Simon Pearson

The Empire Fights Back

May 10, 2025

The Second World War, as Scorched Earth recounts it, was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its prosecution, and imperial in its aftermath.

On Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II

Anniversaries

This week marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Church bells were rung. Beacons were lit across the country. Veterans, fewer each year, were honoured with solemn salutes and wreath-laying ceremonies. The BBC rolled out grainy black-and-white footage of cheering crowds in Piccadilly and Churchill on the Ministry balcony. The Royals were given centre stage, as crowds cheered the requisite Buckingham Palace flypast. In Parliament, the usual tributes were paid. The familiar story was told again: freedom triumphant, tyranny vanquished, the birth of a rules-based world order.It is a story we have been telling ourselves for eight decades. But what if it’s wrong?

Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s Scorched Earth sets out not merely to revise the popular narrative of the Second World War but to displace it entirely. For Chamberlin, this was not a noble war of democracy against fascism but a global struggle among rival empires, waged with colonial logics and ending in the violent reinvention of global imperialism. The Axis powers were not aberrations; they were imperial upstarts. And the victors, far from dismantling empire, restructured it. In new forms, under new flags, but with the same assumptions of racial hierarchy and global entitlement.

Front cover of Scorched Earth by Paul Thomas Chamberlain

Imperial Continuity

This is revisionist history with intellectual clarity and political force. Chamberlin, whose previous work (The Cold War’s Killing Fields) traced the devastation wrought by American and Soviet interventionism in the Global South, brings a similarly global frame to bear here. Scorched Earth presents the Second World War not as a break with the colonial past but as its culmination: the moment at which centuries of imperial violence were fused with modern industrial warfare to produce a truly global conflagration.

Hitler’s demand for Lebensraum, Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Mussolini’s fantasies of a renewed Roman Empire, these were not aberrant ideologies. They were bids for imperial parity. Chamberlin argues that the fascist powers did not invent the logic of racialised conquest; they borrowed it from the British Raj, the French mission civilisatrice, and the Monroe Doctrine. The problem was not that they imitated empire, but that they did so too aggressively, too openly, and too late.

Unthinkable Futures

Chamberlin begins in 1945, with Berlin in ruins and Soviet soldiers occupying the German capital. Even before Japan’s surrender, Churchill had ordered his generals to plan for war with the USSR. “Operation Unthinkable” imagined a new conflict with British and American troops joined by rearmed Wehrmacht divisions. Turning eastward to confront their former Soviet allies. That it was never launched is, Chamberlin argues, less important than the fact that it was taken seriously. The war ended. The war almost continued.

By framing his story in this way, Chamberlin makes clear that the Second World War was not a moment of moral resolution but a hinge in a longer history of domination. The empires of Europe had exhausted themselves. The superpowers that replaced them would adopt their instruments—and sharpen them.

Colonial Violence

The war, as Scorched Earth recounts it, was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its prosecution, and imperial in its aftermath. This is not just a matter of geographic scope, though Chamberlin moves deftly from the killing fields of Eastern Europe to the scorched cities of China, but of analytic emphasis. He insists that the methods of the war, the targeting of civilians, the mobilisation of colonial subjects, the strategic bombing of cities, emerged not from European battlefields but from colonial frontiers. The first concentration camps were in South Africa. The first aerial bombardments were in Iraq. All British by design.

What Chamberlin captures so clearly is how the logic of imperial war, where civilians are fair game, where race determines whose death matters, where destruction is pursued as moral purification, migrated back to Europe and East Asia. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are not aberrations; they are, in a grim sense, the culmination of a process that began in the colonies.

Peripheral Centres

One of the book’s great strengths is its insistence on making the so-called periphery central. The Asian, North African and Pacific theatres are not treated as separate or subsidiary to the Western Front; they are the war. Chamberlin gives weight to the Burmese campaigns, the famine in Bengal, the massacres in Manchuria. He notes the use of forced labour, the strategic deployment of famine, the recruitment of colonial soldiers who would be denied equal rights at war’s end.

Japanese rhetoric about “Asia for Asians” may have been cynical, but it spoke to a real contradiction: that the Western empires claimed to fight for freedom while maintaining dominion over hundreds of millions of colonised people. The war, for many across Asia and Africa, was not about the future of liberalism but the continuity of empire, under whichever master.

