Abstract
The origins of the Second World War, like other major conflicts in history, are amenable to both a simple and an infinitely complex explanation. As the decision actually to commit troops in an aggressive act requires human agency, primary responsibility for the war rests with the leaders of the aggressor states, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, along with their immediate entourages, who took the crucial decisions. This was the verdict of the war crimes tribunals at Nuremburg and Tokyo, and over 40 years of reinvestigation and reconsideration have done little to shake the validity of that judgment.1 But this is a jurist’s approach; the explanation sought by the historian is of a completely different order. It embraces the actions not only of those who directly participated in decisions for aggressive war, but of all the individuals, groups, interests, and classes who were capable of materially affecting the course of events that led to war. Moreover, it seeks to comprehend not only what they did or failed to do, but the reasons for their behaviour. Since, as A.J.P. Taylor has suggested, the Second World War may be said to have begun in September 1931 and gradually expanded until December 1941 when it involved every major power, the historian’s range of subject matter is obviously extremely wide.2
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Notes and References
A.J.P. Taylor, ‘The Second World War’, The Creighton Lecture in History, 1973 (London, 1974), pp. 1–2. Never one to stand still, intellectually speaking, Taylor subsequently argued that the World War did not actually begin until June 1944 and lasted only 11 months. Before that there was merely a series of related but separate small wars.
Taylor, ‘1939 Revisited’, German Historical Institute, London, 1981 Annual Lecture (London, 1981), Addendum.
Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 2nd ed. with ‘A Reply to Critics’ (New York, 1966), p. 279. All subsequent references are to the US paperback edition.
Ibid., p. 72. Detailed assessments of Taylor’s analysis are presented in William Roger Louis (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War: A.J.P. Taylor and his Critics (New York, 1972)
and more recently Gordon Martel (ed.), ‘The Origins of the Second World War’ Reconsidered. The A.J.P. Taylor debate after twenty-five years (London, 1986).
See for instance Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, 1783–1933 (London, 1941)
Peter Viereck, Metapolitics. From the Romantics to Hitler (New York, 1941)
Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: The History of a Political Tradition (Boston, 1957)
Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany (London, 1960).
Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism. Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (London, 1972).
Other major works with a similar theme include, A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History since 1815 (London, 1945)
Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, vol. 3 (London, 1969)
Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship. The Origins, Structure, and Consequences of National Socialism (Harmondsworth, 1973)
Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1978).
Fischer continued his debate with German critics in World Power or Collapse (New York, 1970).
See also the useful summary of the Fischer controversy in J.A. Moses, The Politics of Illusion (London, 1975).
For historiographical surveys by some of the major contributors see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984)
Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism. Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986)
Richard J. Evans, Rethinking German History. Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich (London, 1987); and idem, ‘The New Nationalism and the Old History: Perspectives on the West German Historikerstreit’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 59 (December 1987), pp. 761–797.
See for instance the affirmative view presented in Milan Hauner, ‘Did Hitler want a World Dominion?’ Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 13 (1978), pp. 15–32
and the sceptical view presented in Dietrich Aigner, ‘Hitler’s Aims — A Program of World Dominion?’ in Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. H.W. Koch (London, 1985), pp. 251–66.
The thesis that Hitler possessed coherent plans for world domination is also advanced in Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich (Berkeley CA, 1973)
and Andreas Hillgruber, Germany and the Two World Wars (London, 1981).
Among the best recent restatements of this argument are Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung. A Blueprint for Power (Westport CN, 1972)
and MacGregor Knox, ‘Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 56 (March 1984), pp. 1–57.
See also Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford, 1986), ch. 10.
E.M. Robertson, Hitler’s Pre-War Policy and Military Plans, 1933–1939 (London, 1963), p. 193.
See ch. 11 this volume; also H.W. Koch, ‘Hitler’s “Programme” and the Genesis of Operation “Barbarossa”’ , The Historical Journal, vol. 26 (1983), pp. 891–920, which places principal responsibility upon Stalin for prompting Hitler to resume his aggression in the east.
Jonathan Wright and Paul Stafford, ‘A Blueprint for War? Hitler and the Hossbach Memorandum’, History Today, vol. 38 (March 1988), pp. 11–17.
See also the discussion in Gerhard Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, vol. 2: Starting World War Two (London, 1980), pp. 34–43
and in the brief but excellent study, William Carr, Arms, Autarky, and Aggression: A Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933–1939, 2nd ed. (London, 1979). pp. 71–80.
