 Good morning everybody or good afternoon or just less and people sign in and see the numbers building such as bear with us for a few minutes as everybody gets on board. Give another minute or two if you don't mind waiting. Right, I think let's let's get down to business we've got a decent crowds and already signed in and hopefully more will join us in due course. And thank you everybody for coming along today welcome to our second event in our new global seminar series and my name is Jonathan Fennel I'm president of the second world war research group. And we're a group that aims to promote innovative research on conflict and its global aspects and act as a forum for bringing together new perspectives publicizing recent and current research, encouraging collaboration across scholarly communities and across academic disciplines, and providing a hub an organizational hub for conferences seminars and other related activities and I think by showcasing the new economics of the second world war 75 years on ebook. And we feel we're meeting a number of these objectives today. And so I've got what we've got an astonishing trilogy of speakers with us and with an amazing range of of experience. We're going to start off with Steven broadbury, and then we'll go with Joachim both and Pauline. And Steven is professor of economic history at the Oxford at the University of Oxford and director of the economic history program at the Center for economic policy research. And he is the president of the British Academy and is currently president of the economic history society. Steven by my count as close to 200 publications. Let's try harder Steven, and he is co editor with Mark Harrison of the economics of World War One, and, and the 2018 CPR ebook the economics of the Great War. And of course, and of the economics of the second world war ebook that we're going to discuss today, Steven is going to talk to us about British economic management and performance during the world wars over to you Steven, please kick us off. Right, I'll just share the screen and get the slides up. Well, this, this volume on the economic, the economics of World War two 75 years on was timed to come out after 75 years after the end of World War two, and it followed an earlier volume that we did on World War one. And it's sort of divided into three main sections on the preparations for war, conduct of war, and the consequences. The chapter which I'm going to talk about lessons learned British economic management and performance during the world wars, I mean it does focus mainly on the conduct aspect but of course it, it has implications for the preparations, and the consequences, as we'll see. So I think it's one of the sort of motivating factors behind the joint research that Mark Harrison and I have done over the years was the feeling that somehow the two world wars don't really get the attention they deserve in the economic history literature. And so, so there are, there is an absolutely huge literature on Britain during the two world wars, but you know the economic history of these episodes, we still think remains under researched. And I think there are two reasons for that one is sort of the economic history literature. Most economic historians certainly writing on the modern period seem uncomfortable writing about the war, somehow they treat the war economy is different. So you'll find the literature is really huge on the pre war, the interwar, and the post war periods but nobody wants to write on the war periods. And then in the war history literature, I think there are much more attractive priorities for people to research battles weapons social issues administrative issues, rather than boring old economic issues. So, this chapter draws on research with Peter Howlett on British economic management and performance during World War One, and we also wrote on World War Two, and then this is a sort of comparative chapter. So the questions that we focus on are really twofold. So firstly, to what extent did economic performance during the Second World War improve as a result of lessons learned from the experience of the first World War. And then secondly, what were the implications of those lessons for long run performance after World War Two. So if we compare mobilization during World War One and World War Two, this graph sort of puts the two together. You have the increase of real GDP during the first World War, that's the gray line. And then during World War Two, that's the black line. And secondly, the path of expansion is quite similar. It peaks about five years after the start of the war. In both cases. But on the other hand, the real GDP peak is about double the World War One peak. So it looks as if lessons have been learned. Another way of looking at this is because wars are waged by states is to have a look at the increase in government spending. And again, we get a similar picture, the expansion in both wars. A bigger expansion reaching sort of about 50% of GDP in the Second World War instead of just 40% in World War One. So the scale of mobilization was substantially greater. And it was also achieved more smoothly during World War Two. And that is usually attributed to the lessons learned from the experience of World War One. So World War One, you had certainly at the start an initial aim of business as usual. Not having too much disruption of the economy. And that was only gradually chipped away. In World War Two, by contrast, plans were already being drafted in the 1930s and could be implemented before the war started really once it had become inevitable. And that was sort of eased frictions and disruption. For example, you had 15 million ration books ready for distribution by September 1939. So, state intervention during the First World War was relatively ad hoc until 1917 really, it's very much reactive approach rather than proactive. And certainly the economic and material burden of the war was initially underestimated. And the spread of controls was was pretty slow compared with World War Two. So conscription doesn't get introduced until March 1916 food rationing only in 1918. In World War Two, then governments really believed that controls had been adopted too slowly in the First World War. And so they were much quicker to move on to a total war footing. You have macro measures to control the inflationary gap, keep aggregate demand in line with aggregate supply, but also a barrage of more micro oriented controls to make sure that demand and supply in the case of individual goods brought into line. You have overall central planning to set priorities. You