The History of the World · Grades 10–13 · College · University
The Interwar Years, 1918–1939
History · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University
English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site's translation pattern; none is fabricated here.
The twenty years between the wars
Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending
How to read this class: DOCUMENTED = the fact stands in a named source — a treaty text, an official record, a commission's report, or the standard scholarly literature named in the research file behind this class. DEBATED = the sources genuinely dispute the point, and both positions ride the text. CLAIM = asserted without a finding at the record's standard, and labelled where it stands. OWNER'S TEACHING = the owner's teaching, standing as his, never flattened into the record. Figures the sources give differently are carried as ranges, flagged, never averaged into a false precision. Each nation's own historians, records and testimony are read first where they speak; imperial and official archives are read critically and attributed.
1. The settlements, and what they left undone
DOCUMENTED. The First World War ended in armistices, not in a peace anyone had agreed. The settlement was then written, treaty by treaty, between June 1919 and July 1923 — and the first thing to know about it is that Germany was not negotiated with. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo, was presented to the German delegation as terms. Alsace-Lorraine returned to France. The Rhineland was demilitarised and occupied for fifteen years. The Saar went under League administration for fifteen years, after which its people would vote. Germany lost territory to Belgium, to Denmark after a plebiscite, and to a reborn Poland — including the corridor of land that gave Poland the sea and separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, with Danzig made a Free City under the League. The German army was cut to 100,000 men, conscription abolished, and tanks, military aircraft and submarines forbidden. Germany's colonies were taken away altogether, into the mandate system described below. The companion class, The First World War, carries the war itself; this class carries what its peace did next.
DOCUMENTED — the reparations figures, at their kinds. Article 231 of the treaty assigned responsibility for the war's loss and damage to Germany and its allies, as the legal basis for reparations. The sum was left open in 1919 and fixed by the Reparations Commission in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks. What that number meant is itself part of the record: Sally Marks's scholarship established that the largest portion of it — the so-called C bonds, 82 billion marks — was never expected to be paid, and existed to satisfy public opinion in the receiving countries; the operative liability was 50 billion. Germany in fact paid, between 1919 and 1931, fewer than 21 billion gold marks — roughly 2 to 2.4 per cent of German national income across the period, in the estimates of the Reparation Commission's successors and of Niall Ferguson. DEBATED — the argument that has never closed. John Maynard Keynes, who resigned from the British delegation, fixed the settlement in the world's mind in 1919 as a vindictive peace that would ruin Europe. Marks and the revisionist literature answer that the sums actually transferred were payable, and were in large part financed by American loans flowing into Germany. Both positions stand in the scholarship; this class carries both, and carries the figures above — which are not in dispute — as the ground the argument stands on.
DOCUMENTED — the clause's afterlife. Article 231 does not contain the phrase "war guilt." It assigns responsibility for loss and damage. But it was received in Germany, universally, as a moral verdict — Kriegsschuld, war guilt — and the German state organised a campaign against it that ran for twenty years. The distinction matters, because what drove German politics was not only the treaty's text but the grievance as it was kept alive: a permanent instrument, available to every politician who wanted it, and used most skilfully by the one who finally took the state. Beside the clause stood the "stab-in-the-back" legend — the claim, promoted by Hindenburg and Ludendorff among others, that the German army had stood undefeated in the field in 1918 and been betrayed by civilians at home. CLAIM, answered by the record: the army's collapse in the Hundred Days is operational fact; the legend is false as history. As politics, it is DOCUMENTED: it poisoned the republic's birth, because it taught millions that democracy itself had been the instrument of defeat.
DOCUMENTED — the other treaties, and the peoples in them. Saint-Germain (1919) settled Austria and forbade its union with Germany. Trianon (1920) took from Hungary roughly two-thirds of the old kingdom's territory and some three-fifths of its population, leaving millions of ethnic Hungarians inside Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia — a settlement Hungary's own national memory has never accepted, recorded here as Hungary's history, in Hungary's terms. Sèvres (1920), which would have partitioned Anatolia itself, was never ratified: the Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal defeated it by arms, and its replacement, Lausanne (1923), recognised the Republic of Turkey in approximately its modern borders. Lausanne came with a price paid by peoples, not states: the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923, under which c. 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey and c. 350,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece (League of Nations figures) — compulsory, defined by religion, and written into a treaty as a settlement. The record carries it as what its text says it was.
