Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945

by Aviel Roshwald

For most of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of their experience of the Second World War was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers. In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, Aviel Roshwald brings us the first single-authored, comparative treatment of European and Asian responses to German and Japanese occupation during the war. He illustrates how patriotic, ethno-national, and internationalist identities were manipulated, exploited, reconstructed and reinvented as a result of the wholesale dismantling of states and redrawing of borders. Using eleven case studies from across the two continents, he examines how behavioral choices around collaboration and resistance were conditioned by existing identities or loyalties as well as by short-term cost–benefit calculations, opportunism, or coercion.

466 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 27, 2023

About the author

Aviel Roshwald is an American historian of modern history and Professor of history at Georgetown University.

He received his B.A from the University of Minnesota in 1980 at the age of 18, and his PhD from Harvard University in 1987.

As a scholar of nationalism, Roshwald is noted for his belief that nations and nationalism already existed in the ancient world.

Roshwald is the son of academics Mordecai Roshwald and Miriam Roshwald , and the husband of Alene Moyer

Reviews

[Chloe Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Roshwald said in the introduction, the value of this work lies more in the transnational, innovative comparison of case studies, not so much in uncovering primary sources analyses in each case. I do appreciate how much this opened the world to me, in terms of comparing how different places reacted to their occupying power, given their history and circumstance when they first were occupied.