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Poincaré's invasion of the Ruhr District in 1923 might have been driven by sincerely-held convictions, but inflicted untold damage on the political health of the fledgling German Republic. Passive resistance by the people of the Ruhr was driven by their republican convictions, but the physical and moral price they paid during this campaign was compounded by its failure. Their commitment to the republican order was further compromised by the readiness of cash-strapped industrialists to renege on their promises to Weimar. A decade later Hitler's Nazis were arguably the indirect beneficiaries of the Ruhr Crisis. Despite this bleak scenario, there were moments when key players — French and German — seemed to recognise that the futures of France and Germany were inextricably linked if Europe was ever to enjoy peace and prosperity. That realisation has finally born fruit in the aftermath of World War Two with the creation of the European Union.

This chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book and points to the long–term effects of the events it covers, in the areas of military tactics, intelligence practice, and even the discipline of history. It touches on World War Two, the Cold War, and the present American and British intervention in Iraq.

This chapter describes the postwar consolidation of a new style of covert empire, in which real executive power in the Middle Eastern colonies was held by intelligence agents operating in hidden reaches of the bureaucracy. The scheme evolved informally after the failure of proposals for a more formal intelligence network, which were deemed impolitic. The covert style allowed colonial control in the increasingly anti-imperial postwar world, in places where more overt control would be strenuously resisted but where paranoia dictated some kind of control. The discreet air control scheme was the centerpiece of this system. The covert mode enabled the British to remain in Iraq well after the declaration of Iraqi independence in 1932, through the fifties. The chapter closes with a description of the growing paranoia of Iraqis and other powers in the region about the British presence and British incredulity in response.

Chapter Two explores the political ferment in Chinese American communities during and immediately after World War Two. Chinese politics remained a major obsession, and the Chinese civil war split the community. But after the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which gave Chinese immigrants the ability to become naturalized citizens, American politics began to attract the attention of more of the Chinese American population. An influx of thousands of China-born wives under the provisions of 1946 “war bride” legislation compounded this effect: war veterans of Chinese ancestry pleaded with Congress to allow continued family immigration and an end to immigration officials’ harassment of their wives. By 1947 and 1948, the growing importance of American domestic politics, and the increasingly poor reputation of the Nationalists, signaled the declining power of conservative leaders and organizations in Chinese American communities.

This chapter focuses on a decade dominated by war. Britain's war with Germany in September 1939 overshadowed China's continuing struggle with Japan, and this was not reversed when Britain entered the war in the Far East in December 1941. Meanwhile, the politics of the left in Britain were complicated by the Nazi-Soviet Pact until June 1941. After 1941 the British left contributed to a broad, humanitarian fundraising campaign in support of China (the British United Aid for China Fund). After 1945 the left did not regain interest in China until the Chinese Communists had gained the upper hand in the latter stages of the Civil War with the ruling KMT. The CCC supported the Chinese Communists, but with some reservations, and a new solidarity organisation was created in 1949 to foster relations with the new People's Republic of China (PRC).

The outbreak of World War Two caused the Nazi government to intensify their persecution of the Jews. The chapter first discusses the persecutions and trials endured by the Jews in the months leading up to the war. Upon the outbreak of war, Jewish properties were confiscated, people were sent to labor and concentration camps, and even emigration was prohibited. When curfews and food rationing were implemented, the Jews suffered even more and they lived in daily fear of the mini-pogroms conducted by the Gestapo. Government propaganda blamed the Jews for the war and the German population became even more hardened towards them. The chapter also relates how the Jewish people tried yet again to cope with their desperate circumstances. The final section reconstructs the story of an elderly Jewish couple and their experiences throughout the war.

The overwhelming tragedy of the Holocaust changed the rules of engagement according to many Jews, convincing most that a Jewish safe-haven is more necessary than ever and only acceptable under Jewish self-government. Many Orthodox Jews who were a-Zionist or anti-Zionist changed their position on the establishment of a Jewish homeland or state. But mass immigration to the Land of Israel and creating a military force to protect the community there were considered by many to be an act of defiance against God’s dictate that Jews vow to refrain from mass immigration to Palestine. The problem was resolved for many by the Holocaust, which represented to them Gentile rebellion against their own divinely dictated vow not to persecute the Jews living among them too harshly. Historical crisis and the meaning applied to it thus began the process of breaking down the traditional rabbinic barriers to engaging in war.

The Palestine war of 1948 coincided with the initial phases of three historic processes affecting the entire Middle East in the aftermath of World War Two: the formation of independent national states, the emergence of a distinct Arab state system, and the replacement of colonial domination with US-Soviet rivalry. As these processes evolved, they increasingly interacted with one another, and it was this multidimensional dynamic that determined the decisions taken by the parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict regarding war and peace. This war left Palestinian society leaderless and disorganized. Its principal political institutions during the British mandate had been closely identified with key members of the old elite, and suffered their fate. The Palestinians evolved varying strategies of survival in adaptation to their disparate circumstances. Palestinian nationalist patriotism did, however, ultimately emerge as a dominant force.