DOCUMENTED — the mandates. Germany's colonies and the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces were not annexed outright. Under Article 22 of the League Covenant they became mandates, administered by a victorious power under League supervision: Britain took Palestine and Iraq; France took Syria and Lebanon; the African colonies were divided among Britain, France, Belgium and South Africa; Germany's Pacific islands went to Japan, Australia and New Zealand. One operational fact is not disputed by either side of the mandates argument: no mandate territory's people were consulted on their mandatory or their borders. The one commission that did ask — the American King–Crane Commission of 1919, which consulted Syrian opinion — saw its report shelved until 1922, after the allocations were made. Underneath the mandates lay the wartime paper: the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 dividing the Ottoman Arab lands between Britain and France; the Hussein–McMahon letters promising Arab independence; and the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, which promised a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine while promising that nothing would prejudice "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities" — a population then c. 90 per cent Arab, whom the Declaration did not name, and to whom it promised civil and religious rights, not political or national ones. Balfour himself conceded in 1919 that the wartime commitments could not all be fulfilled at once. Palestine's interwar years (§6) are that concession working itself out.
DOCUMENTED — the absent power. The United States Senate refused to ratify Versailles. The United States never joined the League of Nations its own president had proposed, and made its own separate peace with Germany in 1921. The League thus began without the world's largest economy and its chief creditor inside it — a structural fact that stands behind every failure in §§7 and 8 of this class, stated as structure, not as excuse. And the whole settlement was built by a generation already thinned twice over: the 1918 influenza pandemic had killed, on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's standard statement, at least 50 million people worldwide, within a scholarly range running from c. 17–18 million to 50–100 million — India's toll alone estimated at 12–18 million. The interwar world was made by survivors.
2. States that made themselves, and empires that answered with force
DOCUMENTED. The map of 1923 was not drawn in Paris alone. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Czechoslovakia emerged from the collapsing empires through their own national movements and their own wars between 1917 and 1921; Paris ratified, reshaped or refused, but created less than the map suggests. Ireland fought its war of independence (1919–1921) and became the Irish Free State in 1922. Russia's revolution issued in civil war (1917–1922) — a catastrophe of battle, terror, famine and disease whose tolls this record deliberately does not fold into the First World War's — and in the Volga famine of 1921–22, which killed in the millions; the Soviet Union was formally constituted in December 1922, and after Lenin's death in January 1924 the succession struggle ended, by the late 1920s, with Stalin unchallenged (§5).
DOCUMENTED — Amritsar, 13 April 1919. India had sent c. 1.3–1.5 million soldiers and labourers to the Allied war, in the expectation — documented in India's own record — of a measure of self-government in return. The answer of 1919 was the Rowlatt Acts, extending wartime emergency powers into peacetime. On 13 April 1919, in Amritsar in the Punjab, troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired without warning on an unarmed crowd gathered in the walled garden of Jallianwala Bagh, and kept firing until their ammunition ran low. The two counts stand unreconciled, each labelled for what it is: the British official inquiry counted 379 dead; the Indian National Congress's own inquiry estimated c. 1,000. This class prints India's count beside the government's, and does not average them. Amritsar's documented consequence was a generation's turn: Gandhi, who had recruited for the war, now led non-cooperation against the Raj (1920–22). India's interwar road — the Salt March, the 1935 Act, the ministries of 1937 — runs in §6 below.
DOCUMENTED — Germany's republic. The Weimar Republic was born on 9 November 1918, the day the Kaiser abdicated, and gave Germany universal suffrage, women included, a parliament, and a constitution. It was also born carrying the armistice, a blockade that continued into 1919, the treaty, and the stab-in-the-back legend — and it faced armed attempts from left and right in its first five years, including Hitler's failed Munich putsch of November 1923. The republic survived the 1920s. What killed it was not 1919 but 1930–33 (§§4–5), and this class keeps that order exact: Weimar did not fail at its birth; it was dismantled, late, by identifiable men making identifiable choices.
3. The 1920s: a stabilisation built on borrowed money
DOCUMENTED. The decade's middle years looked, for a time, like a recovery — and their machinery is worth understanding, because the Depression was the machinery breaking. In January 1923, after Germany defaulted on reparations deliveries, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr. Germany answered with passive resistance, financed by printing money, and an inflation already running became hyperinflation: by November 1923 the mark stood at 4.2 trillion to the dollar, prices doubled within days, and the savings of the German middle class — held in marks, war loans and insurance — were destroyed entire. The currency was stabilised that November (the Rentenmark), and in 1924 the Dawes Plan restructured reparations and opened Germany to American credit. Thereafter the interwar economy ran in a circle: American loans flowed to Germany; Germany paid reparations to Britain and France; Britain and France paid war debts to the United States. The circle turned only while American credit kept flowing. The Young Plan of 1929 restructured the schedule again — months before the lender at the circle's head stopped lending.