have rationing to curtail consumer demand. You have production quotas concentration of production to try to increase efficiency, central manpower budgeting, and central allocation of scarce resources such as steel and capital. And a narrative then stresses the limitations of relying on market forces. It also stresses the slowness of governments to learn that lesson during the First World War, and the benefits of making a swift transition to a planned economy during the Second World War. The question that we raise here is, is it possible that the lessons will learn too well, and that the governments had an unrealistic belief in the efficacy of controls that they sort of took this lesson too far. And then we asked, could it be that this was a factor in the relatively poor performance of the British economy during the post war period, which was being overregulated. We must be careful not to overstate that point because, you know, few historians are going to be persuaded that the success of the British war economy was all due to the smooth operation of market forces. But on the other hand, maybe the policymakers underestimated the positive effects of Britain's liberal economic inheritance compared to the main rivals, and therefore somewhat overestimated the contribution of government intervention and planning. We can see signs of that in the work of Mansur Olsen, writing in the early 1960s, he sort of pointed to this contrast, the fact that Britain adopted free trade was dependent on imported food because the agricultural sector contracted. On the other hand, protectionist Germany remains self sufficient in grain production. On the other hand, you know, when you look at the outcomes Britain survived the submarine blockade as its market oriented farmers were able to respond flexibly, expand output, whilst Germany's peasant farmers tended to withdraw from the market, and we see output declining and ultimately collapsing really rather strongly. So Theo Balderson's work which highlights the important role of London as a financial center, which provided an efficient mechanism for financing the war effort. Also, I think we should not be too mesmerized by Germany's rapid industrialization from the mid 19th century on the basis of protectionism state intervention universal banks. It's forgotten that Britain was substantially richer than Germany at the start of both World War One and World War Two, and Britain's steadier more market oriented development made for a more flexible economy, better able to withstand the strains of total war. So, a positive evaluation of planning during the Second World War. So, reinforced disenchantment with the reliance on market forces from the 1930s with the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. Although some of the Labour Party advocated a pretty wholesale move to a planned economy after the war, the Labour government, which took power actually adopted a mixed economy with an emphasis on full employment through Keynesian demand management. And less a strong distrust of market forces permeated economic policy after the war so we have important industries being nationalized coal steel railways restrictions on competition, which had been strengthened during the war. Really were followed by the continuation of a light touch competition policy. I highlighted with Nick crafts in some work we did in the 1990 late 1990s early 2000s we argued that these policies were damaging for Britain's productivity performance during the post war period and lasted right until the factory years. So I'll stop there and I'll stop sharing the screen and hand over to Pauline. Pauline, thank you so much for your time. You're happy to go. You happy to go. And thank you for that, Stephen and for those who want to ask questions as a Q&A box in the bottom right. Please feel free to throw questions in there. And that's how we'll manage it. And at the end of the session so we'll take them all at the end was the three speakers. I'll just quickly introduce your team who holds the UBS chair of macroeconomics and financial markets of the economics department at Zurich University is achievements in terms of publications grant successes and public outreach are too many to list here for our purposes today it is worth noting that your team is a member of the Royal Historical Society, a joint managing editor of the Economic Journal and an associate editor of the quarterly Journal of Economics. He has had three academic books, five popular books and over 50 articles published by for example, OUP Princeton University Press, and the top journals in economics, he's going to talk to us today about Hitler's rise to power over to you. Jonathan, thank you so much. I have to just for the record, clarify that I'm neither an editor at the EJ nor an associate editor at the QJ anymore. Can you see my slides. We can see them. Okay, so let me just get going here. So, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about Hitler's rise to power now in the context of a session on the origins of World War two. It's very hard to think how we could do without mentioning the name of Hitler Hitler's a set accession to power in 1933 sets the course. Inevitably sooner or later we'll go to war to reopen the question posed by World War one. Now, what we want to do, what I'm trying to do in this paper is to revisit the issue of the question of what is the importance, what is the role of economic factors in the rise of Hitler to power, which we will later maps into World War two and all that is to follow. Now, libraries have been written on the rise of Hitler, looking at the political, cultural social background. And why do you need another take on this question at all. Well, the striking fact is that first of all, just so they were on the same page to give you a little bit of background. The rise of the Nazi Party is extraordinarily rapid in the late 20s, early 30s. So, if you actually look at the electoral results in 19 at latest 1928, the Nazi Party gets 2.6% of the national vote. Three years later they already jumped to 18%. And then by the summer of 1932, the single largest party in parliament for the 37% share of the vote. By March, they already in power and they get close to 44% of the vote. Now, the striking thing is that, while pretty much everybody who's written about this feels that this meteoric rise over a very short period could never have happened except for the backdrop of the Great Depression. We've never really been able to marshal evidence that shows how economic misery facilitated the rise of the Nazi Party. So why is that so