Q&A: 80 Years After World War II's End, a New History of the Empires That Ravaged the Globe

Historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin argues for a new interpretation of the Second World War in his book, "Scorched Earth."

May 8 marks 80 years since the end of World War II in Europe. Many histories of the war ignore the most brutal battlefields in East Asia and Eastern Europe. Others offer a one-dimensional portrayal of the conflict as a battle between democracy and totalitarianism, minimizing Stalin's despotism. Paul Thomas Chamberlin is a historian at Columbia University and the author of a new book, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II. In the book, he argues that World War II "did not end imperialism: imperialism ended the war.” In other words, World War II was an all-against-all colonial war waged by rival empires. Chamberlin argues that the war became global as Germany and Japan tried to colonize Eastern Europe and East Asia, dragging in the Soviet Union and the United States, who both had their own empires in these regions. The war ended with the victorious Soviets and Americans creating their own neo-imperial projects in the wake of the dissolution of the British and French Empires and the defeat of Berlin and Tokyo. Chamberlin is also the author of The Cold War’s Killing Fields and The Global Offensive. I spoke to Chamberlin over Zoom last week; our conversation follows, condensed and slightly edited for clarity.

Luke Johnson: World War II is the most studied conflict in human history. Why write another book about it?

Paul Thomas Chamberlin: I had been teaching classes on the history of U.S. foreign relations, and World War II is an important part of understanding the emergence of American power on the global stage. However, I found that the weeks when I had to discuss World War II were kind of boring. Most of the Western accounts hewed to a standard interpretation that emerged in the 1950s of good vs. evil. The war was framed as nation-states fighting against ideology: the U.S., Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan. 

I argue that it was the British Empire, the French Empire, the American empire, and the Soviet empire fighting against the rising German, Italian and Japanese empires. The interwar years were a period of rapid imperial expansion. The British and French empires clawed back territories across the Middle East that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. The Soviet Union tried to reincorporate old parts of the Russian Empire. The U.S. had colonies too, the largest of which was The Philippines. Japan, Germany, and Italy wanted colonies so that they could build themselves into major players on the world stage.

World War II is particularly well-suited to a good vs. evil narrative, because the evil of Germany and Japan is so clear. However, when we approach the Allies as good guys, the largest--and in many ways most consequential--member was the Soviet Union. In this framing, Stalin becomes a good guy; but Stalin was responsible for all sorts of atrocities in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the Soviet Union was largely responsible for defeating Germany. 

LJ: You write that World War II was an extension of colonial wars. Why were those wars so much more bloody than wars in the past?

PTC: I think that it's an important distinction, and one that people in the Second World War would have been very comfortable with. There was "civilized war" that took place between established nation-states with armies, soldiers in uniform, and on a battlefield. They had a battle; somebody wins, somebody loses. 

The Western world was also engaged in the global project of colonialism. As part of that project, countries were fighting what they called colonial wars or savage wars. You have an imperial power moving into an area that was not controlled by a nation-state, fighting often against entire populations. The rules of civilized war didn't apply. The conflict was not limited to the battlefield; it was often taking place in cities and towns. The restrictions on violence were much looser. Armies could bomb towns or even launch extermination campaigns. A lot of the violence that we associate with World War II actually appears first in the colonial world. The first example of an extermination campaign goes back to the German Empire in Southwest Africa against the Herero people in modern-day Namibia. The first concentration camps were created by the British Empire in South Africa. The first instances of aerial bombing of cities took place in the colonial world.

Historian and author Paul Thomas Chamberlin. (Credit: Tony Bui)

LJ: Your book covers some of the less covered theaters of World War II, like East Asia and Eastern Europe. Can you describe the war in these places?

PTC: If you read standard accounts of World War II focused on the U.S. and Great Britain, you see theaters of the war that were in many ways less violent and less horrific than Eastern Europe and mainland Asia, where the military and civilian casualties were the highest. Something like 80% of the people who died in World War II died in either Eastern Europe or mainland Asia.

The notion of colonial war comes into play, because the Germans were trying to colonize large stretches of Eastern Europe. They were trying to depopulate these areas. That's one of the reasons why they had no compunctions about slaughtering civilians, starving millions of Soviet POWs to death in concentration camps, and prosecuting the Holocaust: they were doing all of this in service of an imperial vision. At the same time, large sections of Eastern Europe were recent colonial acquisitions of the Soviet Union from the beginning of World War II; the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and eastern Poland. This was territory where neither side was particularly worried about civilian casualties.

The war in Asia is much the same story. China was in the midst of consolidating itself as a single, coherent nation. Japan was trying to colonize large stretches of China. They carved out what was called Manchuria (northeast China), which they believed was necessary to stand up as a major world power. Likewise, the Pacific War was fought in places like The Philippines and islands in the South Pacific. These were colonial territories at the start of the war. Japan moved into these areas as contested colonial battlefields. Taking a cue from the British and French Empires, the Germans and Japanese saw this as colonial war. They didn't have to abide by the normal rules of war, as they saw it.

LJ: At the end of the war, the U.S. and Soviet Union were victorious. Ideologically, they were quite different. But you make a comparison that like their world orders that they tried to set up were somewhat similar. How so?

PTC: World War II is also a story about the rise and fall of colonialism. The 19th-century version of the colonial empire became obsolete. Neither the United States or Soviet Union was committed to the older concept of seizing new colonial territories. They both recognized that there was not a lot of value in having a formal colony overseas; it was too expensive.

However, they were both trying to come up with a postcolonial, yet quasi-imperial vision for what world power was supposed to be. During World War II, the U.S. and Soviet Union built themselves into massive states. They were both transcontinental powers with massive resources and manufacturing potential.

By the end of World War II, the U.S. could send carrier strike forces to anywhere in the world it could land. It could send its atomic-armed aircraft to bomb cities all over the world. American power was backed up by an ideological construction of liberal capitalism that was seen as a universal vision for the future. 

The Soviet Union was doing a very similar thing. The Soviet Union was able to project force beyond its borders, though not as far as the United States, which is, I think, an important dimension of the Cold War that followed. But the Soviets also had a universal ideological vision in Marxist-Leninism.

LJ: Let's talk about these powers now. With the War in Ukraine, do you think Putin is seeking another Yalta settlement over Eastern Europe?

PTC: I think there's a lot to be said for that. I think what we are witnessing is a return to an old sphere-of-influence type foreign policy. Instead of the global superpowers that dominated the Cold War, you are going to see the reemergence of important regional powers, which looks more like a 19th-century view of world politics.

Russia aspires to be the most important great power in Eastern Europe: it wants to challenge Western European powers and the United States. China is seeking to establish a sphere of influence in East Asia. There's much less support for having one major superpower control the entire international system. That thinking is very much a product of World War II, as different regional powers were destroyed.

The next few generations of world history were consumed by a process whereby the U.S. was rebuilding the world's industrial base; the Marshall Plan rebuilt European industrial power and the U.S. rebuilt Japan into the the dominant economic player in East Asia for large parts of the the end of the 20th century. 

Now in the 21st century, we're seeing the reemergence of regional powers that are trying to reassert control. Under Biden, the United States was pushing back. Now, under President Trump, it seems like there's more of an openness in the United States to consider whether some sort of spheres-of-influence arrangement might actually be a wiser path moving forward.

LJ: Yes, with Greenland and the Panama Canal. What you were talking about was Pax Americana, this idea of American economic and military hegemony. Donald Trump has taken an ax to this world order with tariffs, antagonizing European allies, and allying with Russia at the U.N. What do you make of the fact that this order which the U.S. built up is collapsing in a matter of months?