Lunch Seminar
The Gift of Destruction: Defense Aid and the World Economy in the Second World War

What is the relationship between war and globalization?
Decades of research in political and economic history teaches it is negative. War, especially major war, promotes national hatreds and state control over all aspects of society and  economy, disintegrating markets and dividing peoples. In most histories of the twentieth century, 1914-1945 duly appears as an era of unmitigated deglobalization, with the Second  World War as its absolute nadir.
This seminar offers an  alternative view.
Focusing on programmes of inter-Allied  defence aid in the Second World War, like the United States’ Lend-Lease Act, Thomas Bottelier presents a new account of the global political economy at war. Providing allies with the means of destruction created new forms of transnational  cooperation and exchange. These were not necessarily  beholden to markets and the price mechanism – a finding of some relevance to current debates about achieving the
ecological transition.

With

• Presenter | Thomas BOTTELIER is an historian of war and international relations, and currently Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre
  d’histoire de Sciences Po. His EU-funded research project, ‘Mobilizing the World: A New History of Inter-Allied Cooperation in the Second World War, 1939-1945’, looks at the supranational organisation of production and logistics in the global Allied war effort.
• Discussant | Martin THOMAS is Professor of Imperial History and director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the  University of Exeter. A fellow of the Leverhulme Trust and the Independent Social Research Foundation, he is the author of the forthcoming The End of Empires and a World Remade:  A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton, 2024).

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