ABSTRACT
This chapter on the Second World War discusses the belligerents’ strategies to support the war effort, stressing continuities with pre-war imperial policy designs. On the one hand, colonies experienced a boom in raw materials, namely rubber, vegetable fats, and strategic materials. Overseas territories helped both the Allies and Axis powers to organize war economies and to finance the war by supplying natural resources and labour. On the other hand, the war changed economic activities, notably in Africa, transforming social relations and political activism in colonies. Nonetheless, states in Europe planned for their post-war development in similar ways as they had approached empire before the war. The dichotomy inherent in imperial states between subject colonies and metropolitan nations persisted into the period after 1945.
