The chapter offers a general introduction to the Ichigo campaign, particularly with reference to its economic impact. Launched late in the war when Japan’s position in the Pacific was deteriorating, it was the largest military campaign ever undertaken by the Japanese Imperial Army. The armies of Chiang Kai-shek performed very poorly, often just melting away. There was general pessimism about the war in China even as the Allies did well elsewhere.

The campaign had a calamitous economic impact on Free China. Food supplies were cut off. Hyperinflation continued to have a devastating impact on the lives of Chinese. There were struggles in maintaining the exchange rate of fabi and the beginnings of conflict with the United States over this issue. US treasury secretary Morgenthau became angry with Chiang. A second dispute over the sale of gold in China supplied by the United States created tension between Morgenthau and T. V. Soong who represented Chiang in Washington.

This chapter introduces the extent and importance of black markets in Occupied France, reviews the historiography on the black market since 1945, and explains the central themes in the book.

Surveys how the French office known as the Contrôle économique was created for price controls and then charged with maintaining fixed prices in markets and suppressing the black market. The chapter then provides a critical evaluation of the control strategies for enforcement and their failure to contain black- market growth during the years of Occupation or to retain the initial popular support essential for having state controls work.

Sets French black-market experience in the context of recent research on black markets and economic controls in belligerent powers during the Second World War. It provides analysis of why the French case is so important and interesting, including conclusions on why black market was so extensive in France, how French policies and their enforcement alienated popular support for measures that claimed to ‘equalize sacrifice’ (and failed to do so), and the essential need for government regulation to protect property and market access to essential goods (Vichy controls failed on both counts).

Agricultural policy should have been a primary focus for the Vichy regime, to restore the values of working the land as promoted by their propaganda, and to feed French citizens. This chapter explains Vichy agricultural policies, the alienation of French producers, and it details the economic and individualist rationales for farmers to sell to and rely on the black market, with three product case studies for black- market behaviours and logic: butter, meat, and wine.

Summarizes the economic context for France during the Occupation and postwar period, covering the impact of the war, German Occupation policies and their impact on French GDP and consumption, and the unreliability of statistics on the French economy during the war.

This chapter explores illicit means of obtaining food in the ghettos including smuggling, black market purchases, and food theft. The chapter discusses the ways in which geographical location impacted what types of illicit food access were available to individuals in the ghettos, how and at what time frame these illicit means might be prosecuted, and methods employed to illicitly obtain food. It juxtaposes large-scale and small-scale projects for obtaining additional food. It also includes a study of the black market prices in the three different ghettos and what factors impacted food prices.

Seeking to limit potentially invisible, incontrollable activity, official decrees, neighborhood communities, guilds, and moralists together created a powerful discourse that stigmatized the night, and a set of regulations aimed to impose visibility on those who nevertheless went out after dark. Yet, with vision impaired, the night continued to pose a challenge to urban order, and the authorities at times applied harsh punitive measures in order to project fear. These demonstrations of formal violence were meant to somewhat compensate for the rulers’ actually rather precarious control over the dark city.

This chapter demonstrates that French official employment and vocational policies were a product of the specific interplay between various economic considerations and cultural influences, from nineteenth century socialist utopias and the French ‘civilizing mission’ to the ideology of the National Revolution and the post-1945 rhetoric of production. It illuminates how employment conditions crucially depended on where DPs lived, for whom they worked and their nationality and gender. Significant efforts were made to help a number of DPs acquire the means to learn a trade, but employment discourses often reaffirmed a hierarchical taxonomy in which productivity and desirability were explicitly linked to ethnic and gender differences. This chapter thereby contends that employment policies were deeply implicated in the mixed record of the zone: the emphasis on DP employment at times made possible the development of DPs’ own initiatives and their sense of responsibility, in enabling them to run independent workshops and giving them the opportunity to live in private accommodation. In this sense, it contributed to normalizing DPs’ living conditions. At the same time, actual implementation of employment policies often revealed disturbing indications of brutality, unjustifiable in their cruelty and arbitrariness, as a number of DP strikes testifies.

Chapter 8 explores violence and the inner organization of gangs. The declining provision of basic needs and poor infrastructure have led to the emergence of illegal markets within corrections. The control of these markets by gangs and small groups has contributed to the growth of criminal organizations that have shaped life inside prisons. Using different data sources, we show that these groups fight for dominance of the drug trade and other coveted goods inside prisons, and that they may use extreme violence to maintain control. This chapter studies the conditions under which violence may occur and its extent, the growing role of gangs in Latin American prisons, as well as the conditions that give rise to criminal governance.

Chapter 6 focuses on individual and household coping strategies, and investigates important famine markers such as crime, black-market trade, food expeditions, and the hunt for fuel. It explains how the severe food and fuel deprivation during the final months of war prompted urban dwellers in the occupied west to take matters into their own hands. Because of the transportation difficulties, urban black-market prices rose astronomically. Since most households did not have the means to purchase or barter on black markets regularly, anyone socially and physically capable ventured out into the countryside in search for food. Overall, the strategies pursued clearly demonstrate that the crisis was essentially a transportation problem, and not the result of actual food availability decline.