DOCUMENTED. Diplomacy stabilised with the money. By the Locarno Treaties of 1925, Germany, France and Belgium mutually guaranteed their western frontiers, with Britain and Italy as guarantors — and Germany entered the League in 1926 with a permanent Council seat. Germany's eastern frontiers received only arbitration treaties, no guarantee: a distinction that Berlin's revisionists and Warsaw's and Prague's insecurity both read correctly at the time. In 1928 more than sixty states signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. It carried no enforcement machinery of any kind. Both instruments stand in the record as texts; what they could not do is the subject of §7.
DOCUMENTED. The democracies' own 1920s were harder than the stabilisation story suggests. Britain returned to the gold standard in 1925 at the pre-war rate — a decision Keynes answered in print at the time — and British unemployment never fell below roughly a million in the whole decade; the General Strike of May 1926, called in support of locked-out miners, was defeated in nine days. France, its north devastated and its franc fallen, stabilised only in 1926, and France and the United States together accumulated the era's great gold hoards — a fact Barry Eichengreen's scholarship places at the centre of what followed: a gold standard that transmitted deflation around the world instead of cushioning it. In the United States, the Senate's Nye Committee (1934–36) would later document what the war had meant in money — DuPont's profits at the Senate's own figures rising from an average of about $6 million a year before the war to about $58 million a year during it — while the committee's own final view was that no "merchants of death" conspiracy to draw America into the war had been substantiated: both halves stand in the Hidden Powers class at their exact weight. The committee's work drove the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937, by which the United States bound itself in advance to embargo arms in future wars — a decision taken in Washington that would be felt in Addis Ababa and Madrid (§§7–8).
4. The Depression: what it did to nations
DOCUMENTED. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 stopped the lending on which the circle of §3 depended. By late 1932 American stock prices had fallen to about a fifth of their 1929 value; by 1933, 11,000 of the United States' 25,000 banks had failed (the Federal Reserve's history). American manufacturing output in 1932 stood at 54 per cent of its 1929 level. Because the world's currencies were chained to gold, the contraction travelled: a state on gold could not expand its money or cut its rates without abandoning gold, and the states that abandoned it earliest — Britain in September 1931 — recovered earliest. That generalisation is the scholarship's (Eichengreen), and the national records below are its evidence.
DOCUMENTED — the United States. Unemployment reached 12–15 million workers — 25–30 per cent of the work force — in 1932–33. Across the Great Plains, drought and the wind erosion of ploughed-up grassland — the Dust Bowl, worst in 1934–36 — drove farming families off the land in a migration the literature names by its best-known stream, the Okies to California. President Hoover's measures did not reverse the contraction. Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in November 1932, answered from March 1933 with the New Deal: the banks reformed and reopened, relief and public works on a federal scale, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and in 1935 the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act's protection of organised labour. The answer was real, and it was partial, and it was given inside the constitution: about 15 per cent of the American work force was still unemployed in 1939. This class sets the New Deal at its documented scale — neither miracle nor failure — because the contrast with the answers given in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo is the analytical spine of the interwar years: the Depression broke governments everywhere; it did not break them all the same way, and the difference was chosen, not fated.
DOCUMENTED — Germany. No great economy was hit harder, because none had rebuilt itself more completely on American credit. Registered unemployment rose from c. 1.3 million in September 1929 to more than 6 million by early 1932 — about a quarter of the work force on the official register, nearer a third counting the unregistered. In July 1931 the banking system itself failed and the banks were closed. Chancellor Brüning answered with deflation by emergency decree — cutting wages, salaries and benefits to hold the mark on gold and to demonstrate that Germany could not pay reparations. The demonstration succeeded: reparations were effectively ended at Lausanne in July 1932. But Brüning had already fallen, and the misery his decrees deepened remained. From 1930 Germany was governed not by parliament but by presidential cabinets ruling under Article 48 emergency decrees. The hollowing-out of German democracy therefore precedes Hitler: by the time he was appointed, the Reichstag had already been reduced to an audience. That sequence is documented, and §5 depends on it.
