9. Armed Disorder: Reaffirming the State’s Monopoly on Legitimate Violence in Allied-Occupied Europe
• 10. Living with the Ghosts of Pan-Asianism?: Chinese Muslims, Internationalism, and Decolonization
• 11. Hopes Foreclosed and a World Remade: The Long Endings of World War II
• Contributors
• Index