Margins and Legacies of WWII as a Global War
Trevor Getz, Heather Salter, Michele Louro, Roy Doron, Jonathan T. Reynolds, John Williams
This panel asks what happens when we the Second World War by foregrounding perspectives that sit at the edges of empire, nation, and historical memory. Together, the papers trace how people far from the well-known narrative epicenters nonetheless experienced the war as an intimate, dislocating, and world-shaping event. One paper examines British efforts to mobilize West African troops for the Burma Campaign, revealing a web of contradictions: African soldiers trained for desert warfare but deployed to jungles; colonial racial hierarchies so rigid that exiled Polish officers were drafted to lead them; and a conflict imagined for the Sahara that unfolded in Southeast Asia. A second paper widens the lens across West Africa, showing how both soldiers and civilians encountered shifting imperial loyalties, coercive mobilization, and new political ideas that unsettled colonial authority. A third paper shifts to rural north China, where locust plagues, famine, and fractured occupation regimes forced communities into parallel wartime struggles largely absent from global narratives. The final microhistory follows three Polish-Jewish-South African brothers whose wartime service shaped their contested positions within apartheid’s racial order. Together, these papers illuminate WWII as a genuinely global war—one lived and interpreted from profoundly liminal and marginalized spaces.