TS1.3 How did the conflict affect people’s lives?

Analysing the impact of conflict on people’s lives

Historians who ask how a conflict affected people’s lives begin by separating different groups and different timescales. A war could ruin one region and enrich another, kill a generation of young men and give their sisters new jobs, or free some people while it persecuted others. The question is therefore always "affected whom, how, and for how long?"

The diagram of the impact of conflict groups its effects under four headings: economic impact, social impact, women’s experiences and the experiences of marginalised groups. The four overlap. The economic cost of a war produced social effects, such as hunger and protest, and the experience of women or of a minority group usually had both an economic side (work, property, wages) and a social one (status, violence, rights).

Combatants and civilians

A combatant is a member of an armed force who takes a direct part in fighting; a civilian is anyone who does not. The line between them has never been perfectly clear. Medieval armies were followed by servants, families and pilgrims, and in guerrilla wars such as the Algerian War fighters lived among villagers, so counter-insurgency campaigns treated whole rural populations as suspects.

Before the twentieth century, soldiers in most wars died mainly of disease rather than in battle, and civilians died mostly from the hunger and disease that armies spread. In the twentieth century, aerial bombing, occupation, blockade and genocide made civilians direct targets. In the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, civilian deaths far exceeded military ones.

The idea of total war explains why the effects of modern conflicts reached so deeply into daily life. The home front, the civilian population and economy of a country at war, became as important to victory as the army, so governments controlled work, food, news and movement in ways that would have been impossible in peacetime.

Different groups, different timescales

The effects of conflict varied according to who a person was and where they lived. Four distinctions help to organise the evidence.

The economic impact of conflict

Wars are expensive. Armies have to be paid, fed, armed and moved, and the larger and longer the war, the greater the cost. The economic impact of a conflict on ordinary people came through three main channels: how the war was paid for, what was destroyed or taken, and how the demand for war production changed work and wages.

The diagram of how the cost of war reached households shows why the economic effects of conflict were felt far from the battlefield. Higher taxes and forced levies fell on everyone; borrowing left debts that peacetime taxpayers had to repay; and printing money caused inflation, a general rise in prices that cut the value of wages and savings. Requisitioning and blockade, meanwhile, removed goods from the market altogether.

Paying for war: taxation, debt and inflation

Medieval rulers paid for war mainly through taxes, plunder and loans. To pay for the Third Crusade, Henry II of England and Philip II of France imposed the Saladin Tithe in 1188, a tax of one-tenth of the income and movable goods of everyone who did not take the cross. It was one of the first general taxes on property in England, and the crusade later cost the English further when Richard I was captured on his way home and his ransom of 150,000 marks had to be raised from his subjects in 1193–1194.

The US Civil War shows how differently two sides could pay for the same war. The Union raised money through the first federal income tax (1861), large bond sales and a limited issue of paper money, the greenbacks (1862), and prices in the North rose by about 80 per cent. The Confederacy, with a weaker tax system and its trade cut off by blockade, relied mainly on printing money.

The chart of Confederate prices shows the result. By the spring of 1865 goods cost about ninety times their pre-war price, wages had fallen far behind, and Confederate paper money was nearly worthless. Inflation was not only an economic problem: on 2 April 1863 several hundred women, many of them wives of soldiers and workers at the government armoury, marched through Richmond, the Confederate capital, and broke into shops to take bread and other food. Similar bread riots took place in other Southern towns that spring.

In the First World War every major state borrowed on a scale never seen before. British government debt rose from about £650 million in 1914 to more than £7 billion by 1919, from about a quarter of national income to more than all of it. Germany paid for the war almost entirely by borrowing, expecting to recover the cost from its defeated enemies. When it lost, the debt, the reparations imposed by the peace settlement and the printing of money led to the hyperinflation of 1923, which wiped out the savings of the German middle class.

Destruction, blockade and famine

Armies destroyed and consumed what lay in their path. Medieval and early modern armies lived largely off the land, so the countryside along their routes lost its harvest, animals and seed corn. The Mongol campaigns in northern China (1211–1234) and in Sichuan (1230s–1270s) were among the most destructive in Chinese history. The first Mongol registrations of the north in the 1230s recorded only a small fraction of the households counted by the Jin dynasty a generation earlier, and the historian Paul J. Smith estimates that four decades of war reduced Sichuan’s population to perhaps a twentieth of its late-Song peak.

