ABSTRACT
In the 1930s Europeans had barely recovered from the ‘Great War’ of 1914-18, which cost Britain eight hundred thousand lives (more than half of them under the age of thirty), France more than a million and a half, and Germany nearly two million,before international conflict was again rearing its head (Hobsbawm 1995: 26). The human casualties, material damage, political instability, and psychological impact of this ‘world’ war had been on a scale and intensity hitherto unknown, while the range of territories that experienced military action graphically announced the age of globalisation. Almost all of Europe fought. Other continents were embroiled: New Zealanders and Australians
came to the Aegean, Canadians and Americans fought in France.The naval war spread from the Falkland islands to the North Atlantic.Similar globalising trends were to shape the Spanish civil war of 1936-9 and the ‘second’ world war of 1939-45, which as William Thompson points out, ironically engendered an ‘amazing planetary system of coordination – one that organised the movements of armies, peoples, and industries across the Atlantic and the Pacific’ (Spangler and Thompson 1993: 170).
