Chapter 2 explores how American policymakers built a government-sponsored housing finance model during and after the Great Depression. While the country entered the depression without major national housing programs, it emerged with an expansive toolkit of demand-side housing policies. The FDR administration discovered that subsidizing home mortgages would produce economic cascade effects by stimulating bank lending, construction, employment, wages, and consumer spending, reinforcing the country's emerging demand-led growth regime. The core idea behind New Deal housing programs was to transform mortgage markets to lower the cost for borrowers and minimize risk for creditors. These initiatives included the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program, which offered affordable mortgages to millions of homeowners - although excluding racialized minorities. These housing initiatives helped overcome the depression and permanently made housing finance a "national champion," albeit one heavily dependent on state support. Reinforcing housing-based growth became a routine response to address economic challenges well into the post-WWII period.

Chapter 3 explores the origins of German housing programs in the post-WWII period, arguing that these programs reinforced the country's export-oriented economy and contributed to its economic miracle. Facing severe housing shortages after WWII, German policymakers adopted extensive housing programs, including tax subsidies and social housing programs for both rental housing and homeownership, savings subsidies, and rent controls. These programs aimed to establish low-cost housing for workers and the middle class, which improved industrial productivity by alleviating labor shortages in industrial centers and limiting wage demands and inflation detrimental to export-oriented growth. Unlike American housing programs focused on boosting domestic demand, German supply-side initiatives were designed to overcome the immediate post-WWII housing crisis and support the country's manufacturing sector. These efforts thus made housing programs a pivotal element in Germany's coordinated, export-oriented postwar economy.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

Japanese occupation of British Asia challenged British prestige at an unprecedented scale, but what the War challenged about Britishness went far beyond the myth of white supremacy. This chapter explains how the Second World War shattered the cosmopolitan, inclusive notions of Britishness that developed in pre-war Hong Kong. Even before the outbreak of war, systemic discrimination involved in the 1940 evacuation scheme made colonial subjects realize that Britishness was reduced to a ‘race’ at moments of crisis. The chapter also explored the varied wartime experience of Portuguese refugees in Macau, students and graduates of the University of Hong Kong, and members of the British Army Aid Group (B.A.A.G.). Increased interactions with the British state made some acutely aware of the racism they experienced under British colonialism, and eroded their identification with Britishness. The practicalities of war, then, highlighted the fragility of the rhetoric of imperial cosmopolitanism, and put the diverse forms of Britishness articulated in pre-war Hong Kong to a severe test.

Part I introduces the five protagonists of the book by discussing their childhood and youth during and after World War II. What made them choose economics? What made them amenable to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism as taught in their undergraduate studies? This chapter focuses on their experiences with Nazism, their socialization in the Hitler Youth, and the discrimination they were subjected to because of their ethnic or religious identity. It also highlights the postwar tumults that made them prone to the postwar propaganda on securing peace in the name of socialism and the opportunities to engage in ideological confrontation during the first cleansing waves at university.

Stoppard spent only two years of his childhood in Singapore, so it has left little evident trace on his work, though his early displacements must have had an impact; whereas India appears more substantially, raising questions about Stoppard’s relationship to British imperialism.

Tom Stoppard’s childhood in Czechoslovakia, his Jewish family’s flight from the Nazis to Singapore, and his eventual assumption of a new English identity after his mother’s remarriage all had an impact on his work, in which questions of name and identity are often important.

This chapter provides a historical background of the enduring devastation of the post-World War II agricultural sector in Ukraine that encouraged local authorities to pursue various policies to organise their economies in opposition to laws and practice of their superior central authorities. This chapter provides the proper context to understand the case studies analysed in the following chapters.