More than 80 years after it ended, we are still living through the aftermath of the second world war. When people use the word ‘postwar’ they invariably mean this war and the changes it wrought upon international relations, trade, economics, domestic politics, social values and much more besides. Yet it remains all too easy, certainly in the English-speaking world, to cleave to a rather parochial view of that conflict as something that ended up spreading to lots of exotic places while still ultimately concerning the great battle between good and evil that was the Allies vs the Nazis. Can there be any corner of Hitler’s psyche, any charming detail of the home front in Britain, which remains unprobed in books, TV programmes and museum exhibits?

Less common, even now, is a view of the war as a conflict that was global from the ground upwards – defined by interconnected economies and by the differential impact on people around the world of the same technological and ideological innovations, from air power to workers’ rights. Attempts to tell a global story face daunting challenges, as Jonathan Fennell admits early on in Collapse, the first part of a trilogy that sets out to offer just such an account of the war. Scholarship is now so extensive that........

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