DOCUMENTED — Britain and France. Britain left gold in September 1931, devalued, and governed itself through a National Government; unemployment peaked at c. 2.7–3 million insured workers in 1932–33 — about 22–23 per cent of the insured work force — concentrated in the coal, steel, shipbuilding and textile districts of the north, South Wales and Clydeside, while cheap money and a housing boom rebuilt the south and midlands. The hunger marches, the Jarrow March of October 1936 among them, are the era's documented civic testimony to that division. France was struck later and longer: it clung to gold until 1936 and deflated through a procession of ministries. In February 1934 the Stavisky scandal brought far-right leagues and veterans onto the streets of Paris in riots that reached the Chamber of Deputies and brought down a government; in 1936 France's answer was the Popular Front under Léon Blum — paid holidays, the forty-hour week, collective bargaining won in the Matignon Accords — followed within a year by capital flight, devaluation and Blum's fall. France entered 1939 economically weakened and politically scarred. Both conditions stand on the road (§8 and the companion class).
DOCUMENTED — the colonised world, at the level the record carries. For the peoples who grew the world's cocoa, rubber, tin, copper, coffee and groundnuts, the Depression arrived as prices: export prices for primary products collapsed by half or more between 1929 and 1932 in the standard commodity series, colonial administrations cut budgets and wages or raised labour dues, and the cost was carried by farmers and miners who had no vote in any deciding parliament. This class states the mechanism at that weight and declines to invent colony-by-colony figures the research file could not verify — they stand in the file as OWED. The two cases this record carries whole stand in §6: El Salvador, where the coffee collapse is La Matanza's documented ground, and Japan, where the silk collapse fed the army that seized Manchuria. The Depression was a world event not because every nation's story was the same, but because the same broken machine — credit stopped, prices halved, gold demanding deflation — arrived in every port at once.
5. The rise of fascism and militarism
DOCUMENTED — Italy first, and first by a decade. Fascism took power in Italy in 1922, seven years before the Depression, and its ground was Italy's own grievance: the "mutilated victory." Italy had been promised territory in the secret Treaty of London of 1915; Paris did not honour the promises, and Fiume became the grievance's name — seized in 1919 by Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose legion rehearsed the balcony speech, the uniform and the politics of spectacle that fascism made its own. In the Biennio Rosso, the "two red years" of 1919–20, strikes and factory occupations frightened landowners and industrialists into funding Benito Mussolini's squads, whose violence against socialists is documented in the Italian record. Then the mechanism this class asks students to hold: the March on Rome of October 1922 was a bluff. The fascist columns probably could not have taken Rome against the army. They did not have to. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the decree of martial law that would have dispersed them, and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini arrived by train, and took office as prime minister constitutionally, at the head of a coalition. Fascism in Italy was handed power by the head of state after threatening a force it likely could not have won with — the first dictatorship of the interwar years was an appointment.
DOCUMENTED — the legal seizure. What followed was done largely by law, which is the lesson. The Acerbo Law of 1923 awarded two-thirds of parliament's seats to whichever party won the largest share of the vote with at least a quarter of it; applied in April 1924 amid squad violence, it turned a plurality into an unassailable majority. The socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who denounced the election's fraud, was murdered in June 1924. The opposition walked out of parliament — the Aventine Secession — and left the field empty; in January 1925 Mussolini accepted responsibility for the violence in a speech that marks the open beginning of the dictatorship. The Fascist Laws of 1925–26 then abolished the other parties, the free unions and the free press, and built the tribunal and the secret police. The Lateran Treaty of February 1929, reconciling the regime with the papacy and creating Vatican City, was — in Italian historiography's judgment — the dictatorship's single most effective act of legitimation. Abroad, the regime completed the conquest of Libya in a campaign (1923–1932) of deportations and camps that this site's Chronology carries at its own entry, and turned toward Ethiopia (§7).
DOCUMENTED — Germany: the vote, then the appointment. The Nazi Party's share of the vote is the Depression written as a single series: 2.6 per cent in 1928; 18.3 per cent in September 1930; 37.3 per cent in July 1932 — the largest party in the Reichstag — and then 33.1 per cent in November 1932, falling, indebted and strained. Hitler never won a majority in a free election; he had lost the 1932 presidential run-off to Hindenburg by 53 to 36.8 per cent. Power came, as in Italy, by appointment. On 30 January 1933, after the intrigues of the presidential cabinets, Franz von Papen persuaded President Hindenburg that Hitler could be controlled inside a conservative cabinet — only three of its ministers were Nazis — and Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor. Papen boasted that they had "hired" Hitler and would have him cornered within two months; the boast is carried as his attributed words, at that weight. The consolidation took weeks, and it is dated in the companion class: the Reichstag Fire of 27 February 1933 and the decree suspending civil liberties the next day; the Enabling Act of 23 March, passed with Communist deputies arrested or excluded, empowering the cabinet to legislate alone; the boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April and the purge of the civil service on 7 April; the unions abolished in May; every other party gone by July; the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934; and on Hindenburg's death that August, the presidency and chancellorship fused in the Führer, with the army sworn to Hitler personally. DEBATED where the scholarship debates: the Reichstag Fire's authorship beyond van der Lubbe, who was convicted of setting it, remains disputed, and this class prints it so.
