Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Mobilising the World: A New History of Inter-Allied Cooperation in the Second World War, 1939-1945

Project description

A global look at the Second World War

World War II was a global war. More than 100 million people from 30 countries participated, fighting on the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers. The victory of the Allied Powers would have been impossible without extensive coordination, organisation and planning. However, little is known about this extraordinary organisation. The EU-funded INTERALLIED project will shed light on how the Allies managed to mobilise global markets for war between 1939 and 1945. It will provide an account of the political economy of global Allied warfare and describe a history of the global economy at war.

Objective

In the Second World War, the Allies waged war on a truly global scale for the first and, one hopes, last time in history. Victory required the
mobilisation and transportation of wo/men and materiel on all continents and across four out of the Earth’s five oceans. Success would have been impossible without extensive inter-Allied coordination, organisation and planning. Starting in 1939, a system of inter-Allied organs was set up by Britain and France, whose mission it was to coordinate the supply of the Allied war effort from a common pool. It survived France’s fall in 1940 and, upon US entry in 1941, was revived. By 1942, it had evolved into a global network of military, production and logistics experts from India to Canada and South Africa to Norway, organised into a series of so-called Combined Boards and dedicated to the nuts and bolts of worldwide coalition warfare. Yet we lack a history of this extraordinary organisation. Despite the Second World War’s self-evidently global nature, the tendency to frame it in national, comparative and Eurocentric terms is very deeply entrenched. INTERALLIED, by contrast, seeks to highlight the global, transnational and interdependent character of the Allied war effort. The project asks: how did the Allies seek to couple, then uncouple their war economies, and mobilise (then demobilise) global markets for war, between 1939 and 1945? It seeks (1) to provide an account of the political economy of global Allied warfare, and thus to reach for a history of the global economy at war, which has yet to be written; (2) to advance a recent 'global turn' in Second World War studies, and thus to resist nationalistic and Eurocentric readings of the conflict, frequently deployed politically today; and (3) to produce new, practical knowledge about how societies can cope with massive shocks to their systems of supply, production and trade, and prevent damaging and wasteful competition for scarce resources.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2020

See all projects funded under this call

Coordinator

FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 184 707,84
Address
RUE SAINT GUILLAUME 27
75341 PARIS CEDEX 07
France

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 184 707,84
My booklet 0 0