Global Conflict

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published World History course framework for Unit 7. This unit is worth 8–10% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.

Lessons in this unit

• World War I: Causes and Total War14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the long-term and immediate causes of World War I · Analyze how industrial technology produced a new kind of total war · Assess the global scope and consequences of the conflict
• The Interwar Crisis and Totalitarianism14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the causes and global impact of the Great Depression · Analyze the rise of totalitarian regimes between the wars · Compare fascist and communist forms of authoritarian rule
• World War II and Mass Mobilization14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the causes and global course of World War II · Analyze how states mobilized populations and economies for total war · Assess the human costs of the war, including genocide and mass violence
• Total War: Mobilizing Whole Societies15 min · 3 objectivesDefine total war and identify its components · Explain how both world wars drew on colonial populations and resources · Analyze the effects of total war on women, states, and empires
• The Interwar Collapse: Depression and the Appeal of Dictatorship14 min · 3 objectivesExplain how the Great Depression spread internationally · Compare government responses across liberal, fascist, and communist states · Analyze why authoritarian movements gained support
• Mass Atrocity and the Postwar Legal Order14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and other twentieth-century mass killings · Analyze the conditions that made industrial-scale killing possible · Describe the postwar institutions and legal concepts created in response

Every term in Unit 7

All 36 terms we publish for Global Conflict, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

Total war

Mobilization of a state’s entire economy, population, and propaganda apparatus for war, as in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. Significance: erased the front–home front distinction, expanded state power and women’s wage employment, and made civilians targets, culminating in strategic bombing and the atomic bomb.

Causes of the First World War

Militarism, alliances, imperial rivalry and nationalism, ignited by the assassination at Sarajevo — the MAIN framework.

Trench warfare

Machine guns and artillery gave defense the advantage, producing static lines and enormous casualties for negligible gains.

Treaty of Versailles

Imposed war guilt, reparations and territorial loss on Germany. Its grievances became a central resource for Nazi mobilization.

Mandate system

Former Ottoman and German territories administered by victors under League supervision — imperialism with a new legal vocabulary.

Russian Revolution

War strain toppled the tsar; the Bolsheviks seized power promising peace, land and bread, creating the first communist state.

New Economic Policy and Five-Year Plans

Lenin's partial market retreat, then Stalin's forced collectivization and heavy industry, which industrialized the USSR at catastrophic human cost.

Great Depression

Global collapse after 1929 discrediting liberal economics and strengthening both fascist and communist alternatives.

Fascism

Ultranationalist, anti-communist, authoritarian rule fusing state and corporate power behind a leader, in Italy, Germany, Spain and Japan.

Causes of the Second World War

Versailles grievance, Depression, expansionism by Germany, Italy and Japan, and the failure of appeasement and the League.

Holocaust

Systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others, industrialized genocide organized by a modern bureaucratic state.

Atomic bombings

Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Pacific war and opened the nuclear age, immediately reframing what great-power conflict meant.

United Nations

Founded 1945 with a Security Council of veto-wielding powers, designed to correct the League's lack of enforcement.

Effects of the world wars on empire

Colonial troops fought for powers that claimed to defend freedom, and the wars exhausted the imperial states — accelerating decolonization.

Components of total war

Mass conscription, state direction of industry, rationing, propaganda and censorship, women in industrial labor, colonial troops and resources, and the erosion of the combatant–civilian line.

Colonial troops in the world wars

Over a million Indian soldiers in the First World War and over two million volunteers in the Second, plus African and Southeast Asian soldiers and laborers.

Bengal famine (1943)

Perhaps three million deaths amid wartime requisitioning and shipping decisions — the cost of total war borne by a colonized population.

Total war and state capacity

Governments learned to allocate raw materials, set prices and tax incomes heavily, and much of that apparatus survived into peacetime to build welfare states and planned economies.

Suffrage after the First World War

Wartime service made exclusion from citizenship hard to justify, and the vote followed in several states — a change in legitimacy rather than in lasting employment levels.

Trigger versus cause

The assassination at Sarajevo explains the timing of the First World War, not its scale. Confusing the two is the standard error on this topic.

Expectation of a short war

Widely held in 1914 and a genuine cause: leaders were willing to risk a conflict they believed would be over in months.

Circular flow of reparations and war debts

American loans funded German reparations, which funded Allied repayment to the United States. When American lending stopped the whole structure failed.

Gold standard and deflation

Transmitted contraction across borders and denied governments the option of devaluing or expanding money supply without abandoning it.

Commodity dependence in the Depression

Economies built on a single export — Brazilian coffee, Chilean nitrates, Malayan rubber, Egyptian cotton — collapsed when prices fell, the cost of colonial monoculture coming due.

Fascism versus communism

They differ on private property, on whether class is transcended or made the engine, and on nationalism versus internationalism. Blurring them loses the comparison.

Legal appointment, not coup

Both Mussolini and Hitler reached power within constitutional forms, which is why this period poses the question of how democracies end rather than how they are overthrown.

Fear of communism as an enabler

Conservative elites, industrialists and landowners tolerated or funded fascist movements as the lesser danger, which is how those movements reached office.

Collectivization and the Holodomor

Soviet forced collectivization and grain requisitioning produced famine in Ukraine killing millions, widely argued to have been deliberately intensified.

Failures of the League in sequence

Manchuria in 1931, Ethiopia in 1935–36, and non-intervention in Spain from 1936 — condemnation without enforcement, three times.

Motives for appeasement

Memory of 1914–18, military unpreparedness, economic constraint, and a widespread view that some German grievances over Versailles were legitimate. Better history than calling it cowardice.

Conditions enabling mass atrocity

Bureaucratic capacity to register and transport populations, an ideology excluding a group, war as cover, industrial technology, and local participation.

Armenian genocide (from 1915)

Ottoman deportation and killing of an estimated one to one and a half million Armenians during wartime defeat and a shift toward Turkish nationalism in a multi-ethnic empire.

Raphael Lemkin

Coined the term genocide after losing most of his family in the Holocaust, and drove the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Nuremberg principle

Individuals can be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, and obedience to orders is not a defense — the foundation of international criminal law.

Security Council veto

Any of the five permanent members can block action, so the Council is reliably paralyzed precisely when a great power is party to the dispute.

Debate over the atomic bombings

Traditional case: an invasion would have cost enormous casualties. Revisionist case: Japan was seeking terms and the aim included influencing the Soviet Union. Present the debate rather than resolving it.

What examiners penalize here

• For total-war questions, show the collapse of the soldier/civilian line: economic conversion, rationing, women in war industry, propaganda, and the deliberate targeting of civilians (strategic bombing, atomic bombs, genocide). Mass mobilization is the through-line of this unit.
• This is AP **World** History: an answer about the world wars that names only European and American developments is incomplete by design. Include the **colonial dimension** — troops, labor, resources, and the political expectations created — in every world-war essay.
• Write about atrocity with **specifics** — perpetrator, targeted group, approximate scale, mechanism, date range. Vague condemnation earns nothing, and precision here is both a scoring requirement and a form of accuracy the subject demands.

Practice World History

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 9 units of AP World History: Modern

1. Unit 1 · The Global Tapestry
2. Unit 2 · Networks of Exchange
3. Unit 3 · Land-Based Empires
4. Unit 4 · Transoceanic Interconnections
5. Unit 5 · Revolutions
6. Unit 6 · Consequences of Industrialization
7. Unit 7 · Global Conflict
8. Unit 8 · Cold War & Decolonization
9. Unit 9 · Globalization