This chapter examines the rapid mobilization and almost complete militarization of the German economy long before Goebbels called for total war, and even before Albert Speer arrived on the economic scene to engage in the mythification that long has surrounded studies of Germany’s economic war effort. Just as the insufficiency of the nation’s resources made achieving Hitler’s territorial aspirations ultimately impossible, that insufficiency drove production efforts that increasingly alienated executives but also induced them to participate in crazed and costly schemes to save themselves and their firms.

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?

Following military defeat in 1918, the Emperor abdicated and a Republic was declared. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed devastating terms on Germany. Social, economic, and political instability fostered the growth of radical ethno-nationalist movements. Once the great inflation of 1923 had been brought under control, and reparations and foreign relations were subjected to renegotiation, the political system began to stabilise. Berlin continued to expand as an industrial metropolis, with an improved transport network and major factories between the nineteenth-century red brick churches, schools, and municipal buildings. Immigration continued, including workers from the provinces and Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. A ferment of intellectual and artistic creativity contributed to ‘Weimar culture’, while Berlin also became noted for cabaret, night life, and challenges to traditional sexual mores. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the German economy collapsed, precipitating further political instability. In a situation of near civil war, on 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed the leader of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, as German Chancellor in a mixed cabinet.

A brief epilogue suggests that any attempt to capture the ‘essence’ of Berlin is predestined to be rapidly outdated, as the city continues to develop and change, and Berliners of widely differing backgrounds and outlooks contest alternative ways forwards in a conflict-ridden world. And this self-awareness, this energetic engagement with both the past and the future, is itself an inherent part of the city’s ever ambiguous appeal.

The economic boom of the 1980s turbocharged longer term trends and patterns of daily life in the city, as money flowed freely and the world seemed to be Japan’s oyster. Tokyo grew into a financial powerhouse as a seat of global finance, a hub of media and information, and a center of high-tech innovation. Real estate prices soared, and the government eyed the redevelopment of the waterfront. The global capital also flexed its cultural muscle, exporting creations such as Hello Kitty and sushi to enthusiastic audiences around the world while importing goods and services with an international flair for Tokyoites to consume. The city became more multiethnic and unevenness in concentrations of money were reflected in its social geography, not so much in socioeconomically distinct islands as in its patchwork of neighborhoods. As the economy deflated in the 1990s, in what would later be dubbed the “lost decade,” consumption and tastes moderated but Tokyoites continued to live and work in an undeniably global and thoroughly consumerist society.

This chapter dissects the defects of both the prosecution and defense cases at postwar trials of German big business figures, and then the role of German corporations in creating and propagating a legend of corporate “decency” under compulsion during the Third Reich for decades thereafter, while also concealing the surviving corporate records that would have undermined this legend.

In the early 2000s, the idea of Japan as culturally “cool” captured imaginations. Propelled by a government interested in marketing and selling Japan, products from video games to anime and manga were repackaged as embodying cultural cool. And global audiences were reminded that what they enjoyed consuming, from sushi to Pokémon, were of Japanese origin. The capital of Tokyo, now virtually synonymous with the nation as a whole, was to epitomize this “cool Japan” with its technological sophistication, sleek aesthetics, and cultural creativity as host of the 2020 Olympic Games. Despite disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic, what the games reflected vividly was how the Tokyo metropolitan region, tracing a general trend that dated back centuries, had grown almost inexorably in size and in political, economic, and cultural gravity. Not just in historical patterns but in so many ways – from a city center that remains inviolate to the spiral that radiates outward, from the low-rise wooden buildings in the low city to the names of neighborhoods – the past remains deeply woven into the richly textured pastiche of contemporary Tokyo.

As Japan rebuilt and regained its footing after the war, Tokyo reemerged as the engine and emblem of national progress – of not just recovery but economic growth. Leading up to the 1964 Olympic Games, the host city upgraded its physical infrastructure, erected tall buildings, and made sure Tokyo was clean and shiny to demonstrate to the world the nation’s rebirth as a remodernized, peaceful, and prosperous Japan. Over the course of the 1960s, as gross national income more than doubled and Japan became the second largest economy in the world, a middle class ideal took root of a nuclear family with a husband who worked a white-collar job, a wife who managed the home, and household income enough to purchase electric appliances and to save toward buying a home. Tokyo was at the vanguard of the embrace and the achievement of middle class aspirations, with urban living in a danchi or apartment complex within the grasp of more and more Tokyoites and the relatively affordable suburbs beckoning more and more people. But by the late 1960s, middle class dreams were also tinged with disappointment about cramped apartments, long commutes, and the environmental costs of high economic growth.

How did new forms of mass politics and culture that included and gave voice to all men and women finally develop in Britain between 1885 and 1931?

Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?