difficult? Isn't that obvious if you just put a time series against the electoral results here surely that comes out and that's true. And as the German economy worsens as unemployment spirals towards 6 million or so, the electoral results go up. Now, the thing that we don't find easily is indication that misery at the level of individuals or towns, cities, counties predicts support for the Nazi Party. So if you go to the most striking measure of distress, unemployment, for example, that has almost no predictive power for how many people vote for the Nazis. So finding something in the cross section with good micro evidence that actually links economic misery for the rise of the Nazi Party has been something like the Holy Grail of this literature. The thing I want to talk about today is a little bit of my own research but also recent work that Meisner and co-authors have done, looking at economic factors driving support for the Nazi Party. So before we turn to the stuff that I've done with Stefan Giesfler, Sebastian Dörr, and of course, Luis Pedro. Let me just give you a brief summary of what Meisner and the other three of the co-authors have done and then look at austerity. So austerity is of course nothing new. They take this to the cross section in Germany and this is interesting because it's a very different form of inducing or measuring people's economic unhappiness. If you take away their entitlement, they don't have to be poor, they don't have to be unemployed. It's just that maybe they pay more taxes, maybe they get less from the state. It's a very visible form in which the government may be failing you and they find that this actually has substantial predictive power for how the Nazis do. And difficulty as always is sort of understanding why this happens to the way they extend some places and others and I think they have some nice ways to sort of get around the most obvious challenges. Now, the thing that we've done in this paper is to take a complimentary view and look at one particular set of events that made the Great Depression great. And that's the financial crisis of 1931 in Germany. Germany is not unique in having a financial crisis in 1931 in the US as well as a wave of bank failures, for example. In both cases, there's a very good argument to be made that what is a bad but garden variety recession previous to the bank failures becomes really the mother of all the impressions afterwards. So if you look at industrial output on the slide here, you can see how by early 1931 as a downturn but it's maybe three and a half, four percent relative to the pre-crisis peak. As banks start to fail at a large scale, suddenly you're seeing output declines of 10 percent during the immediate shutdown of the financial sector but that carries on until the total output decline in the industry here, which is 80 percent or so before turning around and starting to rise again. So this is what we want to look at. We want to think more whether those parts of Germany exposed to the consequences of this banking crisis are actually the ones where support for the Nazi party increases the most. So just for sort of short background and context, what is this banking crisis? So there's a German textile firm called North Wallet that engages in speculation that goes wrong. And because two of the big banks, there's four big banks in Germany at the time, two of them are heavily exposed to this textile firm, Greysma and Dana. And these two banks fail and then there's a run on the entire banking system in every bank. As liquidity problems the government fails to provide a backstop effectively as a result of the constraints of the gold standard. And then there's a generalized banking crisis, a moratorium of access to the financial system. And then banks need to be recapitalized right, left and center and some of them get forcefully merged by the government. So what do we do here? Let me just show you the main result. We basically divide Germany into two parts. One part has a lot of local exposure to one of these failing banks called Dana. I'll explain a second while we focus on one and not on the two that fail. And in those places we have a lot of exposure to Dana Bank. The Nazis do much better. So this is the change in support for the Nazi party between September 1930 and July 1932 when they had their big breakthrough. And you can see how those two curves appear sort of shifted to the right for the ones that have Dana exposure. And there's no pre-trends and there's no fading away of this effect. So if you actually always relative to 1930 look at what the electoral success of the Nazi party is. And you can see that prior to 1931 there's nothing in the cross section. There's a small positive effect but it's tiny and insignificant. And afterwards this really jumps and it stays high. So what do we do? We collect data from firm directories on who they bank with. And because connections between Germany between firms and banks are very strong we're pretty much sure that they don't bank with anybody else. And we also have information on the places where you have branches. All this nice map is meant to show you that this really goes from north to south and east to west. In a pretty comprehensive way. All we're going to do is to say how do you do economically in the diamonds versus who does and how do the Nazis do. So what we find is this big additional increase for Dana but not for Greysner. And that's where it gets interesting because you might say well you know economic misery in both cases things fail. Why don't you see the same effects? Well maybe Greysner's failure didn't have the same economic consequences. That turns out to be untrue. So one of the contributions of research here is to actually use income data which has quite severe limitations but nobody's used it in this context before. And what you see is that on top of the normal decline of income between 1929 and 1932 in Germany there's an additional over a third decline in income in areas that have Dana or Greysner exposure as measure that I just explained. So there's a big kick to economic performance. And it's the same for Dana and Greysner. Now if you look at the Nazi voting results, you don't see this at all. They're very different. Only Dana seems to matter. The question is why. And interestingly both firms just like all those banks just like all German high finance has quite a few Jews involved. Dana is led by a very flamboyant CEO, by the name of Jacob Goldschmidt, who becomes a sort of bit noir for the Nazi press. So this is a caricature from most probably the most anti-Semitic newspaper