From the 1930s onwards, colonial administrations made concerted efforts to strengthen local government institutions. New administrative units were established, and given both the right to raise revenue and responsibility for public services. These efforts intensified after World War Two, as African protests against declining living standards and colonial policies proliferated. Local governments were intended to deflect demand for social services to a local level. Further, proponents argued that Africans would be more willing to shoulder a larger tax burden if they were closer to the authority collecting the taxes and spending the revenue. This chapter examines the rise of local authority treasuries and offers speculative conclusions regarding the impact of decentralization on development. It argues that the principal impact was growing inequality between local areas in the services offered.

This chapter stretches from the 1920s to the 1960s, during which time the public profile of the ‘drink problem’ was relatively low and traditional constraints on lifestyle and pleasure began to be challenged. As evangelicalism declined and welfarist forms of government expanded, public alarm about drinking lessened somewhat and beer consumption even became seen aspartly positive during World War Two. So was this an age of permissiveness? This chapter explains that, despite these changes shifts in the contours of the ‘drink problem’, phenomena such as youth drinking and drink-driving were heavily censured in law and public discourse. So, efforts to morally regulate drinking were not abandoned during this period but revised.

This chapter proposes a new framework for understanding the African diaspora. It rejects the ‘Middle Passage Epistemology’, which dictates that diaspora studies are dominated by the African-American experience as shaped by transatlantic slavery. As an alternative, it proposes a ‘Post-War Epistemology’ that proceeds from a reading of World War Two as a transnational event that mobilised black people all over the world. Reading forward and backward from the War allows us to give adequate attention to a wider range of historical actors, including people of different genders and displaced or mobilised Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. It also brings into focus new kinds of connections among black people, a ‘horizontal diaspora’ that rests on elective affinities – sexual and cultural as well as political. The chapter draws on a range of literary and historical texts.

Beginning with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s response to the 1918 armistice and her fictional reimagining of it in her novel The Years, this introduction sets out the importance of questions of peace and Europe to Woolf’s practices as a writer. Situating Woolf within broader literary responses to questions of war and peace, including those who supported war, such as H.G. Wells, and her involvement with the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, we explore Woolf’s legacy as a writer whose aesthetical innovations and theoretical interventions aimed to bring new ideas of peaceful co-existence into being. Surveying the critical legacy of Woolf as a theorist of war and of violence, we suggest that the recent turn to “weak theory” within modernist studies can benefit from Woolf’s literary pacifism and her willingness to embrace “the subjunctive, the speculative, and the counterfactual”.

This chapter provides a guide to landmark episodes in James Joyce criticism and key examples of the different ways in which his work is currently being read. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some critics identified a stylistic advance beyond both Edwardian and naturalistic fiction. Arnold Bennett's review provides praise and condemnation of Ulysses. Stuart Gilbert takes pains to highlight Joyce's classical literary heritage. The years between the end of World War Two and the explosion of critical interest in Joyce's work caused by the emergence of modern literary and cultural ‘theory’ saw the debate over his achievement and legacy steadily intensify. Joyce's work has a long and involved relationship with psychoanalytic criticism. Joyce's ‘general awareness of Irish politics’ expressed itself in a number of lasting commitments. There has been a problem with Joyce's belief in the cultural redemptiveness of the artwork.

This chapter focuses on a neglected facet of Scottish men’s sense of self – the expression of intimacy and emotion in the context of one man’s letters home to his wife during an extended posting abroad in World War Two. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire - these are not qualities commonly identified in the narratives of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century. The war provided the backdrop for a correspondence which allowed a serving soldier to explore his emotional side, and sustain his marriage, not only by consuming narratives of love but producing them too. Through a close examination of personal correspondence this chapter argues that this correspondent encapsulated a modern masculine self that Scottish men were to practice with greater confidence in the postwar decades.

The crisis of the 1930s made changes in American foreign policy a necessity, and events demonstrated that Franklin Roosevelt made the correct decisions on the major issues to protect American interests and meet the challenges. For FDR, World War II was the second chance for the United States to create a lasting peace, one based on the Grand Alliance, collective security, and the United Nations. Beyond just the defeat of Germany and Japan, it was an opportunity to build a world order that would produce peace and prosperity through a cooperative, multilateral international system. This was Roosevelt's great legacy, to envision a different world than the one that proceeded the war and to begin to establish the values and institutions it would be built on. In doing so, he transformed American foreign policy. Roosevelt was the most important and most successful foreign policymaker in the nation's history.

This chapter focuses on the ‘long war’ between the competing ideologies of democracy, communism and fascism that defined the twentieth century. Only decades after World War One, democracy’s existence was threatened. The Allied countries would fight in democracy’s name, but it was a war for survival against the vicious imperialism of the Axis powers. The grand alliance between the democratic powers and the Soviet Union defeated fascism, but this was due in large part to force of numbers and the self-destructiveness of the Nazis. Contestation continued between the two remaining ideologies of democracy and communism until the end of the Cold War. In 1989 the ideological contestation that had defined so much of the twentieth century was replaced by a remarkable consensus around liberal democracy. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the liberal zeitgeist of the post-Cold War era.

This chapter examines the conflicts in Mairi MacInnes's poetry, fiction, and memoirs between creative freedom, domestic ties, the love of home, and expatriation. It draws upon her memoirs and poetry of recollection to address the relationship between lived experience and the formal poise of her art. The casual circumstances of what merely appears to happen or befall are seen in her art as inevitabilities, especially when they concern natural processes. This sense of an inevitable ‘absolute circumstance’ is then followed out in works that address the fateful occurrences of family history, decision-making, and grief.