Overview

Standard English-language histories of World War Two have their own Mercator distortion: they make the Anglo-American experience loom enormous and shrink almost everything else. This book is the Robinson projection of WWII-it allocates narrative to each combatant nation in strict proportion to population. The result: China commands 27% of every chapter. India, at 378 million people, becomes the second-largest presence. The Soviet Union's catastrophe dominates Europe. Small nations-Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece-receive sustained monthly attention. The familiar Anglo-American narrative doesn't disappear, but it can no longer crowd out everything else. What changes in our understanding? The same thing that changes when you replace a Mercator projection with a Robinson: the familiar takes its actual place among everything else. You begin to see the war as the majority of its participants experienced it-not as a contest between great powers, but as a global catastrophe that engulfed two billion human beings. Seventy-four monthly chapters cover September 1939 through September 1945.

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9781608885633

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