DOCUMENTED — the racial state, and where its record is carried. The Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 stripped Germany's Jews of citizenship and forbade marriage between Jews and citizens of "German or related blood." On the night of 9–10 November 1938 — Kristallnacht — the regime organised a pogrom across Germany and annexed Austria: at least 91 Jews were killed on the standard accounting, with later deaths raising the toll; some 267 synagogues were burned; thousands of businesses were wrecked; c. 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps; and German Jewry was fined a billion marks for the damage done to itself. These are the standard literature's figures, carried as such. What this machinery became after 1939 is carried whole in the Holocaust class and its dossier, and this class cross-refers to The Holocaust rather than duplicating it — the interwar volume's duty here is the narrower one: to show that the persecution was public, legal and dated, years before the war, in front of the whole world.
DOCUMENTED — Japan: militarism without a fascist party. Japan's road was different in kind, and Japanese historiography insists on the difference, which this class keeps. No mass fascist party seized the Japanese state. Instead, a constitutional order — the party cabinets and universal male suffrage of the 1920s, the same Diet that passed the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 under which the thought police worked — was captured by its own armed services. The pattern was set in Manchuria: the Kwantung Army staged its explosion and seized a region the size of France and Germany together against the stated policy of the Tokyo government, and the government ratified what it had not ordered (§7). Prime Minister Inukai, who resisted recognising the conquest, was assassinated by naval officers in May 1932; party cabinets then ended for the era. In February 1936 a regiment-scale attempted coup murdered the finance minister who had tried to curb military spending; the rebels were executed, and the army nonetheless emerged with a deeper veto over every cabinet. Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany that November, and in July 1937 slid from the Marco Polo Bridge clash into a full-scale war in China it could neither win nor leave — the war that consumed its economy and drove every escalation after. The mechanism to hold is insubordination rewarded: in Tokyo in the 1930s, the men who acted first and presented the state with accomplished facts were promoted by the facts they made.
DOCUMENTED — the Soviet Union, in its own record. The third dictatorship was built in the same years on the other ideology. From 1929, collectivisation destroyed the Soviet peasantry as an independent class. In 1932–33 famine followed — in Ukraine, the Holodomor. The demographic reconstruction of the Ukrainian Institute of Demographic and Social Studies, with the University of North Carolina, counts c. 3.9 million excess deaths in Ukraine in 1932–34, with a further c. 600,000 births that never occurred; the famine also devastated Kazakhstan, proportionally the heaviest loss in the Soviet Union, and parts of Russia. The toll is a reconstruction and is carried as one. Whether the Ukrainian famine is classed genocide is DEBATED: Ukraine's parliament and a growing list of states have recognised it as such, and the argument continues in the scholarship; the famine itself, its dates and its demographic scale are not the debated part. Then came the Great Terror of 1936–38, which consumed the party, the officer corps and the professions in waves of arrest, show trial and execution — its tolls among the era's most contested archival figures, and carried in the research file as NOT VERIFIED rather than ranged here. The Soviet record matters to this volume twice: as the fear that shaped conservative calculations in Berlin and democratic hesitations in London and Paris alike, and as the state that, in August 1939, would make the pact that opened the road's last mile (§8).
6. The Americas and the colonised world in those years
DOCUMENTED — the Americas beyond the United States. The Depression broke Latin America's export economies and, in country after country, its old politics with them — each in its own historians' telling. In Brazil, the collapse of coffee brought the Revolution of 1930 and Getúlio Vargas, whose Estado Novo of 1937 made Brazil an authoritarian corporatist state. In Argentina, the coup of September 1930 — the first of that country's century — opened the "Infamous Decade" of fraudulent conservative rule. In Chile, the nitrate and copper collapse produced the hemisphere's deepest contraction and a cascade of fallen governments, until a Popular Front won the presidency in 1938. In Mexico, the post-revolutionary state moved the other way: under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) it redistributed land on a vast scale and, on 18 March 1938, expropriated the foreign oil companies — the era's boldest assertion of economic sovereignty in the hemisphere, carried in Mexican historiography as such. The general sentence "the Depression caused authoritarianism across Latin America" is therefore carried as DEBATED: it fits Brazil and Argentina; it does not fit Mexico or the Chile of 1938, and this class does not flatten the continent into it.
