The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives. Edited by Andrew N. Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor. Cornell University Press, 2025, 398 pp.
When did World War II begin? When did it end? Who were the combatants? And was it a single, global conflict or instead a series of regional wars in a trench coat? Andrew Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor led a team of historians to provide some unconventional answers to these seemingly straightforward questions in The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives. The result is a series of essays exploring the “ragged edges” of the world’s largest conflict. The book provides some unique perspectives, ultimately pushing at the war’s conventional academic boundaries. The individual essays expand the reader’s understanding of the conflict and offer new paradigms to consider. The contributors are an eclectic group of historians from around the world. Their diverse backgrounds are essential for the book to live up to its subtitle of “global perspectives.”
The book contains 11 independent essays that each probe a different aspect of the conflict. Some explore the roots of the war before violence erupted in China or Europe. Others examine how for many of the participants the war did not end in August 1945. Instead their own fights continued, often against new or even pre-war enemies. The book does an excellent job of broadening the scope of World War II. It looks beyond battlefields and commanders and unabashedly investigates social aspects of the conflict. Topics are as wide ranging as women’s rights, colonization and re-colonization issues, labor movements across the globe, and even post-victory gun control. Many of these issues that shaped the world after war may be unknown to even avid students of the period.
One of the most enlightening chapters is written by Naina Majrekar of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. She explores the labor strikes and naval mutinies surrounding the Dutch efforts to regain control of Indonesia beginning in late 1945. Readers may be surprised to learn that Australians and Indians alike refused to load and ship military equipment to the new conflict. The resulting Dutch logistics headaches limited their military response and directly contributed to Indonesian independence, which was only the first of many anti-colonial movements in the region.
Tejasvi Nagaraja from Cornell University continues this thread in a later chapter, examining broader strikes and mutinies. He directly connects such actions to anti-colonial movements across the world, including the refusal of many American soldiers to deploy to China after the fall of Japan. The American inability to surge troops there arguably supported the eventual communist victory on the mainland.
Another chapter that stood out for its unique topic and high-quality writing comes from Marco Maria Aterrano of the University of Naples Federico II. He discusses the postwar proliferation of arms in the hands of civilians that led to a long wave of crime and violence. He shows how even the local governments lacked their own arms and thus struggled to uphold the rule of law until several programs designed to disarm the public finally took effect. The result was an orgy of violence—which to many civilians was as vicious as the war itself—that lasted until gun restrictions reshaped several states.
Pablo Del Hierro of the University of Maastricht covers a myriad of larger topics in his chapter about Tangiers, Morocco. During the conflict, the city was wrapped up in the Spanish Civil War, serving as a hub of spying and intrigue. Later, it became a centerpiece of growing American economic hegemony. Del Hierro uses the city as a microcosm of broader themes experienced across the globe before, during, and after the war. Several other chapters are similarly readable and explore unique questions.
The natural outcome of an edited volume such as this is a wide divergence in the chapters of both topic and tone. This is both good and bad. While some chapters flow easily and provide excellent narratives that blend well with the academic arguments, others are ponderous and dense. For example, University of Arkansas’ Kelly A. Hammond’s chapter provides an intriguing look at how Chinese Muslims connected the China theater to the Middle East, and how they were heavily courted by the Japanese, who considered the minority group as potential key supporters of their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The topic is interesting, but the thick academic prose can be challenging to read. A chapter by Alexandre Fortes from the Rio de Janeiro Rural Federal University examining the Brazilian civil aviation industry suffers from similar writing.
Serious students of World War II and those wishing to broaden their understanding of the conflict should take a look at this book. Readers of all types would do well to attempt each chapter but should feel free to skip over those that do not capture their interest. Yet, the concluding chapter written by one of the editors is not to be missed, as it does a masterful job of combining the various threads into a cohesive argument that the global conflict extends far beyond many preconceived notions. The ending is a crescendo that will have scholars and casual readers alike rethinking World War II.
Lieutenant Colonel Ian Bertram, USAF