Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Foreword
- Contents
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Small States in a Total War
- Chapter 3 The Mystery of the Dying Dutch
- Chapter 4 Feeding the People
- Chapter 5 From Riches to Rags
- Chapter 6 Value for Money
- Chapter 7 Poverty in Moneyed Times
- Chapter 8 The Shadow Economy
- Chapter 9 Filth, Food and Infectious Disease Mortality
- Chapter 10 Conclusion
- A Note on Archival Sources and Abbreviations
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 11
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Small States in a Total War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Foreword
- Contents
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Small States in a Total War
- Chapter 3 The Mystery of the Dying Dutch
- Chapter 4 Feeding the People
- Chapter 5 From Riches to Rags
- Chapter 6 Value for Money
- Chapter 7 Poverty in Moneyed Times
- Chapter 8 The Shadow Economy
- Chapter 9 Filth, Food and Infectious Disease Mortality
- Chapter 10 Conclusion
- A Note on Archival Sources and Abbreviations
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 11
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 1987, the economic historians Jeffrey Mills and Hugh Rockoff lamented that:
Economic historians, with some distinguished exceptions, have neglected wars, regarding them as temporary aberrations in which the normal principles of economics no longer apply. This attitude, we believe, is a mistake. It is precisely within these periods of intense economic change and experimentation that one can test economic ideas.
Their complaint was not unjustified. In the late 1980s, over 40 years after the end of the Second World War, knowledge of the economic dimension of the conflict had hardly been developed. Yet more than any other war, the Second World War was a conflict in which economic factors were decisive, and that impacted economies more strongly than any previous or later war. The German occupation forcibly included Denmark and the Netherlands in a multinational economic block geared towards waging total war.
Total war – a term with a long genesis and a somewhat vague meaning – is used here to describe the type of conflict that arose, depending on one's definition, in the 1860s, in 1914, in 1940 or even as late as in 1942. Whatever starting point is chosen, the epithet ‘total’ sets the wars of the early twentieth century apart from what had gone before; the wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by contrast, had been ‘limited’. The changeover from one kind of war to another marked the beginning of a phase in which war necessitated the complete mobilization of the productive capabilities of nations and peoples. Bound together by nationalism and strengthened by industrialization, societies had become willing and able to devote resources and lives to warfare that simply defied comparison with the expenditure on previous wars. War was no longer ‘a continuation of politics by different means’, as Von Clausewitz put it, but had become a life or death struggle between entire peoples. As had become evident in the First World War, especially after 1916, belligerents in a total war cannot and will not limit the resources they devote to their war effort without ultimately paying with defeat. At bottom line, outcomes on the battlefield were a result of the ability of a nation (or an alliance of nations) to churn out people and material, and to minimize competing civilian consumption.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Lard, Lice and LongevityThe Standard of Living in Occupied Denmark and the Netherlands, 1940–1945, pp. 12 - 37Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2009