Superpower Succession

The postwar order that emerged from the rubble was no less imperial. Chamberlin details how the United States and the Soviet Union inherited the tools of empire. Military garrisons, economic leverage, ideological policing and wielded them to enforce their global spheres of influence. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only acts of war against Japan but messages to Moscow. Stalin’s rapid installation of puppet regimes from Warsaw to Bucharest was not revolutionary export but territorial consolidation.

What followed. Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Kenya. Were not Cold War “flashpoints” but the aftershocks of an imperial system redrawn rather than dismantled. The war had not ended fascism, racism, or colonial violence. It had simply relocated the centres of power and renamed the justifications.

Postwar Myths

Chamberlin is not interested in moral equivalency, but he is unflinching in his analysis. The United States did not simply “win” the war; it emerged from it as a global hegemon, armed with the world’s most powerful military, a globe-spanning base network, and a set of institutions. From Bretton Woods to the UN, all designed to secure its interests. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, held sway over the Eurasian continent through a militarised state apparatus as brutal in suppression as it was effective in command.

What is most striking in Chamberlin’s account is how familiar the aftermath feels. The world of endless war, drone strikes, forward operating bases, and economic extraction under liberal guise is not a betrayal of the postwar settlement but its logical continuation. The myth of 1945, of fascism defeated and peace restored, functions not as history but as ideology.

Comparisons

Readers familiar with Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War, long a touchstone for Marxist analysis, will find in Scorched Earth a markedly different emphasis. Mandel saw the war as both a product of inter-imperialist rivalry and a crucible of revolutionary possibility, in which class struggle simmered beneath the surface even in the darkest years. Chamberlin, by contrast, keeps his focus squarely on empire, violence, and the racial ordering of global power. There is little here of class dynamics or socialist potential. Where Mandel traced the war’s dialectical tensions. Its capacity to produce both barbarism and resistance, Chamberlin offers a starker account: a war that tightened the grip of empire, redrew its maps, and buried its crimes beneath a mythology of liberation. If Mandel’s book urges the reader to look for ruptures, Chamberlin’s insists on continuities.

A Reckoning

Scorched Earth is not an easy book to read, and it was not meant to be. It offers no comforting counter-narratives, no romantic portraits of resistance. Chamberlin writes with the cold lucidity of someone determined to look directly at the machinery of power and say what he sees. The result is a history of the Second World War that feels closer to our present than to our past.

There are omissions, of course. The book sometimes races past the internal dynamics of resistance movements or the complex political struggles within the colonised world. Its emphasis on structural violence can understate the agency of those who fought against it, not just with arms, but with strikes, petitions, and postwar movements for national liberation. But these are limitations of scope, not of insight.

In Britain, where VE Day is still invoked as proof of national virtue, and in the United States, where the “arsenal of democracy” has become a permanent institution, Chamberlin’s book arrives as a necessary provocation. Against the mythology of liberation, he offers a record of domination; against the moral clarity of the good war, a reckoning with firebombs, famine, and the architecture of empire. It is a book that refuses to console and for that reason, it deserves to be read.

What makes Scorched Earth linger is the way it renders the present newly legible. When Churchill ordered “Operation Unthinkable” the secret plan to strike the Soviet Union with American support and rearmed Nazi troops, he was not acting out of madness but from imperial reflex. The war had barely ended; the next one was already being imagined. Today, with Europe rearming, NATO expanding, and Ukraine as the new frontier of East-West confrontation, one wonders how far those old plans have really been buried, or whether, in some windowless room, they’re being dusted off again.

Front cover of Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War

Front cover of Mark Mazower’s Dark continent

This is an important book. One that deserves a place on the shelf of every historian seriously engaged with the Second World War. Alongside Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, Chamberlin’s Scorched Earth stands as a major contribution: panoramic in scope, morally unflinching, and conceptually sharp. When you’ve read as much literature on the conflict as now exists, to come across a book with a new central premise, and one so forcefully argued, is not just refreshing. It’s a rare and vital find.

Book Review, Books, History, Second World War