ever published. This shows the Jewish banker, protestly oversized obese smiling happily hanging the honest German businessman. And apparently anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the crisis of 1931 becomes so common that even the cabaret makes fun of this generalized tendency to blame everything on the Jews. So let me just show you some evidence that this is actually true that Dana is being singled out as the scapegoat for this financial crisis. This is from mentions of Dana and crisis in the German speaking press. You can see how Dana sort of comes everything else after the crisis breaks out in the summer of 1931 but not before. And then if you go to the leading bankers, you can take the ones from Deutsche Dresden. Dana is always the same Goldschmidt just goes through the roof. And the Nazis when they sort of look back and say where did our electoral breakthrough come from. So in 1932 when they're sort of patting themselves on the back and say look how amazingly we've done. The central mouthpiece, the Föker-Gerber-Obertha says the crisis in the summer of 1931 showed to the bourgeois middle class that we've always been right about the system by which they mean the alleged sort of coterie of Jewish higher financiers, by my democratic politicians controlling everything and as well as in Germany and collaborating with the Western powers to extract reparations. So, what we then go on to do is to say where's the star not kick benefit for the Nazi party greater. And it turns out to be greatest in those areas where there's pre-existing anti-Semitism. So before 1914 the anti-Semitic parties in Germany already in those places where you have a Donald branch or Donald related firms, you see a much bigger increase in Nazi party voting where you have a history of programs going back all the way to the Middle Ages. It's exactly the same thing. So what we learned from this. So we know that the electoral rise of the Nazi party coincides with the Great Depression. And in the cross section we used to have very little evidence that economic fact effects had anything to do with it. Now, because the banking crisis really turns recession into depression, we look at new data on cross sectional exposure to the financial sector, and show how this particular type of connection between financial distress, economic downturn and prominent involvement of Jews helps to basically sell what you would call a hate narrative. This makes it more plausible because seemingly the story of the Nazis are trying to peddle how the Jews are everybody's misfortune in Germany seems to be borne out by the fact because the Jewish little bank fails and creates this wave of misery everywhere. Many thanks indeed. And right run to number three we're keeping to time which is fantastic thank you everybody and I'll give us a bit of time for questions at the end and Pauline is next Pauline joins us all the way from Sydney, which is extraordinary and she's a professor in the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research. She's worked as an economist at the European Bank for reconstruction and development, and is now getting on close to something like 50 publications. Her list of grand successes is quite something. And if I'm right, she is currently an Australian Research Council future fellow. Pauline is going to talk to us about how the second World War shaped political and social trust in the long run. Over to you. Thank you very much and thanks for the invitation. I apologize that my camera is broken. So you can't see my face but it's preferred. I think it's preferable at this time probably. So this is a project joined with a bunch of people and I think I'm going to talk about several papers in this talk so it's joined with a bunch of economists such as Alexander Kassar, Julia Kajé, Anna deGoran, and Sammy Traja and a political scientist at High Point University somewhere. So then the chapter in itself in the ebook that I've been invited to talk about touches upon the issue of like how war can affect social and political preferences. And from a theoretical point of view, there's been quite a lot of work in theory on how war can shape social preferences and in particular the infants that it has on parochialism. So the difference is between in-group and out-group preferences. So the story is that if you're attacked by outsiders, you're going to increase your preference for the in-group and possibly decrease your preference for the out-group. However, one of the implications of this is that internal conflict might have very different effects than international conflicts have. And it's kind of what we observe studying different types of civil conflicts in previous literature. And so that also suggests that if we look at World War II in Europe that might have different consequences on social preferences depending on the level of infighting that followed or that took place during the country in countries that were divided or in countries where resistance groups opposed collaborator groups, for example. There's also been literature on the relationship between war experience either as a victim or combatant and collective action. And here the overwhelming evidence in the literature points to the fact that either as victim or combatant people who are involved in a conflict tend to participate more in groups after the conflict ends and participate more in political action. But if we look at the nature of this political action, we also see that it's not necessarily bonding social capital and there's this, you know, what others I've called the dark side of social capital in the sense that these groups may not be necessarily achieving the common good, but the good for these in-groups. So going back to this issue of parallelism that they might increase the benefits of its members at the expense of outsiders. And so in particular, my co-authors Samitraja and his co-authors have shown that, you know, soldiers who had come back with conflict experience had better skill at collective action and that was used in particular to conduct ethnic cleansing during the partition of India. So the chapter in the e-book that I wrote builds on a very interesting survey, in my opinion, but I designed it so I'm very partial to it. But there was, there's been several waves of a large scale survey in between 32 and 37 countries depending on the waves in Europe and the former, particularly the former communist Europe, and some comparative countries in Western Europe. In particular, the 2010 waves of this live in transition survey includes many questions on family victimization