In chapter 11, To act now if we are to act at all (June 16 - Jun 27) the relative calm in Austria is followed by increasing concern about Germany which looses foreign exchange. The Bank of England, the New York Fed, the Banque de France and the Bank for International Settlements arranges a $100 million credit to the Reichsbank. Meanwhile,on June 20, US President Herbert Hoover announces his plan for a one year moratorium, which is received positively in most of Europe, but not in France. George Harrison assumes a more active role in trying to defuse the concern about a breakdown in Europe, and he enters into dialogue with the Banque de France, which is more open to a solution than the French government. The chapter ends with some optimism that the Hoover proposal may have changed the situation in Europe.

On October 27, 1944, the editors of Neamul evreesc (The Jewish Nation), one of the main Jewish national newspapers, published an editorial entitled “We Want Justice: One Hour Earlier” (Vrem dreptate: cu un ceas mai devreme) reflecting the most important requests of the Jews of Romania to help them rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. They represented the voices of the largest Jewish community in postwar Europe outside the USSR, estimated at 428,000–450,000 people in 1947. Arguing that expropriation of property and denial of rights was the second worst category of antisemitic crimes perpetrated by the pro-Nazi dictatorship of General/Marshall Ion Antonescu between September 1940 and August 1944 (the first being mass murder, as Romania had been the largest Holocaust perpetrating country after Germany), the journalists emphasized that the Jewish survivors “expected with an understandable impatience that all the injustices they suffered be fully repaired” by the new democratic Romania. They expressed their disappointment about the delay of the “restitution in integrum” (full restitution) of their rights and wondered about the reasons behind it. Acknowledging the difficulty of repairing injustices and returning property taken by force and the lawmakers’ efforts to draft a restitution law, the journalists emphasized that postponing full restitution and reparations meant the perpetuation of suffering for many Jews. The journalists also argued that the Jews who were tortured in the camps or lost their family members were entitled to reparations and asked lawmakers to adopt a law to immediately address this injustice after the first restitution law would be enacted. This newspaper editorial encapsulates the problems, disappointments, and hopes of many Jewish survivors during their struggle to obtain restitution and rebuild their lives in Romania.

While the First World War may not have been the first war to be global in scope, the development of European societies, economies and governance meant that combatant states were able to make effective use of the levers of national power in ways hitherto unseen. Capable of mobilising the resources of their own nations and their empires, the belligerents raise, equipped and sustained large forces in the field for four years. In the process of building their own power, they developed mechanisms to apply military, diplomatic and economic pressures on their enemies. The states best able to mobilise and deploy all the levers of national power – Britain and France – had the edge in the long war over Germany, which concentrated on building its military power at the expense of other levers. This chapter explores how the Entente was able to make deliberate use of its resources more effectively than the Central Powers to achieve its strategic goals.

Chapter 5 addresses a major demographic puzzle concerning thousands of New York slaves who seem to have gone missing in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the chapter questions how and if slaves were sold South. The keys to solving this puzzle include estimates of common death rates, census undercounting, changing gender ratios in the New York black population, and, most importantly, a proper interpretation of the 1799 emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. Given an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, I conclude that a large number of New York slaves (between 1,000 and 5,000) were sold South, but not likely as many as some previous historians have suggested. A disproportionate number of these sold slaves came from Long Island and Manhattan.

This chapter offers a critical rereading of Omani work history that foregrounds labour, flipping the perspective from the view of industry and capital to the human experience. Through examining the history of labour governance and resistance in Oman, it argues that the contemporary governance, regulatory, and resistance environment for labour have clear lineages in the past. First, it traverses three key legacies governing work and workers – the colonial modes of circulating, disciplining, and classifying labour, the oil industry’s human resources policies, and the management of labour in national economic planning. Second, the chapter traces discourses about workers and how these discourses and prejudices are persistent technologies of governance that influence practices and assessments of employment and development. Together, this reveals a genealogy of practice and discourse underpinned by racial capitalism that have shaped work life in Oman and the Gulf more widely. Finally, the chapter discusses the various forms of contestation to these practices over time, including connections to worker agitation and mobilisation, strike action, and connections with antiimperialist movements.