Documents on German Foreign Policy (D.G.F.P.), Series D, vol. II, doc. 221, quoted in D.C. Watt, ‘Appeasement. The Rise of a Revisionist School?’ Political Quarterly, vol. 36 (1965), p. 205.
Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 1985), p. 119. See also the valuable collection of essays, Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 1, Ursachen und Voraussetzungen der Deutschen Kriegspolitik, ed. Wilhelm Deist, Manfred Messerschmidt, et al (Stuttgart, 1979).
T.W. Mason, ‘Some Origins of the Second World War’, Past and Present (December 1964), reprinted in Robertson (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War, pp. 124–25. Mason’s argument is further elaborated in ‘Intention and Explanation: a Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds.), The ‘Fuhrer State’: Myth and Reality (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 23–42.
Jost Dülffer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine: Reichspolitik und Flottenbau 1920–1939 (Düsseldorf, 1973)
Wilhelm Deist, The Wehrmacht and German Rearmament (London, 1981)
Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938–1939. The Path to Ruin (Prince-tone NJ, 1984), pp. 32–38.
D.C. Watt, ‘The Historiography of Appeasement’, in Crisis and Controversy. Essays in Honour of A.J.P. Taylor, ed. Alan Sked and Chris Cook (London, 1976), p. 113.
For a careful attempt to synthesise the old and the new views emphasising the role of domestic public opinion, see Lothar Kettenacker, ‘Die Diplomatie der Ohnmacht. Die gescheiterte Friedensstrategie der britischen Regierung vor Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, in Sommer 1939. Die Grossmächte und der Europaische Krieg, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 223–79.
Lawrence R. Pratt, East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis, 1936–1939 (Cambridge, 1975)
Frank M. Hardie, The Abyssinian Crisis (London, 1974)
Jill Edwards, The British Government and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (London, 1979)
William Roger Louis, British Strategy in the Far East, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1971)
Bradford A. Lee, Britain and the Sino — Japanese War, 1937–1939: A Study in the Dilemmas of British Decline (Stanford, 1973)
Anne Trotter, Britain and East Asia, 1933–1937 (Cambridge, 1975)
Peter Lowe, Great Britain and the Origins of the Pacific War: A Study of British Policy in East Asia, 1937–1941 (Oxford, 1981)
James Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1919–1941 (Oxford, 1981)
Paul Haggie, Britannia at Bay: The Defence of the British Empire against Japan, 1931–1941 (Oxford, 1981)
Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin, a Biography (1969)
Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy between the Wars, 2 vols. (London, 1968 and 1976)
Norman H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, vol. 1: Rearmament Policy (London, 1976)
David Dilks, Re-treat from Power: Studies in Britain’s Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, 1906–1939 (London, 1981)
Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars (London, 1972).
Wolfgang Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacker (eds.), The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement (London, 1983) provides a very useful introduction to the subject.
Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (London, 1985).
Ross McKibbin, ‘The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government, 1929–1931’, Past and Present, no. 68 (August 1975)
R.A.C. Parker, ‘Economics, rearmament and foreign policy: the United Kingdom before 1939 - a preliminary study’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10 (1975), pp. 637–47
Parker, ‘British rearmament 1936–9: Treasury, trade unions and skilled labour’, English Historical Review, vol. 96 (1981), pp. 306–43
George Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–1939 (Edinburgh, 1979). On Keynes’s views in their relationship to rearmament, see Peden, ‘Keynes, the Economics of Rearmament and Appeasement’, in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, ch. 10.
Robert P. Shay, Jr., British Rearmament in the Thirties: Politics and Profits (Princeton NJ, 1977), finds less excuse for the pace of rearmament.
See also the elaborate but sometimes obscure analysis of British politico-economic policy-making by the political scientist Gustav Schmidt, England in der Krise. Grundlagen and Grundsüge der britischen Appeasement-Politik (1930–1937) (Wiesbaden, 1981) translated as The Politics and Economics of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy in the 1930s (London. 1986).
D.C. Watt, Too Serious a Business. ‘European Armed Forces and the approach to the Second World War (London, 1975), pp. 72–74
Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy. Background Influences on British External Policy. 1865–1980 (London. 1981) p. 292.
Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy, pp. 292–93; Corelli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London, 1972), pp. 505 and passim; Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, ch. 2.
Milan Hauner, ‘Czechoslovakia as a Military Factor in British Considerations of 1938’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 1 (1978), pp. 194–222
and more generally, David E. Kaiser, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War. Germany, Britain, France, and Eastern Europe, 1930–1939 (Princeton NJ. 1980).
