While the academic study of International Relations immediately following the World Wars was focused on the causes of war and the conditions of peace, the diversification of IR in the mid twentieth century led to the creation of a discrete subfield of security studies. For the remainder of the twentieth century, this subfield focused exclusively on the problem of war – conventional and nuclear – between nation-states. But the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of multiple, opaque, and transnational security risks opened an intellectual space within security studies for a re-envisioning of the analytical approaches to security, as well as to a widening of the agenda. Security was no longer linked exclusively to war but also to a wider range of issues, and security was no longer exclusively conceptualized as the continued existence of the state but applied also to a multitude of actors.

During the 1930s, the Bank devised a plan to help prepare the nation for war. In contrast to the Treasury, the Cabinet, and the League of Nations, the Bank was the sole defender of exchange control, a policy that involved restrictions on conversions in and out of sterling. Its experts argued that the necessity of wartime finance, diplomatic tensions with France and the United States, and a potential flight from sterling at the outbreak of war all justified the reform of exchange-rate management. Although exchange control was primarily seen as an overly restrictive arrangement, often associated with authoritarian regimes in Germany or Argentina, the Bank’s advisers claimed to understand the technical requirements and the particular needs of a financial sector preparing for war. With its enactment in early 1939, the Bank had effectively abandoned its commitment to restoring the prewar liberal economic order and instead oversaw a new system of governance that continued well into the postwar years.

Chapter 1 offers a historical introduction as well as an overview of existing research in the field. It argues that by mapping out the trajectories of former volunteer soldiers, it is possible to see the many ways in which the Spanish Civil War and the broader anti-fascist engagement of the inter-war period could constitute a transformative experience and event; an event that expanded volunteers’ political horizons and gradually opened up possibilities for border-crossing political engagement in the post-war era. Thus, it sets the stage for the case studies constituting the main part of the book, showing that the political and military influence of the volunteers in Spain did not necessarily come to an end in 1938/1939 or even in 1945. In a few yet significant cases, it stretched across the globe far into the Cold War period.

Chapter 3 highlights the centrality of Spain in the development of a particular kind of ‘professional revolutionary’ deployed by the Comintern in the late 1930s and 1940s. It focuses on the life of the Italian communist Ilio Barontini and follows his long militancy within the anti-fascist front. Barontini, unlike most Europeans of his generation, had been confronted with violent fascism since the early 1920s. Nevertheless, the Spanish Civil War marks a watershed in his life, as it was in Spain that he refined his skills as a fighter. But Spain influenced Barontini’s trajectory in a political sense, too, as it was during the period of intense fighting at Guadalajara in early 1937 that fellow volunteers in the Italian brigade began to discuss the need to bring the anti-fascist fight to the colonial front as well. In the following years, Barontini went both to fight and to train new recruits in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. In this way, the chapter offers a glimpse of one way in which anti-fascism and anti-imperialism connected in this period.

Chapter 4 follows the trajectory of Ernst Frey and other European anti-fascists, who enlisted in the Vietnamese Army after defecting from the French Foreign Legion. It focuses on the complicated relationship between the soldiers who survived the anti-fascist struggles in Europe and the new generation of soldiers of the anti-colonial wars in the Global South. After 1945, many Spanish Civil War veterans followed events in Algeria and Indochina with great interest and sided with those fighting for national self-determination. Notwithstanding the visibility of both causes, notable armed support materialised only in Indochina, where foreign volunteers were initially well-received and saw their military influence grow much beyond what their modest careers in the French Foreign Legion might indicate. With time, however, they were also seen as a challenge to the nationalistic Vietnamese leadership, who, thanks largely to Chinese support from the early 1950s onwards, were radically altering their military structure, leaving little or no space for French Foreign Legion defectors.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

The civil war in Spain provoked deeper political thinking and involvement for Hemingway, and his political engagement shaped his writing about that war. Hemingway returned to his journalistic roots in the war reportage he wrote on the conflict, and experimented with dramatic form in his only play, The Fifth Column. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he absorbs, adapts, and rejects a romanticized view of the Spanish Civil War that had been developed and promulgated by European and American writers sympathetic (as Hemingway was) to the Spanish Republican cause, stripping from the realities of internecine conflict any potentially consoling significance of political commitment. The Second World War also drew Hemingway as a war correspondent (initially reluctant, he became an enthusiastic witness to, and even participant in, combat in France and Germany). On the basis of his wartime experience, he explored themes of forgiveness and grace in Across the River and into the Trees, a flawed novel whose purgatorial narrative is nevertheless an interesting experiment in fictional form.

Starting from the Russo-Japanese War until the height of the Cold War era, Schoenberg’s adult life coincided with various wars during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Schoenberg navigated these events by surveying his correspondences with friends and pupils, his own writings and brief analyses of two overtly political compositions, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947). This chapter ends by considering the two war compositions as the composer’s statement and restatement against fascistic tendencies in Germany during World War II and, again, in the United States during the Cold War era.

Humor functions as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds (1947), novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or conservative, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion—religious or secular—could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

The relationship between the International Brigades and Spain did not end with the volunteersߣ withdrawal from frontline service in late 1938. By way of conclusion, Making Antifascist War considers the post-war trajectories of the antifascist veterans with a particular emphasis on Spainߣs continuing impact on their military activities, political activism and antifascist identities. It then considers the process by which some veterans substituted making antifascist war with writing, speaking and recording it, showing how this process related to the shifting politics of their respective home countries. In the 1990s, the International Brigades came to occupy a particularly contentious place in Spaniardsߣ own memories of their twentieth-century past, with the governmentߣs offer of citizenship to those veterans still alive in 1996 unleashing fresh debates about their relationship to the country. By considering the ongoing role of Spain in the lives of the volunteers, this concluding chapter reaffirms the bookߣs underlying premise that the domestic context of the country is essentially in reaching a full understanding of their transnational military service.

Chapter 3 uses the most iconic figure in LFC’s pre-Shankly history, the Scottish winger Billy Liddell, as the jumping off point for a study of a club, and a city, in apparent post-war decline. Topics range from Liverpool’s early de-industrialisation to LFC’s local rivalry with the ‘Mersey Millionaires’, Everton.

Chapter 1 looks at the key factors behind post-war changes in political status, the motivations of local politicians involved in these negotiations and the impact of these changes on future steps to decolonise. In 1946, Martinique and Guadeloupe gained overseas department status to integrate them fully into the French Republic. Meanwhile, the West Indies Federation negotiations gave the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands the opportunity to reconsider their position within the British Empire. Both chose to become crown colonies with a more direct link to Britain. This chapter argues that these changes to political status were crucial to later attempts to negotiate greater autonomy. These changes were particularly significant for the French Antilles, as they would halt debates about independence for the following ten to fifteen years. In the British territories, crown colony status stabilised British rule and shifted the focus towards economic development.