Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INTERALLIED (Mobilising the World: A New History of Inter-Allied Cooperation in the Second World War, 1939-1945)
Période du rapport: 2022-02-01 au 2024-01-31
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, sought to highlight the global, transnational and interdependent character of the Allied war effort. The project asked: 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 has contributed (1) to providing an account of the political economy of global Allied warfare, and thus to the history of the global economy at war, which has yet to be written; (2) to advancing the recent 'global turn' in Second World War studies, and thus to resisting nationalistic and Eurocentric readings of the conflict, frequently deployed politically today; and (3) to producing new, practical knowledge of how societies can cope with massive shocks to their systems of supply, production and trade, and prevent damaging and wasteful competition for scarce resources.
The work for the project was divided into five work packages: literature review (WP1), archival research (WP2), management (WP3), communication and dissemination (WP4) and training and transfer of knowledge (WP5). The progressive numbering of the work packages should not be taken to imply that the researcher completed WP1 before moving on to WP2 and so on. Though I began work on WP1, this continued throughout the project, while the milestone of WP2’s completion was not reached until month (M) 22.
The bulk of the work for the project was completed in the project’s second year. The labour for WP1 was desk research, undertaken through the facilities of Sciences Po’s Library, begun in M1 and continued to the project’s end. By contrast WP2 involved on-site archival research, which necessitated travel and limited work on this element to certain moments, specifically June-July 2022 (M5-6), May-June 2023 (M16-17) and August-November (M18-22) 2023. The first deliverable to be completed was for WP3, namely the Personalised Career Development Plan (PCDP), finished in March 2022 (M3). This was followed by the first deliverables for WP4, a set of conference presentations. Four months of the project were devoted to a major non-expert dissemination and TOK to the host activity, a lecture course at Sciences Po between January and May 2023 (M12-15). At around the same time I completed the bulk of WP3 in the form of the Data Management Plan and the project’s Ethics Requirements. The final eight months of the project were largely devoted to the completion of WP4 through a series of academic conference and seminar presentations, media interviews, a public/policy roundtable and an international conference that I organised. The only WP to not produce its own deliverables is WP5, because the training courses originally envisioned were discontinued and there were no workable replacement either at Sciences Po or at other Paris institutions of higher education (see below Section 5).
The bulk of the work for the project was completed in the project’s second year. The labour for WP1 was desk research, undertaken through the facilities of Sciences Po’s Library, begun in M1 and continued to the project’s end. By contrast WP2 involved on-site archival research, which necessitated travel and limited work on this element to certain moments, specifically June-July 2022 (M5-6), May-June 2023 (M16-17) and August-November (M18-22) 2023. The first deliverable to be completed was for WP3, namely the Personalised Career Development Plan (PCDP), finished in March 2022 (M3). This was followed by the first deliverables for WP4, a set of conference presentations. Four months of the project were devoted to a major non-expert dissemination and TOK to the host activity, a lecture course at Sciences Po between January and May 2023 (M12-15). At around the same time I completed the bulk of WP3 in the form of the Data Management Plan and the project’s Ethics Requirements. The final eight months of the project were largely devoted to the completion of WP4 through a series of academic conference and seminar presentations, media interviews, a public/policy roundtable and an international conference that I organised. The only WP to not produce its own deliverables is WP5, because the training courses originally envisioned were discontinued and there were no workable replacement either at Sciences Po or at other Paris institutions of higher education (see below Section 5).
The project has contributed to progress beyond the state of the art in the following ways. First, it has established that inter-Allied defence aid - the provision of goods and services to anti-Axis states and fighting forces and the main mechanism of integration of the Allied coalition - was very large in value and may well have compensated for the global loss of international commerce due to war. This is a major finding since we until now lacked estimates of the total value of inter-Allied aid and its size relative to the world economy. It also establishes that the Second World War was not uniformly a disintegrative force and that there are alternatives to the market in organising global exchange - a finding with important implications for current debates about the ecological transition. Second, the project has established that political economy is a promising vector for writing the global and transnational history of the Second World War (and studying the phenomenon of war more broadly), which until now has primarily been the province of cultural and to a lesser extent military history.
The project has produced two forthcoming, peer-reviewed outputs that advances these arguments:
- "Les choses de la guerre : L'aide interalliée dans l'histoire globale de la Seconde Guerre mondiale", Histoire @ Politique 52 (2024/1, June 2024);
- "The 'Grand Alliance of Nations': Making war global, waging global war, 1937-1955", in Essays on the Greater Second World War, eds. Ruth Lawlor and Andrew N. Buchanan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, May 2025)
A third publication is nearing completion but has yet to pass peer review.
The project has produced two forthcoming, peer-reviewed outputs that advances these arguments:
- "Les choses de la guerre : L'aide interalliée dans l'histoire globale de la Seconde Guerre mondiale", Histoire @ Politique 52 (2024/1, June 2024);
- "The 'Grand Alliance of Nations': Making war global, waging global war, 1937-1955", in Essays on the Greater Second World War, eds. Ruth Lawlor and Andrew N. Buchanan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, May 2025)
A third publication is nearing completion but has yet to pass peer review.