DOCUMENTED — the Mexican repatriation from the United States. Inside the United States, the Depression's pressure was turned on Mexicans and Mexican Americans: across 1929–1939, federal, state and local authorities deported, or pressured into "voluntary" departure, a number the scholarship ranges from c. 400,000 to c. 1.8–2 million people — the width of the range is itself the record of how informal much of the coercion was. That a substantial share of those removed were citizens of the United States by birth is documented in the standard study (Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal); California formally apologised for its role in 2005. In the same decade the United States reversed a half-century of policy toward its own Indigenous nations: the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 ended allotment — the policy that had stripped the nations of land since 1887 — and authorised tribal governments. In Canada, wheat and drought broke the prairies together; the On-to-Ottawa Trek and the Regina Riot of 1 July 1935 are the era's documented civic testimony, and the federation's failure to answer the Depression became the Rowell–Sirois Commission's brief. Canada's Indigenous peoples lived these years inside the Indian Act regime — compulsory school attendance from 1920, the residential schools at their system peak in 1931 — which this site's Indigenous classes carry whole and this class cross-refers rather than repeats.
La Matanza — El Salvador, January 1932 (the house record, cross-referred). The Americas' interwar atrocity stands whole in its own class, and belongs in this volume by its date. El Salvador's coffee economy collapsed after 1929; in the municipal elections of January 1932, Communist and allied candidates won in western towns and were barred from the offices they had won; on the night of 22–23 January a poorly armed rising took town halls across the west. The repression by the Martínez regime killed, on the scholarly range, 10,000–30,000 people, the great majority of them Pipil (Nahua) — and after it, for two generations, public Indigenous identity in El Salvador was abandoned under terror: the dress, the language, the brotherhoods driven from view. The class stands at La Matanza — El Salvador, 1932 (Anderson; Gould and Lauria-Santiago; Tilley). This volume adds only the placement: it happened in the same season as the seizure of Manchuria, and the world that could not answer either is one world.
DOCUMENTED — India. India's interwar road runs from Amritsar (§2) through two decades of mass politics conducted against an empire that conceded in instalments. In March 1930 Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea at Dandi and made salt in defiance of the British monopoly; the civil disobedience that followed filled the prisons with tens of thousands. The Government of India Act of 1935 introduced provincial autonomy, and the Congress ministries elected in 1937 governed the major provinces — until 1939, when the Viceroy declared war on India's behalf without consulting a single Indian legislature, and the ministries resigned. That act, and that answer, are the documented bridge from this volume into India's Second World War. The Muslim League's separate trajectory in the same years is named here so that the partition story is not begun mid-stream in a later volume: by the eve of the war, the two-nation claim that would be formalised at Lahore in March 1940 was already the League's direction.
DOCUMENTED — Palestine and Africa. In Palestine, the mandate's incompatible promises (§1) produced the disturbances of 1929 and then the Arab Revolt of 1936–39: a six-month general strike, then armed revolt, suppressed under emergency regulations whose record stands in both British official and Palestinian historiography — whose accounting of the revolt's Arab dead, commonly c. 5,000, this class carries attributed, the two accountings unreconciled in the research file. The Peel Commission of 1937 proposed partition, the first official proposal of it; the White Paper of May 1939 reversed British policy, restricting Jewish immigration and land purchase on the very eve of the catastrophe in Europe. In Africa, the interwar decades were the high noon of the colonial systems: forced-labour regimes continued in documented forms across the French and Portuguese empires and the Congo concessions, Italy completed its conquest of Libya through the camps the Chronology records, and the first modern political organisations of the colonised — the National Congress of British West Africa (1920), the Kikuyu Central Association (1924), the négritude circle forming in Paris — laid the documented seedbed from which the post-1945 world would grow. One African state stood independent of all of it. It is the subject of the next section but one.