This chapter turns to the accounts of the campaigns of the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 BC), followed by those of the Warring States Period (475–221 BC) that ended with the creation of the first imperial state in China in 221 BCE, and finally the campaigns that created, maintained, lost, restored and then permanently lost the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). War for rulers, generals and statesmen required them to devise and execute strategies that were not ideal, often failed, and seldom accommodated higher moral values. This reality was portrayed clearly in most of the histories, even in the stylised and moralised anecdotes that are often all that is left to us.

Chapter 1 establishes the context and extent of Dutch culture in New York to demonstrate that Dutch slavery in New York was distinct and extensive. This chapter provides a demographic argument for the importance of Dutch slaves in the history of New York slavery. This chapter combines an argument drawn from census data with anthropological observations about the nature of violence and mobility in Dutch New York slavery.

This chapter discusses a number of events of Soviet military history, ranging from relatively minor conflicts with neighbouring states (mostly parts of the former Russian empire that collapsed in 1917) in the 1920s and mid-1930s to fully fledged participation in the Second World War. Wars with Finland in 1939–1940, Nazi Germany in 1941–1945 and Japan in 1945 are the main events that fully represent Soviet military strategy. There is still lack of access to some primary sources of key actors that shaped the Soviet military strategy in 1939–1945, so the most intensive debate in the literature has been about Stalin’s plans before and during the Second World War. Another point of discussion relates to the major failure of the Red Army during the initial phase of war with Nazi Germany, focusing on the purge of the Soviet officer corps between 1937 and 1939. In general, the war against Nazi Germany (commonly referred to in Soviet/Russian literature as the Great Patriotic War) was a struggle not only for the ‘life and death of the Soviet state’ and all the peoples of the USSR, but also for the liberation of Europe and the world from fascism.

Strategy is a not a word not often used in connection with early medieval warfare ,which is often seen as mere feud or the gathering of loot. This was strongly reinforced by the widespread attitude that military history was a fit subject only for military academies. Only recently has it been recognised that war in this period was the subject of thought, care and calculation. Moreover, early medieval sources are relatively scarce and often pose difficulties of interpretation. And armies had no continuous institutional life of the kind we associate with the formation of strategic ideas. Nor were kings able to impose a monopoly of violence on their followers, for early medieval states were fragile and highly dependent upon the accidents of individual ability. The armies which were gathered were not unitary, but assemblages of diverse elements whose political relation to the sovereign was problematic. But although writing about strategy poses challenges, it is evident that military commanders in this period were not mere bloodthirsty brutes. An army, even a small one, represented a huge financial and political investment whose raising could only be justified by some substantial purpose. But the nature of medieval strategy was conditioned by the political structures which created it. A world where dynastic continuity and political stability were closely intertwined, and where kings were rulers of peoples rather than territories, gave birth to a very different kind of strategic outlook from our own.

Chapter 13, Germany will collapse (June 19 - July 10) begins with everyone’s eyes on Germany where the uncertainty about the French position towards the Hoover plan increases every day. More generally, politics comes to play a larger role, as Norman increasingly emphasizes that it’s about politics, and Harrison has to take Hoover’s plan into account. At the same time leadership in the epistemic community of central bankers shifts away from Norman toward Harrison, who enters into a dialogue with French central bankers. Tensions arise between Norman and Harrison, as the begin to subscribe to divergent narratives of the situation and what needs to be done. In Germany, the situation gets more concerning by the hour, and Hans Luther travels to London and Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a giant credit to the Reichsbank.

On 25 June 1950, North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea, commencing the Korean War and aiming to unify the country by forces. On 7 July, when the UN adopted a resolution calling for all possible means to aid South Korea, President Truman announced he was sending in US forces to stop the Communists and expanding his Cold War containment to East Asia. The Korean War became a conflict between China and the United States. To drive UNF out of Korea, Mao sent in 33 divisions, which was only the beginning of Chinese involvement. In April 1951, CPVF launched its spring offensive against UN troops, which put up a strong defence. After the Chinese failure in the battle, the war settled into a stalemate and a more conventional pattern of trench warfare along the 38th Parallel. The Korean stalemate became the longest positional warfare in world military history. This military impasse, from June 1951 to July 1953, has become the most forgotten phase of the ‘forgotten war’. About 45 per cent of all US casualties occurred after truce talks began in July 1951. By 1952, Chinese forces in Korea had grown to a record high of 1.45 million. Realising the huge gap between Chinese objectives and means, Mao became willing to accept a settlement without total victory.