Chad B. Denton, Loughlin Sweeney, Thomas W. Bottelier, Tatsuya Mitsuda
This panel argues that the world wars in Asia were not interruptions to global integration but zones of contact that generated new forms of cross-border connectivity. While recent scholarship in military and international history has begun to explore war-generated globalization, this work has not yet been brought into sustained conversation with world history. This panel bridges that gap, examining how conflict produced transnational exchanges of ideas, practices, and material across Asia—often between states simultaneously closing their borders to peacetime commerce.
Loughlin Sweeney traces how interactions between British, Indian, Japanese, Ottoman, and American officers during the First World War transformed military culture. Encounters in Asia forced a reckoning with competing models of professionalization, as officers learned not only from allies but from enemies, accelerating the shift from "gallantry" to "efficiency" as an organizing principle. Thomas Bottelier reexamines inter-Allied economic aid during the Second World War, arguing that alliances functioned as incubators of new international relationships rather than mere coalitions of convenience. United States aid to China, routed through British India, reveals multilateral networks of exchange operating within wartime blocs that complicate the image of the 1940s as a nadir of globalization. Chad Denton shows how Japan's metal requisition programs were modeled on German precedents from both world wars, with propaganda featuring Nazi parallels to justify the requisition of household objects, shrine bells, and bronze statues across Japan's empire.
Together, the papers demonstrate that wartime Asia was a site of intensive, if coerced, globalization, and that Asia was central—not peripheral—to these processes.