2026-06-25 –, Room 204 PC Desk (Seats 30)
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.
War and globalization: wartime globalization, deglobalization, war-generated connectivity, global entanglement, cross-border connections, closed borders, transimperial history, wartime internationalism, economic interdependence
Military: military professionalization, inter-service interactions, officer corps, military culture, gallantry, efficiency, professionalization, zone of contact, Allied cooperation, Axis alliance
Economics and resources: resource mobilization, war economies, economic autarky, strategic materials, Lend-Lease, economic aid, trade blocs, wartime trade, non-ferrous metals, metal requisitions, scrap metal, copper, salvage drives, raw materials, embargoes, blockades
Regions and empires: Asia-Pacific, East Asia, British Empire, Japanese empire, British India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ottoman Empire, occupied territories, comparative empire, colonial administration
Practices and concepts: policy transfer, total war, home front mobilization, propaganda, national spiritual mobilization, occupation, requisitions, economic collaboration, civilian compliance, resistance
Periods: First World War, Second World War, interwar period, 1914–1945, transwar
Disciplines/approaches: world history, military history, international history, business history, transnational history, material culture, comparative history
‘Efficiency’ and the globalisation of military organisation: Inter-service interactions between First World War officers in Asia
Abstract for Additional Participant 1:This paper examines military organization as a vector for the globalization of ideas of modernization and efficiency during the First World War. Before 1914, the imperial Great Powers legitimised their predominance with reference to technological modernity and civilizational superiority, yet this rhetoric sat alongside anxieties of decline and military backwardness. For Britain, fraught discussions since 1912 about the Army's slow modernisation had shifted the central organising concept within the officer corps from 'gallantry' to 'efficiency'. This transformation can be traced through interactions between officers of the British and Indian armies and their counterparts in Japan, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire. British officers voiced surprise at the pace of change in allied and enemy militaries, contributing to wider discussions surrounding 'modernity'. The paper situates this turn towards 'efficiency' within the broader global 'professional revolution' identified by Harold Perkin, Philip Ollorenshaw, and Ryan Martinez Mitchell.
Title for Additional Participant 2:Mobilizing Metal for Total War: German Models and Japanese Metal Requisitions, 1937–1945
Abstract for Additional Participant 2:In 1939, a Japanese journalist published excerpts from an American woman's account of German household metal requisitions during World War I, thinking her descriptions would be "helpful for housewives." Within two years, Japan had instituted a metal mobilization drive closely mirroring German practices. This paper examines Japan's metal requisitions, 1937–1945, focusing on how German precedents served as models, justifications, and propaganda tools. Following the Sino-Japanese War, scrap salvage became a vehicle for "national spiritual mobilization" through neighborhood associations and women's groups. The 1941 "Special Metal Collection" featured photographs of German requisitions. As in Germany, legislation extended to occupied territories (Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) targeting brassware, shrine bells, and statues. The paper argues that Japanese metal mobilization was a distinctive form of wartime policy transfer: a regime pursuing autarky that nonetheless depended on transnational knowledge circulation, showing how ideas traveled even as trade collapsed.
Title for Additional Participant 3:Inter-Allied Military and Economic Aid in Asia During the Second World War: Warlike Globalisation?
Abstract for Additional Participant 3:This paper rethinks how the Second World War fits into the history of globalisation, focusing on the war in Asia. In global economic history, the Second World War's image as the nadir of twentieth-century deglobalisation—marked by market disintegration and proliferating trade barriers—continues to predominate. This paper complicates that picture through a study of inter-Allied military and economic aid, particularly Lend-Lease to China (1941–1945). Recent work has reinterpreted Sino-American wartime aid as a relationship of interdependence, for example of US war production on Chinese raw materials, mediated by transnational business networks. This paper extends such revisionism by including British India, through which Lend-Lease had to pass, setting the aid relationship in its proper multilateral, inter-Allied context. It also examines aid beyond weaponry—infrastructure and education—highlighting the war as a force that created, not solely destroyed, transnational and global exchange.
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.
Loughlin Sweeney, FRHistS, is a Lecturer in History at Yonsei University, South Korea. His research covers the history of professionalisation, nationality, and warfare in the 19th-20th century British Empire, and the history of international law. He is the author of Irish Military Elites, Nation and Empire 1870-1925 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and the editor of Dreams of Modernity: China, the British Empire, and the Emergence of International Norms (Routledge, forthcoming). Recent publications include ‘A Return to Great Power Geopolitics? The Historical Context of Great Power Competition in Asia’ (Asian Affairs, 2024), and ‘Western Opium Consumption in China: Informal Empire, Medicine, and Modernity, 1840-1930’ (Social History of Medicine, 2023).
forthcoming
forthcoming