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The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Edited by Mark Harrison New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxiii + 307 pp. Tables, notes, and bibliography. $49.95. ISBN 0521620465.
Reviewed by Daniel Beaver
This edited volume deals with economic issues related to the Second World War in a broad, longitudinal context, roughly from 1920 through 1990. In an overview, editor Mark Harrison argues that the overall economic impact of the war on the vanquished was not the unmitigated disaster that it seemed. Indeed, he argues that "the wartime losers won the peace in the sense that they came to dominate the post-war global industrial economy and world trade in manufactures" (p. 40). Stephen Broadbury and Peter Howlett follow with a piece on the United Kingdom which modifies traditional accounts by at least implying that it was not wartime efforts but post-war policies which brought the...