in World War Two, in particular, but also family victimization during the regimes that fall World War Two. And there's also questions on displacements. So if we look at the results of this survey, we get the graph that I've plotted here, which is basically cross-country variation in rates of victimization. And I provide some statistics to suggest that that correlates actually quite well with secondary sources on, on conflict deaths. So in the e-book, if we, if what I do basically is a simple exercise of correlating these rates of victimization to levels of political trust. So trust in central institutions, perceived fairness of courts, of courts, as well as generalized trust. So trust in other people, as well as measures of collective action, so how much people participate in groups, and how much people are participating between social groups and political parties here in the bottom two corners. And then I differentiate between countries, you know, that fall down the winning side of the conflict, the losing side, and then countries which were divided, and that experience, you know, what could be compared to a civil war. We find looking at this data that people who reported a family history of victimization are less likely to trust political institutions, including courts, and also report much higher level of participation in, in groups. And also, if we look at the age of these respondents in the survey, we find that the effect is quite stable down the generations. And another point as well is that, so we see that there is this, this result confirmed about higher victimization leading to more participation in, in groups and collective action. And these are the people who have even the worst trust in political institutions, which is consistent with this idea that it's, it's membership in groups that's not necessarily indicative of bonding social and maybe indicative of bridging social capital. So, I briefly in the five minutes that I've got left I want to talk to you about another series of project that I have on the, the two world wars and political development in Europe that enables you to understand a little bit more the, the mechanism underlying the relationship that I documented in the ebook. So in particular, I have a paper with my co-authors looking at the, the effect of combat heroism during First World War, during the First World War on the propensity to collaborate during World War two and even the long term consequences of this throughout different elections in France during the interwar and after the Second World War. So what we use in this paper we use the incidental assignment of General Philippe Petain, who was then general and then made Marshall at the end of the First World War, and the arbitrary rotation of line infantry regiments at the during the First World War. So for this paper we use a file an intelligence file that was collected in 1945 and more than 97,000 collaborators and we augment this data set so we also collect other sources of data on collaboration from the US, as well as a more precise data set on a subset of collaboration, which was the legion of French volunteers who were people who volunteered to go and fight on the Eastern front under a very much uniform and we've got about 9,000 of these, of these people, and then includes people who died on the front and some people who volunteered but were turned away. And so what we find in this paper is that using the fact that some municipalities were assigned to regiments that arbitrarily were rotated under Pétain at Verdun. When it came to political choices and political action during the Second World War when Pétain became the dictator of France and collaborated with Germany we find that the regiments that have been arbitrarily assigned to him in combat at Verdun had higher shares of collaborators by about 7% and lower members of the resistance by the civilian resistance by about 8%. And we also find that this is associated with a persistent political advantage to the right that starts forming during the into war, and that remains significant even after the Second World War and in particular lasting up until the 1980s and being quite large in magnitude so we find about a 6 percentage point advantage to the right in post-war to France in those municipalities that were assigned to combat under Pétain at Verdun. So this is related to a recent and quite exciting literature on the effect of different events of World War II on further political development. So there's a series of paper in Italy, as well as the series of work also on the impact of World War I military death on political development. So it's loosely related because we're not looking at the impact of military death but just the rotation of regiments under Pétain at Verdun. But there is what I think is a quite interesting literature allowed, namely by the availability of data on World War I individual records of fatalities. And there is also, you know, some some literature that Joachim has contributed to on the effect of the scars of the conflict on consumer choice. So I'm going to go in two minutes summarizing our paper on collaboration and the long term political effects. So, yeah, so our context is World War II France, where, you know, Marshall Pétain becomes a dictator of France pretty much and puts in place an authoritarian conservative and repressive regime that that collaborates with Nazi Germany until France's liberation in June 1942. So Pétain was a very important guy because he was lionized as the hero of the very important battle of Verdun in World War I. And so what we do is that we collect information on each of the regiments. So here, a pattern of color here is about the catchment of the other regiments in the First World War. And what we use is we use the rotation of these regiments at the Battle of Verdun differentiating those who serve under Pétain at the start of the battle. So during these three months, and the others who were rotated at the battle at a later day. And we also connect a bunch of data on voting results at the level of each of 35,000 municipalities in France. And we check that, you know, so basically here, the picture that emerges is that these municipalities are that were rotated under Pétain are not exactly similar to others before the war. But what we observe is that after the war, and they're even similar in terms of fatality right during World War I. But what we observe is that these municipalities consistent with Pétain's own choices collaborate more with the occupants or in, you know, the police or paramilitary group that support the regime during