Total War: Mobilizing Whole Societies
- Define 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
What makes a war total
Total war is not a synonym for a large war. It names a war in which the state mobilizes the entire society and treats the enemy's society as a legitimate target. The components are specific and worth listing: conscription on a mass scale; economic direction of industry toward war production, with rationing and price controls; propaganda and censorship to manage opinion; women drawn into industrial and agricultural labor; colonial troops, labor, and raw materials; and the erosion of the distinction between combatant and civilian, through blockade, aerial bombardment, and deliberate targeting. A prompt asking how the world wars differed from earlier conflicts is asking for these, and naming four or five of them with evidence is a complete answer.
The colonial dimension, which is easy to omit
Both wars were global because empires were global, and this is the aspect an AP World answer must include. In the First World War, over a million Indian troops served, and hundreds of thousands of African and Southeast Asian soldiers and laborers; French colonial troops from West and North Africa fought in Europe; Chinese laborers worked behind Allied lines. Colonies supplied grain, rubber, minerals and money, and colonial taxation rose to pay for it. In the Second World War, over two million Indian volunteers formed the largest volunteer army in history, African troops fought in Burma and North Africa, and colonial resources were requisitioned — the Bengal famine of 1943, in which perhaps three million died, occurred amid wartime requisitioning and shipping decisions. The political consequence is the hinge of Unit 8: colonial peoples who had fought for imperial powers, often having been promised reform, returned to demand it, and the wars had visibly weakened the powers that would have to refuse them.
What total war did to states and to women
Total war expanded state capacity permanently. Governments that had never directed production learned to allocate raw materials, set prices, run railways, and tax incomes heavily; much of that apparatus survived into peacetime and made the welfare states and planned economies of the mid-century possible. For women, wartime labor demand opened industrial, transport and clerical work, and the political consequence was immediate in several states: women's suffrage followed the First World War in Britain, Germany, the United States, Canada and elsewhere, and the connection between wartime service and the franchise was argued explicitly at the time. But be careful with the claim: most women were pushed out of industrial jobs when men returned, and the durable change was less in employment levels than in the argument that had been won — that exclusion from citizenship could no longer be justified by absence from public life. That is a change in legitimacy rather than in labor statistics, and stating it that way is more accurate.
Explain ONE way the First World War affected colonized peoples in Africa and Asia.
- 1.State the participation: more than a million Indian troops and hundreds of thousands of African and Southeast Asian soldiers and laborers served, and colonies supplied raw materials and revenue.
- 2.Identify the expectation created: service was often accompanied by promises or expectations of political reform and greater self-government.
- 3.State the consequence: when those expectations went unmet after 1918, nationalist movements gained membership and urgency, and the war had weakened the imperial powers who now had to refuse them.
Which best describes a defining feature of total war?
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.
Why the First World War began: sorting the causes
Use the standard four and add the trigger, keeping them distinct. Militarism: arms racing, especially the Anglo-German naval competition, and general staffs whose mobilization plans were rigid enough that starting to mobilize meant committing to war. Alliances: the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente, which converted a Balkan quarrel into a continental war by obligation. Imperialism: competition for colonies and markets produced repeated crises — Morocco twice — that habituated states to confrontation. Nationalism: both the great-power variety and the Balkan variety, where Serbian ambitions and Austro-Hungarian fear of internal fragmentation collided. The trigger was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. Keep trigger and cause separate: the assassination explains the timing, not the scale, and an answer that treats it as the cause has confused the two. Add one more factor students often miss — the widespread expectation of a short war, which made leaders willing to risk one.
The extension of women's suffrage in several countries after the First World War is best explained by
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
Sign in to save your progress