Andrew N. Buchanan – författare

A comprehensive review of World War II that offers a global-level analysisWritten for academics and students of history, World War II in Global Perspective, 1931-1953 presents a dynamic and global account of the historical events prior to, during, and after World War II. The author—a noted expert on the topic—explores the main theaters of the war and discusses the connections between them. He also examines the impact of the war on areas of the world that are often neglected in historical accounts, including Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the so-called ‘neutral’ countries. This comprehensive text clearly shows how in the struggle against the Axis powers, the United States replaced Britain as the global superpower.The author discusses the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Korean War (1950-1953) and argues that the core years of the war (1939-1945) cannot be understood without considering the turbulent events that framed them. The text puts World War II in context as a series of large regional conflicts that intersected and overlapped, finally emerging as a genuine “world war” with the formal entry of the United States in late 1941. This vital text:  Offers a comprehensive review of World War II that frames it in a global contextGives weight to the economic and political developments of the warProvides a robust account of the main military campaignsContains illustrations and maps that themselves highlight little-known aspects of the global war

A comprehensive review of World War II that offers a global-level analysisWritten for academics and students of history, World War II in Global Perspective, 1931-1953 presents a dynamic and global account of the historical events prior to, during, and after World War II. The author—a noted expert on the topic—explores the main theaters of the war and discusses the connections between them. He also examines the impact of the war on areas of the world that are often neglected in historical accounts, including Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the so-called ‘neutral’ countries. This comprehensive text clearly shows how in the struggle against the Axis powers, the United States replaced Britain as the global superpower.The author discusses the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Korean War (1950-1953) and argues that the core years of the war (1939-1945) cannot be understood without considering the turbulent events that framed them. The text puts World War II in context as a series of large regional conflicts that intersected and overlapped, finally emerging as a genuine “world war” with the formal entry of the United States in late 1941. This vital text:  Offers a comprehensive review of World War II that frames it in a global contextGives weight to the economic and political developments of the warProvides a robust account of the main military campaignsContains illustrations and maps that themselves highlight little-known aspects of the global war

Offering a global account of the ‘long’ World War II, this book challenges conventional narratives that picture a clearly defined war period (1939-1945) followed by a distinct postwar era dominated by the encroaching cold war. Arguing instead that while some aspects of the war did end abruptly in 1945, in many corners of the world ‘war’ bled directly and raggedly into the ‘postwar’ such as Allied Occupation in Italy, the civil war in Greece, the rise of US hegemony and struggles for national liberation in India. From World War to Postwar shows how critical developments in the latter half of the 20th century were a direct result of the Second World War, and reconceptualizes the conflict as an intersecting series of regional wars as well as an overarching world war. Offering new ways to think about how ‘the war’ shaped the second half of the 20th century, this book reaches into those regions often overlooked in the study of WWII. Showing how wartime relations between the US and Latin America played a crucial role in the worldwide development of US hegemony, how WWII accelerated the retreat from Empire in Sub-Saharan Africa and how it encouraged the growth of anti-colonialism in regions around the world, Buchanan offers a truly global account of the outcomes of the largest conflict in human history, and challenges the temporal boundaries in which we view it.

Offering a global account of the ‘long’ World War II, this book challenges conventional narratives that picture a clearly defined war period (1939-1945) followed by a distinct postwar era dominated by the encroaching cold war. Arguing instead that while some aspects of the war did end abruptly in 1945, in many corners of the world ‘war’ bled directly and raggedly into the ‘postwar’ such as Allied Occupation in Italy, the civil war in Greece, the rise of US hegemony and struggles for national liberation in India. From World War to Postwar shows how critical developments in the latter half of the 20th century were a direct result of the Second World War, and reconceptualizes the conflict as an intersecting series of regional wars as well as an overarching world war. Offering new ways to think about how ‘the war’ shaped the second half of the 20th century, this book reaches into those regions often overlooked in the study of WWII. Showing how wartime relations between the US and Latin America played a crucial role in the worldwide development of US hegemony, how WWII accelerated the retreat from Empire in Sub-Saharan Africa and how it encouraged the growth of anti-colonialism in regions around the world, Buchanan offers a truly global account of the outcomes of the largest conflict in human history, and challenges the temporal boundaries in which we view it.

The Greater Second World War challenges the traditional temporal and geographic frameworks of World War II, expanding the timeline to include a series of regional conflicts and revolutions that began in 1931 and continued into the mid-1950s. These conflicts bookended a "central paroxysm" defined by the intervention of the United States into every theater of the war, rendering it genuinely global. The essays within this volume bring top-level accounts of US, European, and Axis strategic maneuvering into conversation with social histories of "bottom-up" agency in ways that destabilize conventional narratives.Working with novel and overlapping scales of time and space and attuned to ongoing and lively debates about the place of the nation-state in global history after 1945, the scholars featured in The Greater Second World War seek to not only describe the war's beginnings in Asia and Africa—rather than in Europe—but also trace its ends to the shatter zones of the Soviet frontier, the struggles for sovereignty in contested spaces, and the long-reaches of US imperialism well into the late twentieth century. Together, their contributions reveal how the cascading imperial and economic crises of the mid-twentieth century triggered a series of discrete local and regional struggles that took on the character of a singular, unified "world war" after the entry of the United States into every theater and almost every corner of the world.Contributors: Marco Maria Aterrano, Th. W. Bottelier, Pablo del Hierro, Alexandre Fortes, Kelly A. Hammond, Ashley Jackson, Naina Manjrekar, David Motadel, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Martin Thomas