These figures are contested. Censuses counted households registered for tax, so people who fled, hid or were taken as slaves disappeared from the record without dying. Historians such as Jinping Wang (In the Wake of the Mongols, 2018) accept that the conquest destroyed more than a third of the population of north China, while warning against reading the whole fall in registered households as a death toll.

Industrial war added blockade on a continental scale. The Allied naval blockade of Germany from 1914 cut imports of food and fertiliser. After the failure of the potato harvest in 1916, Germans lived through the Turnip Winter of 1916–1917, when swede turnips replaced potatoes as the staple food. In December 1918 the German health authorities claimed that the blockade had caused about 763,000 civilian deaths; historians regard this figure as too high, but agree that hunger and the diseases it encouraged killed hundreds of thousands. Britain, hit by German submarines, introduced rationing of sugar, meat and butter in 1918.

Famine was often the deadliest economic effect of conflict. In 1943 between about 2 and 3 million people died in the Bengal famine in British India (estimates differ with the method used). The causes are debated: the loss of rice imports after Japan conquered Burma, a poor harvest, inflation caused by wartime spending, and British decisions on food distribution and exports all played a part. In Poverty and Famines (1981), the economist Amartya Sen argued that the famine was caused less by a shortage of food than by the collapse of poor rural workers’ ability to buy it, as wartime inflation drove prices beyond their reach.

Winners and losers: new industries, jobs and trade

Conflict did not only destroy wealth. War production created jobs, raised wages for some workers and built new industries. In the North during the US Civil War, government contracts for uniforms, boots, rifles and railway equipment kept factories busy, and laws passed by a Congress no longer blocked by Southern votes (the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, both 1862) encouraged western settlement and railway building. In 1961 the historian Thomas Cochran asked whether the war in fact slowed industrial growth, since output in several industries grew more slowly in the 1860s than in the 1850s; the war’s economic benefits for the North are therefore debated.

For the South the war was an economic catastrophe. Emancipation abolished slavery, the main form of Southern wealth: enslaved people had been valued at about 3 billion dollars in 1860. Railways, farms and towns were destroyed, above all in the path of Union armies in 1864–1865, and the South remained the poorest region of the United States for generations.

The Crusades show that conflict could also open new trade. Venice, Genoa and Pisa provided ships for the crusaders and in return won their own quarters, law courts and tax exemptions in the ports of the crusader states. A treaty of 1123, the Pactum Warmundi, gave Venice a third of the city of Tyre once it was captured. Italian merchants then carried spices, silk, sugar and cotton from the eastern Mediterranean to Europe, while pilgrims and crusaders created a steady demand for shipping and credit.

The Mongol conquest of the Song had a similar double effect. After 1279 China was part of a Mongol empire that stretched to Persia and Russia, and the Yuan government extended the Grand Canal to its capital at Dadu (Beijing), issued paper money across the empire and protected the great southern port of Quanzhou. Merchants, many of them Muslims from Central and West Asia, prospered. For the peasant families of Sichuan or the north, whose villages had been destroyed, these gains came too late or not at all.

Rebuilding after the fighting

The economic impact of a war did not end with the ceasefire, because whoever rebuilt the damage also had to pay for it. In France, ten départements of the north and east, where the Western Front had run for four years, were officially classed as devastated regions. In February 1919 the minister for reconstruction, Louis Loucheur, told the Senate that rebuilding them would cost about 75 billion francs. French governments borrowed to pay for it, on the assumption that German reparations would repay them; when Germany paid far less than expected, the cost fell on French taxpayers and savers through debt and inflation in the 1920s.

Defeat could make rebuilding harder still. Japan’s Economic Stabilization Board estimated in 1949 that the war had destroyed about a quarter of the country’s national wealth, and in 1945–1946 millions of bombed-out city dwellers lived in shacks and depended on black markets for food. In the American South after 1865, the cost of rebuilding railways, towns and farms fell on a region that had also lost its capital in enslaved people and its banking system, which helps to explain why it stayed poor for generations. In each case reconstruction shifted the burden of the war from those who had fought it to the next generation of taxpayers and workers.

