20 World War II and Global Society

World War II and Global Society is the study of how the Second World War extended and intensified the total mobilization patterns established in the First World War to a genuinely global scale, drawing in populations and resources across every inhabited continent, targeting civilian populations with unprecedented deliberateness, and producing social, political, and technological transformations whose effects extended for decades after the conflict's end.

An Even More Complete Mobilization

Mobilizing entire economies and populations

Belligerent states in the Second World War extended the total economic and manpower mobilization first developed during the First World War even further, directing a still greater share of national economic output, labor, and scientific research toward the war effort and sustaining this mobilization across a conflict that again lasted years rather than months.

Global geographic reach

Unlike the primarily European and Middle Eastern theaters that dominated the First World War, the Second World War involved major, sustained combat across Europe, North Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific simultaneously, engaging colonial populations and resources from across the globe far more extensively than the earlier conflict had.

Civilian Populations as Direct Military Targets

Strategic bombing of cities

Both major coalitions in the conflict conducted sustained, large-scale bombing campaigns deliberately targeting industrial cities and, in numerous instances, civilian populations directly, reflecting a marked intensification of the trend, already visible in the First World War, toward treating civilian morale and infrastructure as legitimate military objectives.

Genocide and mass civilian atrocity

The Second World War included the deliberate, systematic mass murder of civilian populations on racial and ethnic grounds, most notably the Holocaust, representing an atrocity of organized, industrialized violence against civilians that exceeded even the war's already unprecedented direct military destruction and stands as a defining, singular horror of the conflict.

Occupation and civilian suffering

Extended military occupation of conquered territories subjected civilian populations to forced labor, requisitioning, and severe deprivation across much of the conflict's duration, extending the war's direct impact on civilian life well beyond the areas of active combat operations themselves.

Scientific and Technological Mobilization

Total mobilization of scientific research

Belligerent states organized scientific and engineering research on an unprecedented scale directly in service of the war effort, producing transformative military technologies including radar, improved aircraft and naval capability, and ultimately nuclear weapons, reflecting an intensification of the state-directed industrial mobilization seen in the earlier conflict into a form that now encompassed cutting-edge scientific research as well.

The atomic bomb as a culmination of total war logic

The development and use of nuclear weapons represented an extreme culmination of total war's logic of directing a nation's full technological and industrial capacity toward producing decisive military force, while simultaneously introducing a weapon whose destructive capacity fundamentally altered subsequent thinking about the acceptable scale and conduct of warfare between major powers.

Social Transformations Accelerated by the War

Renewed and expanded roles for women

As in the First World War, women again entered industrial, agricultural, and military support roles in very large numbers to sustain the war effort, and in several belligerent societies this wartime experience contributed to lasting shifts in expectations regarding women's participation in the workforce and public life.

Wartime experience and postwar political change

The shared experience of extensive wartime service and sacrifice among diverse populations, including colonial subjects mobilized in large numbers for the war effort, contributed to postwar demands for expanded political rights and, in numerous colonial territories, directly fueled subsequent movements toward decolonization.

Institutional and Global Consequences

Reordering the international system

The war's conclusion produced a fundamentally reordered international system, with previously dominant imperial powers substantially weakened and new international institutions established specifically to manage relations among states and prevent renewed global conflict, reflecting direct institutional responses to the catastrophic scale of the preceding conflict.

The advent of the nuclear age

The demonstrated destructive capacity of nuclear weapons introduced an entirely new strategic consideration into subsequent international relations, fundamentally altering the calculations of major powers regarding the potential costs of future large-scale conflict between nuclear-armed states.

Why World War II and Global Society Matter

Representing the fullest historical expression of total war

This conflict stands as the most extensive and destructive realization of the total war pattern examined throughout the field, extending economic mobilization, civilian targeting, and technological mobilization to their most complete historical expression to date.

Establishing the conditions of the subsequent global order

Understanding the war's global mobilization, its unprecedented atrocities, and its technological transformations is essential to explaining the subsequent international order, the nuclear-influenced strategic environment, and the widespread movements toward decolonization that would shape the remainder of the twentieth century.