7. The road's first miles: Manchuria, 1931
DOCUMENTED. On the night of 18 September 1931, officers of Japan's Kwantung Army exploded a small charge on the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden — track Japan itself owned and guarded — blamed Chinese soldiers, and seized Manchuria. The explosion damaged so little track that a train passed over the spot shortly after; the conquest it licensed took a territory the size of France and Germany combined. By February 1932 Japan had organised the puppet state of Manchukuo, with Puyi, the last Qing emperor, as its figurehead. The Second World War dossier of this Collection dates the war's Asian beginning here, in 1931, on China's own periodisation, and this class follows it: for China, the fourteen-year war of resistance starts at Mukden.
DOCUMENTED — the League's answer, dated. China appealed to the League of Nations. The League appointed a commission under Lord Lytton in December 1931. The commission travelled, inquired, and reported in October 1932 — thirteen months after the seizure: Japan's operations, it found, could not be regarded as self-defence; Manchukuo was not the product of a genuine independence movement; Manchuria should be autonomous under Chinese sovereignty, with Japanese interests safeguarded. In February 1933 the Assembly adopted the report by 42 votes to 1. The Japanese delegation walked out of the hall. In March 1933 Japan gave notice of withdrawal from the League, and kept Manchuria. The United States' answer, the Stimson Doctrine of January 1932, refused recognition to territory taken by force — a doctrine, without enforcement. No sanctions were imposed; the great powers, in the pit of the Depression, would not risk the trade or the confrontation. Every general staff in the world had been given a demonstration, at no cost to the demonstrator: the machinery of collective security took thirteen months to produce a report, and the aggressor answered the report by leaving the building.
DOCUMENTED — China beneath the blow. Manchuria fell on a China already at war with itself, and Japanese planning counted on it — the fact stands in the Japanese record. China's republic had fractured into warlord rule after 1916; the Versailles decision of 1919, handing Germany's concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than back to China, had provoked the May Fourth Movement and China's refusal — alone among the participating states — to sign the treaty at all. The Guomindang and the young Communist Party, allied in 1924, split in blood in 1927; the civil war that followed, with the Communists' Long March of 1934–35 at its centre, was still running when the Kwantung Army struck, and ran on until the second United Front against Japan in 1937. The interwar history of China is not a pause between wars: it is war, revolution and invasion layered on one another for the whole twenty years, and its historians — China's first, in this record as in the war dossier — count the era accordingly.
8. Ethiopia, 1935 — and Spain, 1936–1939: the rehearsal
DOCUMENTED — Ethiopia. Ethiopia — a League member since 1923, and with Liberia one of Africa's two independent states — was invaded by Italy, also a League member, on 3 October 1935. Italian forces used mustard gas, sprayed from aircraft and bombed onto soldiers and civilians, in documented breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol Italy had signed; Mussolini's authorisations to his commanders to use gas stand in the Italian record itself. The League declared Italy the aggressor and imposed sanctions — which excluded oil, the one commodity that might have stopped the war, and were never extended to closing the Suez Canal to the troopships supplying the invasion. Then, in December 1935, the era's most damning document leaked: the Hoare–Laval Pact, by which the British and French foreign ministers had secretly agreed to hand Italy the greater part of Ethiopia. It was disowned in scandal, and it destroyed what credit collective security had left: the two democracies had been caught preparing to reward the aggression they were publicly sanctioning. Addis Ababa fell on 5 May 1936. On 30 June 1936 the Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the League Assembly in person — no head of state had done so before — describing the gas in words the record keeps ("a fine, death-dealing rain," in the speech's standard translation) and warning the assembled states: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." The sanctions were lifted four days later. Ethiopia's dead across invasion and occupation are estimated in the hundreds of thousands in Ethiopian and scholarly literature; a figure of c. 1 million circulating in Ethiopian accounts stands as CLAIM in this site's Chronology, not adopted. The occupation's terror — the three-day massacre in Addis Ababa of February 1937 above all — stands in the Chronology's Ethiopia entry at its classes. Haile Selassie re-entered his capital on 5 May 1941, five years to the day after its fall.
DOCUMENTED — Spain. Three weeks after sanctions on Italy were lifted, the second rehearsal opened. Spain's Second Republic, attempting land, church and army reform since 1931, had survived an election in February 1936 that returned a Popular Front; on 17–18 July 1936 army officers rose against it. The coup failed in most great cities, where armed workers defeated it, and succeeded in enough of Spain to split the country: what was planned as a pronunciamiento became a civil war of three years. Spain's own historians come first in this record (Thomas; Preston; Graham), and their Spain is not a chessboard: it is a Spanish war, about Spanish land, Spanish faith and Spanish power, into which the foreign powers then poured themselves.