World War II. And the effect is very robust, you know, whatever specification that we use, and to a wide right range of controls. And in the last minute or maybe out of time. I just want to, you know, to talk to you about political consequences of this thing or, you know, how this is associated with political choices. What we observe is that during the interwar, we find that these municipalities that had been rotated under Pétain start voting more for the right and the extreme right in the 1936 election. And we find that the effect is durable even after World War II. So this is the effect. You know, so this is, well, I'm just going to show you this last slide that shows that you know you've got an average 6% advantage to the right in those municipalities that were rotated at Pétain, at very under Pétain that also collaborated until the 1980s. And you see that this effect is particularly strong in times of social and political crisis in France. So, in particular, you know, in the context of the Algerian war or social unrest of 1968, or even in the context of what was at the time of very scary election of the first socialist president in 1981. And yeah, to show you, you know, the sort of long-term effect that this has also on social preferences, this is the share of children who are named Philippe after Philippe Pétain in France. So you see that there's this big spike when Pétain becomes, when Pétain assumes power in 1940. But then in 1951, when he dies, you have these big clashes throughout France between veterans who support him and other people. And what you actually see is that you ask his death, you have an even bigger spike in the name of, in the in the share of newborns who are named Philippe. So that's kind of a, if you want an illustration of the long-term social consequences through naming patterns. And I think I'm going to stop here. But just to say that, you know, this is part of an exciting body of work that looked at the through line of both World Wars on political developments in 20th century Europe. And I think we know that, you know, if we look at current news, we know that these undercurrents are very important. So, you know, there is many reference to the Blitz in the UK in recent years. The symbolism of World War II is very important in Russia. And even Emmanuel Macron, you know, used the words that George Clemenceau had used to talk about the former soldiers of World War I to command doctors and nurses during the COVID crisis. And that's it. Thank you Pauline, super stuff. Thank you to all three speakers and for providing us with some really fascinating insights. I mean, I think sometimes mass statistics can seem remote, impersonal almost, but your presentation show us that looking at the experience of people through the lens of data allows us to better understand arguably the agency of individuals and communities and during this extraordinary period of conflict, and indeed change. So we have, we've questions coming in, we've a good 15 minutes and the panelists have very kindly agreed to bleed a little bit over time if that is necessary. So the first question came in early from Alex, and who's one of our regional directors in the group, and he said this, I think it's directed towards Stephen. There is a strong move in the historiography towards placing Britain's war in its imperial context. We have convincing economic data that looks at the war from the perspective of the Empire, rather than solely from the United Kingdom. And if so what what does it tell us. Yes, thank you for that question. One of the things that we do in, in both of the hard copy books that go back a bit earlier to the early 2000s was to add up resources supplied by the different countries on the two sides and you get some interesting insights from that because I think we subscribe to the view that in the long run, the outcomes really depend on the resources devoted on both sides, and you get some interesting changes in who the participants are. So in the World War II, if we, we get a different answer to the balance of resources on the two sides, if we look at the beginning of the war when neither the US or the US are on the Allied side. So, but one of the things we did was to count to count up resources then. Now, in terms of supply of soldiers, I think, you know the Empire can be quite important. But in terms of overall resources, it's much, much smaller. And the reason for that I think is, is that, is that you have to have to be a relatively rich country to supply a lot of resources for fighting wars. And in, in a total war, if you're a poor country, where most people are supplying their labor to just to produce the food, clothing and housing, you know, you don't have much to draw on. I think the scale of the contribution of the Empire looks bigger if we do it in terms of labor and providing the soldiers, but if you look at it in terms of total resources, I mean, someone like India or the African colonies are not really able to supply very much because they're relatively poor. There's one there, Stephen. So Alan Alport, who's got up at seven o'clock this morning in the United States to dial in and has thank the speakers and he asks you a question about the growth of real GDP in both World Wars. So it seems from the graph that the point of departure in the second World War is one year after the start of the war, i.e. 1940 compared to 1915 is one part of the explanation for the greater rise in British real GDP. And in World War Two, the military course of the war. So in 1915 Britain was expanding its army, but there was no immediate emergency France and Russia was still fighting in 1940 France fell and Britain had to take on the burden of the war by itself, plus Empire of course. But France not fallen, in other words, with the two curves of the first and second World Wars look much more alike, regardless of lessons learned. Thank you. Right, well, so I've put up this slide here. I think what's happening here is that in the, in the first year. We are very similar. And indeed as we go into the second year. They're pretty similar. It's really in the third year that we're, I would explain it more by sort of the capacity of the economy in the first World War to go on increasing So that you remember in in world in World War Two starts out. You still have a lot of unemployment. Whereas World War One is starting off from pretty much full employment. So, so I think that's perhaps why you get a bigger increase in the second World War. I mean, I still think, I mean, yeah, I mean earlier on as well in in in the first World War, it seems to me