This introduction situates the Allied occupation of Italy as a distinctive yet comparatively underexplored case within the broader history of mid-twentieth-century military occupations. It traces the origins, peculiarities, and contradictions of Allied rule, foregrounding the tension between liberation and occupation that shaped both contemporary experiences and subsequent historiography. After outlining the fragmented development of the field and the long predominance of liberation-centred narratives, it calls for recontextualising the occupation of Italy within wider transnational and comparative frameworks. Rather than examining the Italian case solely through an exploration of its domestic impact, the article proposes treating it as an early laboratory for Allied ruling practices that were later applied elsewhere. In addition, it suggests exploring the Italian case through a set of research themes that have emerged from the new comparative field of Occupation Studies. The special issue advances this agenda by combining attention to hitherto marginalised aspects of the era with critical reflection on established subjects, thereby contributing to a reassessment of Italy’s place within the history of Allied rule in mid-twentieth-century Europe.

This article examines the Italian translations and reception of Winston S. Churchill’s The Second World War, using British and Italian archival materials and press sources. It shows how the Italian editions and serialisations introduced constant modifications – abridgements, omissions, textual cuts, and paratextual framing – in order to adapt the memoirs for a national audience. These interventions softened Churchill’s judgments on Italy, emphasised the ideological character of the war, and strengthened anti-Soviet themes, thus aligning the text with dominant cultural and political discourses of the postwar years. Analysis of contemporary reviews and newspaper debates highlights a polarised reception: critical distance or silence in intellectual journals contrasted with enthusiastic praise in mainstream dailies, where the memoirs were hailed as both literary achievement and democratic statement. The article argues that these editorial and translational strategies played a crucial role in integrating Churchill’s narrative into Italian collective memory, supporting a symbolic redefinition of Italy’s place from defeated nation to one of the victors.

The trajectory of Allied control in occupied Italy was characterised by the easing of pressure on local institutions in its progression from military government to institutional supervision. The structure of control was imagined as following three institutional steps, according to which the Allied Military Government would be succeeded – upon the re-establishment of a functioning Italian government – by an Allied Control Commission tasked with maintaining a supervisory role. A lesser-known institution, the Advisory Council for Italy, was established with the external contribution of Russian, French and subsequently Greek and Yugoslav representatives. This third body contributed to the political management of Italian affairs through a series of recommendations which helped shape the direction of the Allied occupation. By analysing the Council’s documentation, this article outlines its political objectives, institutional practices and internal tensions, while highlighting the development of a more widely co-ordinated Allied control policy for Italy.

This article tackles head-on a question that is often thought to defeat pacifism: ‘How then would you react against a Nazi invasion?’ That multiple wars are still recurrently justified as necessary to confront yet another ‘Hitler’ makes tackling this question critically relevant far beyond pacifist circles. On the Nazi context specifically: the question comes too late if pitched in 1939; militarism did not deter Hitler; there were actually many examples of nonviolent resistance against Nazis; even Hitler was mindful of public opinion; and the fight ‘against Nazis’ claimed many non-Nazi German victims too. More generally, and adding theoretical depth: pacifism need not entail a single absolute rejection of violence in all scenarios; nonviolent resistance has been proved to be effective; war-readiness has a corrosive constitutive impact; the Nazi question tends to assume that the application of retaliatory violence is controllable; and to presume that violence is the only option is absolutist and idealistic. Far from delivering a conclusive victory, the Nazi question, carefully considered and discussed, exposes cracks in conventional thinking about violence and war and provides opportunities to unpack and clarify multiple arguments advanced by pacifism.

During World War II, condom consumption increased in both belligerent and non-belligerent countries, including Sweden. Yet the relationship between state-led initiatives and commercial marketing in driving this trend has received little scholarly attention. The main sources in this article consist of wartime public health campaigns and condom advertisements. Applying the concepts of social and consumer engineering, the article examines how government interventions, specifically through public health measures, influenced condom marketing practices. The findings show that wartime campaigns sought to engineer citizens’ sexual behavior and that businesses strategically aligned their messaging with government propaganda. This convergence was instrumental in positioning condoms as essential tools for public health and facilitated a more permissive attitude toward condoms as prophylactics, bridging state-led public health efforts with commercial objectives. By examining this dynamic, the article contributes to understanding how wartime policies shaped consumer behavior and forged enduring connections between public health and market strategies.

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.

This article examines the experiential and perceptual environment in which social encounters between soldiers and civilians occurred in Allied-occupied Italy (1943–45) and its enduring impact on the lives of those who experienced it. It does so by applying Mary Louise Pratt’s theoretical framework of the ‘contact zone’ to the case of occupied Italy and by exploring it through the lens of oral history sources. The critical analysis of interviews with Antonio Taurelli, an Italian teenager in 1944 who fought with American soldiers, and Harry Shindler, a British veteran who married an Italian woman during the war, sheds light on how ordinary individuals shaped their own experience of occupation within the contact zone as well as on the life-changing impact of their encounters with ‘otherness’. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the social experience of the Allied occupation of Italy and the impact of military-civilian encounters in occupation environments more broadly.

During the Second World War, Allied-occupied Italy became the setting for a wide range of intimate encounters between local women and the occupiers, especially American soldiers. These relationships – ranging from romantic and consensual to transactional and coercive – reflected complex interactions with perceived ‘otherness’ and exposed tensions around race, gender, and power. US authorities, concerned about its social, cultural, and political implications, monitored ‘fraternisation’ closely. This article explores these dynamics by examining US Army marriage regulations and oral history interviews with Italian women who married American soldiers. Women’s experiences – shaped by region, class, and individual circumstance – represent a spectrum ranging from disillusionment to long-term partnership. These narratives offer a complex portrait of gender relations under occupation, revealing how military policy also intersected with and shaped the everyday lives of women during occupation.