DOCUMENTED — the foreign war inside the civil war. Germany and Italy intervened for General Franco from the first days: German and Italian aircraft airlifted his Army of Africa from Morocco to Spain in July–August 1936, the first major military airlift in the record. Italy eventually sent tens of thousands of troops; Germany's Condor Legion, from November 1936, rotated c. 19,000 men through Spain to test aircraft, tactics and crews — Göring stated the purpose at Nuremberg in his own words: the war "gave me an opportunity to put my young air force to the test." The Soviet Union supplied the Republic from October 1936, paid for from the Bank of Spain's gold; and c. 35,000–40,000 volunteers from more than fifty countries came to fight for the Republic in the International Brigades. Against all this, Britain and France built Non-Intervention: an agreement, signed by twenty-seven states including Germany and Italy, under which the legal Spanish government was refused the right to buy arms abroad while the two dictatorships violated the agreement in the open. The asymmetry is not this class's gloss; it stands in the parliamentary debates of the time.
DOCUMENTED — Guernica, 26 April 1937. On market day in the Basque town of Guernica, the Condor Legion, with Italian aircraft, bombed the town for hours and destroyed most of it. The figures are carried as the file carries them, unreconciled: the Basque government's contemporary count was 1,654 dead; the current scholarly accounting, built from municipal and mortuary records, places the toll below 300, with deaths in Bilbao's hospitals uncounted in it. The Francoist claim that retreating Republicans had burned the town is answered by the German records themselves. Picasso's Guernica, shown in Paris that July, fixed the bombing in the world's memory — a fact about memory, stated as such. The war's whole toll is ranged by the scholarship at roughly 500,000 dead — battle, bombing and the repressions behind both lines — with the proportions DEBATED: Paul Preston's reconstruction, the most cited modern one, places the Francoist repression's victims at c. 130,000–200,000 and the Republican zone's terror near 50,000, and it is carried attributed. Madrid fell on 28 March 1939; c. 450,000–500,000 Republicans had already fled into France in the Retirada, into internment camps on the beaches. Franco's dictatorship, the war's outcome, lasted until 1975.
DEBATED — why "rehearsal." The label is the literature's, and this class carries it as interpretation, not fact. For it: Spain combat-tested the Luftwaffe, demonstrated that the democracies would deny arms to a legal government under attack, joined Germany and Italy as fighting partners two and a half years before the Pact of Steel, and taught the Soviet Union the limits of its reach. Against it: some lessons Spain taught were wrong — the decisiveness of bombing among them — and a rehearsal implies a script the actors did not yet have. Both readings stand. What is not debated is the sequence itself, and the sequence is the companion class's subject: The Road to 1939 takes the dated line from the Rhineland to the invasion of Poland.
Sources
Every claim in this reading stands in the research file behind this class: THE_INTERWAR_YEARS_RESEARCH_2026-10-28.md, which names its sources section by section and carries twelve NOT VERIFIED items openly — among them the Kazakh famine's toll at this file's standard, the Great Terror's totals, a reconciled toll for the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, and any colony-by-colony accounting of the Depression in the colonised world, all of which this class therefore leaves owed rather than filled. Principal authorities, in brief: the treaty texts (Versailles, Saint-Germain, Trianon, Lausanne with the 1923 exchange convention; Locarno; Kellogg–Briand; the London Schedule of Payments, 1921); the Lytton Report (1932); Sally Marks on reparations; Keynes (1919), carried as a contemporary argument; Eichengreen, Golden Fetters; Tooze, The Wages of Destruction; Steiner, The Lights That Failed and The Triumph of the Dark; MacMillan, Peacemakers; Kershaw on Hitler; Del Boca and the ICRC record on Ethiopia; the Hunter Committee report and the Indian National Congress inquiry on Amritsar; the U.S. Federal Reserve's history of the Depression; Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal; the Ukrainian Institute of Demographic and Social Studies / UNC reconstruction of the Holodomor (2015); Anderson, Gould and Lauria-Santiago, and Tilley on El Salvador; Thomas, Preston and Graham on Spain, with the Gernikazarra historians' provisional Guernica count; and, in the house, the First and Second World War dossiers, from whose settlement and origins sections this class's spine is drawn.
Read beside this class: The Road to 1939 · The First World War · The First World War — The World the War Drew In · The Second World War · The Holocaust · La Matanza — El Salvador, 1932 · The Hidden Powers, Examined
Record: THE_INTERWAR_YEARS_RESEARCH_2026-10-28.md (study_materials/world_history) — classes carried unchanged; NOT VERIFIED items named in the file stand owed on this page.