that they're looking fairly similar in the first two years. And by the third year they're running into capacity constraints. I think that's perhaps the best way I could make sense of that. Thank you very much. And I have another question here and from Professor David Edgerton which I will come to in a second day but if you will allow I just want to direct a question before towards our other two speakers and the data to me at least seems to shine a light on the issue of equality. It runs like a thread through the ebook I think and quality and fairness in terms of the causes conduct and consequences of the war. I guess to what extent was the search for me social justice and fairness, the lifeblood of the conflict, and it seems to resonate very strongly with your paper at Joachim on how individuals experienced the depression, experienced the crises that that it will emerge in the 1930s. I have a question. So, I'm radically in favor of equality and all sorts of dimensions right so getting rid of class differences for example is one of the things that they love if you watch that linear even style movie from the 1930s. It's a symbolic act where people from different corners of Germany, Saxons, Thuringians, Bavarians all become Germans in some equal sense. Of course that's in the context of extreme emphasis on differences where there's one race that's the good one and the right one and everything else is ready for extermination. So, I think, you know, there's clearly two sides to them and you could probably argue that they are actually intimately connected that an important part of what makes the German military so extremely effective in World War Two is actually creating very cohesive groups of people who think of themselves as equals and the difference between officers and men perceived and in terms of treatment and privilege and so forth, but that then is basically used for the purpose of establishing the superiority of one group over all others. Pauline do you want to jump in or do you want to address and Michael Keegan's question and then we'll come to David. Yeah, so I was actually answering Michael's question in the chat but maybe I can answer it. So the question is whether the goal confuses our right left analysis of the French as the goal was also from the right and even named his child after Peter who was his career sponsor. International child naming is very interesting do you think admiration for pizza remains to any significant extent today in France. So, the, it's, it's on our treat list, and I'm sorry that we haven't done this yet to code exactly you know what election. So the election results is for the legislative elections so it's not really for the presidential elections where you know that role could play a more important role. And I think it's important to code exactly you know when he was around and when he wasn't, and clearly, you know, the financial and T8 results I've just said this may be part of our story and also I want to say that it's not a story the post World War one right wing result is not the extreme right I mean this is tricky because the extreme right you know appears later on in France but even after it appears it's clearly not support higher support for the extreme that we see in those places it's really support for, you know, the traditional right which in France in the context of the time period that we look at is, you know, still quite organized around, you know, strong men but it's not it's not the extreme right. So, the, to the extent that admiration for bitter remains to any significant extent today in France it absolutely does. And it's actually surprising and, and it, you know, this is actually quite controversial to say anything bad about against bitter. It seems very bizarre but a lot of people still remain attached to his status as this heroic figure and systematically downplay whatever role he whatever negative role he may have played in the second world war. And yeah, and I think in particular among young people, you know, people say, yeah, they, he's the positive aspect of whatever he did and especially especially in the first world war is still very much present and the fact that he was a hero and he did all this great thing for his friends and the negative role still downplayed. Yeah and the good actually you know, himself community his death sentence. And he was not executed after the war, even though he was sentenced to death. Yeah. Okay, back then to to you Steven and so David Edgerton has asked, would you agree that you're using a particular definition of economic history since many economic historians, self defined have contributed a lot to the understanding of the economics of the second world war, especially post and going over and forward, and etc. Yes, well I, I think I would stand by my claim that it's still an under researched area. And, you know, the names we have here. I think they were they were writing the official history of the second world war. And I think, you know, there's no doubt that that literature is, is a great resource with very detailed writing up of, really based around ministries, I guess, so administrative issues really. I don't think there's any doubt that that's a terrific literature but it does seem to have had the effect of I still think of those as the main, the main writings and. You know, you certainly ovary and Millward and PDN have added things but if you look at an economic history journal. You know, you just don't see most economic historians working on the wars. And so I just think it's been rather neglected and if you're writing a sort of textbook summary is still going to lean very heavily on this literature from the war histories. Steven, we've a question for two other panelists and then I might sneak in a final question myself at the end if I'm allowed. So an anonymous attendee said thank you for presenting this illuminating research and data, wondering if the presenters found anything specific that surprise them about the data from the other presenters research that they'd previously not considered and you might broaden that out actually to the other papers in the ebook or that they found particularly supported or a few to their own evidence. And I guess I might jump my question on top of that which was I was struck by how, and in one of the papers by Clemens, that's the GDP of occupied Europe in 1938 well that would become occupied Europe in 1938 it was equal to the GDP of the United States in 1938. And that surprised me so you know the extent to which the allies, you know the narrative goes that it was a massive mismatch