Nicholas Rostow, Anglo-French Relations, 1934–36 (London, 1984)
Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936–1939 (London, 1977), pp. xv and passim; Adamthwaite, ‘War Origins Again’. Journal of Modern History. vol. 56 (1984) p. 113.
Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39 (London, 1984), pp. 46, 157, 165, 167, 205, 210 and passim.
Brian Bond, British Military Policy between Two World Wars (Oxford, 1980), p. 284ff.
Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932–1939 (London, 1980); Watt, Too Serious a Busi-ness, pp. 72–77; Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, pp. 80–84. For an interesting account of similarly exaggerated hopes and fears of airborne attack in more recent years
see Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven CN. 1987).
The importance of Eden’s diplomatic initiatives is accepted in Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London, 1986)
treated sceptically in Sidney Aster, Anthony Eden (London, 1976)
and A.R. Peters, Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office (Aldershot, 1986)
and disputed in David Carlton, Anthony Eden, a Biography (London, 1981).
The argument that Britain missed a chance over Italy is advanced in Cedric J. Lowe and Frank Marzari, Italian Foreign Policy, 1870–1940 (London, 1970), pp. 264, 325
and revived by Richard Lamb, The Ghosts of Peace, 1935–1945 (London, 1987).
But see the review by Christopher Seton-Watson, in Association for the Study of Modern Italy Newsletter, no. 12 (Autumn 1987). On the negative strategic value of Italy see Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, pp. 317, 319–20.
Callum MacDonald, The United States, Britain and Appeasement, 1936–1939 (London, 1981), ch. 5
David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (London, 1981), pp. 16–23
Gillian Bennett, ‘The Roosevelt Peace Plan of January 1938’, Foreign and Commonwealth Historical Branch Occasional Papers, no. 1 (November 1987), pp. 27–38.
Lamb, The Ghosts of Peace; Sidney Aster, 1939. The Making of the Second World War (London, 1973), pp. 43, 230 and passim; Klaus-Jürgen Müller, ‘The German Military Opposition before the Sec-ond World War, in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, eds. Mommsen and Kettenacker, ch. 5;
Christopher Andrew, Secret Service. The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985), p. 395
D.C. Watt, ‘British Intelligence and the coming of the Second World War in Europe’, in Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars, ed. Ernest R. May (Princeton NJ, 1984), p. 263.
Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘The British Government and the Media, 1937–1938’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 18 (April 1983), pp. 281–97.
See also the introduction to Frances Thorpe and Nicholas Pronay, British Official Films in the Second World War: A Descriptive Catalogue (Oxford, 1980); Bryan Haworth, ‘The British Broadcasting Corporation, Nazi Germany and the Foreign Office, 1933–1936’, Histori-cal Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 1 (March 1981);
Nicholas Pronay, ‘The First Reality: Filrn Censorship in Liberal England’, in Feature Films as History, ed. K.R.M. Short (London, 1981), ch. 6
Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring (eds.), Propaganda, Politics and Films, 1918–1945 (London, 1982).
This view is most clearly presented in David Dilks, ‘Appeasement Revisited’, University of Leeds Review, vol. 15 (1972), pp. 38–49; and David Dilks (ed.), Retreat from Power, vol. 1, Introduction.
Robert Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932: A Study in Politics, Economics, and International Relations (Cambridge, 1987).
On the (generally exaggerated) American role, see Werner Link, Die amerikanische Stabilisierungspolitik in Deutschland 1921–32 (Dusseldorf, 1970)
Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Eur-ope: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill NC, 1976)
Melvyn P. Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1932 (Chapel Hill NC, 1979)
Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion. American Political, Economic and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca NY, 1984).
Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics. France and European Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (New York, 1980)
Jacques Bariéty, Les relations franco-allemandes après la première guerre mondiale (Paris, 1977)
Wal-ter A. McDougall, France’s Rhineland Policy, 1914–24: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton NJ, 1978)
Georges Soutou, ‘Une autre politique? Les tentatives francaises d’entente économique avec l’Allemagne’, Revue d’Allemagne, vol. 8 (1976), 21–34
Edward D. Keeton, ‘Economics and Politics in Briand’s German Policy, 1925–1931’, in German Nationalism and the European Response, 1890–1945, eds. Carole Fink, Isabel V. Hull, and MacGregor Knox (London, 1985), pp. 157–80.
Economic factors receive close attention in P.M.H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1986).
More typical is Robert Ferrell, American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover-Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929–1933 (New Haven CN, 1957), which, despite the title, has nothing to say about the great depression.
Robert J. Young, French Foreign Policy, 1918–1945. A Guide to Re-search and Research Materials (Wilmington, Del., 1981), is helpful but needs updating.