The social impact of conflict

The social impact of a conflict is its effect on how people lived together: who died and who survived, where people lived, how families, classes and communities were organised, and how much control the state had over everyday life. Some social effects ended with the fighting; others, such as the loss of a generation of young men or the memory of an atrocity, shaped societies for decades.

Death, wounds and disease

The most basic social impact of conflict was death. The death tolls of the six core conflicts are estimates, and for the medieval wars no reliable totals exist at all. Modern estimates differ because records were lost or never kept, because deaths from hunger and disease are hard to separate from deaths in fighting, and because death tolls have become part of national memory and politics.

Data in the table: J. David Hacker, Civil War History (2011); Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan (2013); commonly cited ranges for the First World War and the Algerian War.

Disease killed more soldiers than battle in most wars before the twentieth century. About two-thirds of the soldiers who died in the US Civil War died of disease, especially dysentery, typhoid and pneumonia in crowded camps. Wars also spread disease to civilians: the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, which killed tens of millions worldwide, spread rapidly through troop camps and transports in the last year of the First World War.

Survivors carried the war with them. About 21 million soldiers were wounded in the First World War, and many returned with lost limbs, damaged lungs or disfigured faces. The British army recorded about 80,000 cases of shell shock, the name given at the time to the psychological breakdown caused by prolonged exposure to bombardment, which would now be recognised as a form of post-traumatic stress. Each death or wound also changed a family: by 1918 there were hundreds of thousands of war widows and orphans in each of the main combatant countries.

Uprooted people: refugees, deportation and camps

Conflict uprooted people on a vast scale. A refugee is a person who has fled their country because of war or persecution; a displaced person has been forced from home, but may still be inside their own country. Fighting drove people to flee, armies deported populations they distrusted, and governments moved civilians into camps to control them.

The Algerian War shows how counter-insurgency could uproot a whole rural society. To cut the FLN guerrillas off from the villages that fed and hid them, the French army declared large areas "forbidden zones" and moved their inhabitants into regroupment camps (camps de regroupement). Michel Cornaton’s study of 1967 counted about 2.35 million people in the camps, roughly a quarter of the Muslim population of Algeria. In a report of February 1959 a young civil servant, Michel Rocard, described hunger and high child mortality in the camps; when the report was leaked to the press it caused a scandal in France.

The effect on Algerian society outlasted the war. Peasants lost their land and animals and could not return to farming, so many moved to the shanty towns around the cities. The camps broke up village communities and extended families. The sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, who studied the camps during the war, called the result Le Déracinement ("the uprooting", 1964): a peasant society cut off from the land and the customs that had held it together.

Many people were uprooted again when the fighting ended. In 1962 about 800,000 Europeans, the pieds-noirs, left Algeria for France within a few months, fearing reprisals. They had to rebuild their lives in a country many had never lived in, and the loss of most of Algeria’s doctors, engineers, teachers and skilled workers damaged the economy of the new state. The exodus shows that the end of a war could uproot people on as large a scale as the fighting itself.

Living with the enemy: conquest and coexistence

Conquest forced people to live under rulers of a different faith or culture. After the First Crusade, the crusader states (the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the counties of Edessa and Tripoli and the principality of Antioch) ruled a population that was mostly Muslim and Eastern Christian. Muslims were excluded from political power and paid a poll tax, much as non-Muslims had paid one under Muslim rule, but most villagers kept their land and their faith. Eastern Christians kept their village churches, but the crusaders installed Latin patriarchs in Jerusalem and Antioch in place of the Greek Orthodox ones and gave the main shrines to Latin clergy. Some Franks who settled permanently learned Arabic and adopted local customs.

Among the Franks are those who have become acclimatized and have associated long with the Muslims. These are much better than the recent comers from the Frankish lands. But they constitute the exception and cannot be treated as a rule.

