Chad B. Denton
Chad B. Denton is Professor of History at Underwood International College, Yonsei University, South Korea. His research focuses on wartime resource mobilization, economic collaboration, and recycling in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Japanese empire. He is the co-editor, with Heike Weber, of a special issue of Business History on waste economies and World War II (2022). Recent publications include "Are Carcasses Political? German Veterinarians and the Modernization of Rendering Technology, 1864–1940" (Technology and Culture, 2023), "Korean Kuzuya, 'German-Style Control' and the Business of Waste in Wartime Japan, 1931–1945" (Business History, 2022), and "New Caledonian Nickel and the Origins of the Axis Alliance, 1931–1940" (The Journal of Pacific History, 2019). He is currently working on a book manuscript, Confiscation and Collaboration: Mobilizing Metal in Hitler's Empire.
Yonsei University
Session
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.