J-B. Duroselle, La politique étrangère de la France: La décadence, 1932–1939 (Paris, 1979). Support for this thesis also comes from René Girault, Duroselle’s successor at the Sorbonne: ‘Les décideurs français et la puissance française en 1938–1939’, La puissance en Europe, 1938–1940, eds. René Girault and Robert Frank (Paris, 1984), p. 39.
Still unrivalled for their flavour of the period for English readers are Denis Brogan, France under the Republic: The Development of Modern France (1870–1939), (London, 1942), the several works by the Manches-ter Guardian’s Paris correspondent Alexander Werth, particularly France in Ferment (London, 1935), The Destiny of France (London, 1937), and France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (London, 1939), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s fictional trilogy, Roads to Freedom.
Robert Frankenstein, Le prix du réarmament français (1935–1939), (Paris, 1982); also his ‘The Decline of France and French Appeasement Policies, 1936–9’, in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appease-ment, eds. Mommsen and Kettenacker, ch. 16.
Geoffrey Warner, Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France (London, 1968)
R.J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933–40 (Cambridge MA, 1978); Frankenstein, Le prix du réarmement francais, ch. 2.
René Rémond and Jean Bourdin (eds.), Édouard Daladier, chef de gouvernement (avril 1938 - septembre 1939), (Paris, 1977)
R.J. Young, ‘A.J.P. Taylor and the Problem with France’, in The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered, ed. Martel, pp. 105–06; Frankenstein, Le prix du réarmement français, chs. 8, 9. Daladier the politician is also treated with some sympathy in Serge Berstein, Histoire du Parti Radical: crise du radicalisme (1926r1939) (Paris, 1982). From an examination of British records, Callum MacDonald, ‘Britain, France and the April Crisis of, 1939’, European Studies Review, vol. 2 (1972), pp. 151–69, underlined Daladier’s independence from British policy and called for a reappraisal of the Anglo - French relationship.
Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936–1939 (London, 1977), pp. 106–07 and passim; Adamthwaite, ‘France and the Coming of War’, in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, ch. 17.
Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of War, pp. 104–05; Adam-thwaite, ‘France and the Coming of War’, p. 249; Duroselle, La décadence, chs. 12–15. See also Douglas Johnson, ‘The French View’, in 1939. A Retrospective Forty Years After, ed. Roy Douglas (London, 1983), pp. 56–57.
Robert Young, In Command of France; Jeffrey A. Gunsberg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport CN, 1979).
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (London, 1976); idem, Mussolini (London, 1981).
See also Giampiero Carocci, Italian Fascism (Harmondsworth, 1974).
C.J. Lowe and Frank Marzari, Italian Foreign Policy, 1970–1940 (London, 1975)
John F. Coverdale, Italian Intervention in the Spanish Civil War (Princeton NJ, 1975)
Esmonde M. Roberston, Mussolini as Empire-Builder: Europe and Africa, 1932–36 (London, 1976)
Rosaria Quartarero, Roma tra Londra e Berlino: Politica estera fascista dal 1930 al 1940 (Roma, 1980); Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il Duce, vol. 1, Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936, vol. 2, Lo Stato totalitario 1936–1940 (Turin, 1974, 1981)
Quartarero, ‘Imperial Defence in the Mediterra-nean on the Eve of the Ethiopian Crisis (July-October 1935)’, The Historical Journal, vol. 20 (1977), pp. 185–220
B.M. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941 (New York, 1982); idem, ‘Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 56 (March 1984), pp. 1–57.
Denis Mack Smith, ‘Appeasement as a Factor in Mussolini’s Foreign Policy’, in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, eds. Wolfgang Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacker (London, 1983), pp. 264–65.
V.M. Falin et al (eds.), Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II (September 1938 - August 1939): Documents and Records, 2 vols. (Mos-cow, 1973). For a discussion of the contents of these volumes and alterations in the second one-volume edition which appeared in 1976
see John Hermon, ‘Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War Two: A Review of the Soviet Documents’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 15 (1980), pp. 577–602.
Margot Light, ‘The Soviet View’, in 1939. A Retrospect Forty Years After, ed. Roy Douglas (London, 1983), pp. 74–89.
A few critics have braved censure by speaking out, see Teddy J. Uldricks, ‘A.J.P. Taylor and the Russians’, in The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered. ed. Gordon Martel (London. 1986). on. 178–79.
Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930–1933: The Impact of the Depression (London, 1983); idem, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–1939 (London, 1984); The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933–41 (forthcoming); Soviet Foreign Policy, 1939–41: Isolation and Expansion (forthcoming).
Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 1869–1942 (London, 1977)
Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London, 1987)
James William Morley (ed.), The China Quagmire: Japan’s Expansion on the Asian Continent (New York, 1974); idem, Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany and the USSR, 1935–1940 (New York, 1976); idem, The Fateful Choice: Japan’s Advance into South-east Asia, 1939–1941 (New York, 1980), and the essays in idem, Dilemmas of Growth in Pre-war Japan (Princeton NJ, 1971).
See also William Carr, Poland to Pearl Harbor. The Making of the Second World War (London, 1985), a lucid account that sets the Far Eastern crisis into its international context
and Kyozo Sato, Japan and Britain at the Crossroads, 1939— 1941. A Study in the Dilemmas of Japanese Diplomacy (Tokyo. 1986).
Hans H. Baerwald, The Purge of Japanese Leaders under the Occupation (Berkeley CA, 1959)
Richard H. Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton NJ, 1971)
David A. Titus, Palace and Politics in Prewar Japan (New York, 1974).
David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy: How Emperor Hirohito led Japan into War against the West (London, 1971).
For a detailed criticism, see C.D. Sheldon, ‘Japanese Aggression and the Emperor, 1931–41, from Contemporary Diaries’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 10 (February 1976), pp. 1–40.
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (Oxford, 1979).
William E. Kinsella Jr., Leadership in Isolation: FDR and the Origins of the Second World War (Cambridge, MA, 1978
Basil Rauch, Roosevelt. Munich to Pearl Harbor (New York, 1962)
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 3 (New York, 1966)
Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. IV (Boston, 1973)
Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–45 (Lincoln NB, 1983).
Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York, 1965)
Arnold A. Offner, The Origins of the Second World War: American Foreign Policy and World Politics, 1917–1941 (New York, 1975); idem, American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933–1938 (New York, 1976)
David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo — American Alliance; Frederick W. Marks III, Wind over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (Athens GA, 1988).
Science and Society, vol. 18 (Winter, 1954), pp. 1–20. The same thesis is advanced in many of Williams’s publications including ‘The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 24 (1955), pp. 379–95, and The Contours of American History (Chicago, 1961). For an acute criticism of the Williams thesis
see J.A. Thompson, ‘William Appleman Williams and the “American Empire”’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 7 (1973), pp. 91–104.
The phrase is coined by Joan Hoff Wilson in American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933 (Lexington KY, 1971), p. xvi, a work ac-knowledging Williams’s influence.
Wilson’s biography, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston, 1975), which also uses it to characterise foreign policy in the 1920s (ch. 6), received almost universal praise in the United States when it appeared.
David Burner, Herbert Hoover: a Public Life (New York, 1979), ch. 13, borrows uncritically Wilson’s argument: see especially ch. 13. See also her ‘A Re-evaluation of Herbert Hoover’s Foreign Policy’, in The Hoover Presidency: A Reap-paraisal, Martin L. Fausold and George T. Mazuzan, eds. (Albany NY, 1974), pp. 164–86.
Lloyd dardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison WI, 1964)
James R. Moore, ‘Sources of New Deal Economic Policy: The International Dimension’, The Journal of American History, vol. 61 (December 1974), pp. 728–44. Vestiges of the same thesis are apparent in Patrick J. Hearden, Roosevelt Confronts Hitler.
Dick Steward, Trade and Hemisphere: The Good Neighbour Policy and Reciprocal Trade (Columbia MO, 1975)
Frederick C. Adams, Economic Diplomacy: The Export-Import Bank and American Foreign Foreign Policy, 1934–1939 (Columbia MO, 1976).
Recent literature on the Anglo - American relationship is examined in D. Cameron Watt, Succeeding John Bull. America in Britain’s Place, 1900–1975. A Study of the Anglo - American Relationship and World Politics in the Context of British and American Foreign Policy-making in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1984).
Christopher Andrew, Secret Service. The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985), p. 400.
F.W. Deakin and G.R. Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge (London, 1966), p. 233
Gordon W. Prance, Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (New York, 1984), ch. 56.
Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (London, 1985).
Robert J. Young, ‘French Military Intelligence and Nazi Germany’, in Knowing One’s Enemies,ed. E.R. May, pp. 297, 308; Wesley K. Wark, ‘British Intelligence and Small Wars in the 1930’s, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 3 (1988), pp. 67–87.
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Boyce, R. (1989). Introduction. In: Boyce, R., Robertson, E.M. (eds) Paths to War. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20333-8_1
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