economically between the allies and the access, but the access did have occupied Europe and I'd be interested in your thoughts on, and whether we should reflect again on some of those core economic arguments about the, the inequality between the two sides. So, over to you, whoever wants to have a crack at that. Well, perhaps I could say a few things there because we did. In, in the hard copy book that we did on on Mark Harrison edited on World War two we did we did provide the resources on the two sides and we do know that the, you know that the change, change in the balance with Soviet Union switching sides the US coming in and so on. One thing to remember is that the United States, the people supported coming in and in Britain, people supported the war effort. It's much harder to extract resources from somewhere that you invade. And, and so there's lots of cases of this going back further in history to it's quite hard to extract resources from a resisting country. And so I think it's not just that's not the same as having willing participants. Anybody else want to jump in about any other papers that sparked new ideas in your heads. Okay, I'll move to Neil Kerry, he says, do you think, and so I think Joachim is addressed at you. And do you think that this analysis of the reasons for Nazi electoral success sheds light on their later management of the early wartime economy, e.g. their refusal to prepare for protracted war to mobilize the female female population etc. So I think the research that I presented has almost nothing to do with that particular question but it's very clear in the early 1930s already that the Nazis have no understanding of economics I mean the Nazis are trying to get some professional help by people like Yama Shaft, the party is full of people with very crazy ideas like Fida money that loses its value, it's not used to transactions and stuff like that, and it's pretty clear that they just all a matter of will and that you know inflation is a matter of discipline. So even the most basic things about how to manage an economy and that economy is not just like a large firm they're missing the understanding of all of this and in some ways the fact that they come to power at the moment when the German economy is already turning without anything that they do is a blessing for the Nazi regime but it's also a curse because they never really have to sort of start thinking hard and fast about what it takes to turn a country around and then you get this completely lexadaisical management of the German war effort later on which is really just a continuation of what's going on before with the expectation that everything will fall in their lap. Thank you. Can I have one final question that's come through to me by a text and I think someone is struggling on the IT front and question for Pauline and we'll round off with this. The sheer volume of data in your work is phenomenal. What are the key methodological lessons that you learned over the duration of your studies? How much groundwork do you need to undertake to see whether datasets exist in the first place? How should one best frame these really profound research questions? So thank you for the question. The framing, I'm still open for suggestion and advice on that. The data, I mean this is the project on France we started 11 years ago and I think the big challenge is I think a lot of previous studies of France are generally done at the department level or maybe at the electoral content level which and you know you've got 90 departments or 4,000 content in the best of cases we've got 35,000 municipalities so I think matter of scale this is really a big step up and allows us to have a much more refined analysis and that meant 10 years of data collection and in particular collecting all that data on electoral results at the municipal level was a big task and I think the data on collaboration honestly yeah we just we got lucky. This was a picture of us going into the basement of someone who's a secretary of the Institut Jean Moulin Bordeaux who had taken pictures of those files and we took pictures of his pictures because this data is actually not made public still because it's very politically sensitive I mean we have a lot of information on these people we have their address their names their the nature of their collaboration activities and and nothing happened to these people so these are active collaborators but these are people you know who were still alive in 1944-1945 and this is the the medium range if you want so these people who were active but not the top end of collaboration which we get from the OSS data on high-end collaborators but this is generally you know generally people who were not punished but probably also because of the scale of their and their and the fact that you know they had important jobs for these places and so would have been very disruptive to to do anything against them but yeah I think it's a matter of luck and then I think for the life in transition survey I mean this is still a survey that I think is is very interesting and I don't think this data has been fully utilized I mean I think there's a series of papers now that you that has used this data to look at the relationship with electoral results in different countries of Europe so but you know I always encourage people to actually look at this survey because I think there's many interesting questions and and for me it was just a matter of luck because I was actually working at the European then for reconstruction development when we did the first wave of this survey and then I was involved in the in all the later rounds and so I was able to add the questions that I wanted so thank you and if the attendees will forgive me we better draw stumps and we've gone over our time and the speakers have been very generous and give a little bit of extra and on a Thursday afternoon so so thank you everybody and thank you especially to our three speakers you provided us with insights in terms of sources methodologies you provided us with some fascinating perspectives it certainly made me think again about agency and how statistics can be used underpin my own research and I'm sure it's the same for many who are attending and will indeed hopefully listen to it down the line the session has been recorded and so please do pass it on to friends and colleagues who may well be interested in this and we will return hopefully with more from our global seminar series and in the new academic year so thank you again everybody have a safe summer and we'll hopefully reconnect in due course thank you thank you