Usama ibn Munqidh, Memoirs (Kitab al-I‘tibar), translated by Philip K. Hitti (1929); written in the 1180s. Usama was a Syrian Muslim nobleman and diplomat who had dealt with the Franks for decades. He wrote in old age for a Muslim audience, in the years when Saladin was waging war on the crusader states, so his stories mock Frankish customs. His distinction between settled Franks and newcomers is valuable evidence that coexistence was possible, and his last sentence warns against treating it as typical.

In China, Mongol rule after 1279 placed former Song subjects under a ranking of peoples set by the order of conquest. The ranking shaped who could hold office, how crimes were punished and even who could carry weapons.

The ranking of peoples under Yuan rule had its sharpest effect on the scholar-official class of the south, which had dominated Song government through the civil service examinations. The Yuan did not hold the examinations until 1315, and then gave Mongols and semu separate, easier papers and an equal share of the degrees. Many educated southerners turned to teaching, medicine, painting or writing plays instead of government service, and the Yuan period became a great age of Chinese drama.

Some refused to serve the conqueror at all. These Song loyalists (yimin, "leftover people") kept their memory of the fallen dynasty alive in art and writing. The painter Zheng Sixiao (1241–1318) is said to have painted orchids without soil around their roots, because, he explained, the land had been stolen. Such quiet refusal was the main form of resistance open to an educated class that had lost political power.

The state in everyday life

Total war enlarged the power of the state over ordinary lives. In Britain, the Defence of the Realm Act of 8 August 1914 allowed the government to take over factories and land, censor the press and letters, and restrict everyday activities: pub opening hours were cut, and from 1916 clocks were put forward an hour in summer to save fuel. Conscription, compulsory military service, came to Britain for the first time with the Military Service Act of January 1916.

Governments also tried to control what people thought. Wartime propaganda, information designed to shape opinion, encouraged recruitment, saving and hatred of the enemy, while censorship kept news of defeats and casualties from the public.

Class: who paid and who gained

Conflict changed relations between social classes, because the burdens of war were rarely shared equally. In the US Civil War both sides let wealthier men avoid service. The Union’s Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed a drafted man to hire a substitute or pay a commutation fee of 300 dollars, close to a year’s wages for a labourer, and the Confederacy’s conscription law of October 1862 exempted one white man on every plantation with twenty or more enslaved people. In both North and South the complaint spread that it was "a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight".

Resentment of the draft could become violence against people even lower in the social order. When the first Union draft lottery was held in New York City in July 1863, mainly Irish immigrant workers rioted for four days. The rioters attacked draft offices and the homes of the rich, but also lynched Black New Yorkers, whom they blamed for the war and saw as rivals for work, and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum. More than a hundred people died in the New York draft riots before federal troops restored order.

Total war in the twentieth century could also narrow the gap between classes. In Britain during the First World War, full employment raised the wages of unskilled workers faster than those of the skilled, trade union membership roughly doubled between 1914 and 1920, and the standard rate of income tax rose from under 6 per cent to 30 per cent, so the better-off paid a far larger share of the cost of war than before. Historians who see total war as a force for social change, such as Arthur Marwick, point to these shifts; others note that most of them were reversed in the depression of the early 1920s.

Atrocity, massacre and memory

Many conflicts included the deliberate killing of civilians. When the crusaders took Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, they killed many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Ibn al-Athir, a Muslim historian writing over a century later, put the dead at more than 70,000; modern historians regard this as a great exaggeration and estimate a few thousand, while still treating it as a massacre that shocked the Muslim world. Mongol armies massacred the population of cities that resisted, as at Changzhou in 1275, to persuade others to surrender without a fight.

Women’s experiences of conflict

Women experienced conflict as workers, carers, heads of households, victims of violence, refugees, political activists and sometimes fighters. Their experiences varied enormously by class, region and ethnicity: a middle-class British woman who joined a munitions factory in 1916, a Korean woman forced into a Japanese military brothel in 1942 and an Algerian woman who carried bombs for the FLN in 1956 all lived through "women’s experiences of conflict", but in very different ways.

Work and new responsibilities

When men left to fight, women took over their work. In the medieval and early modern world this meant running farms, workshops and estates. In the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, where noblemen were frequently killed in battle, noblewomen often held land and passed on claims to lordships. Queen Melisende ruled the kingdom jointly with her husband Fulk from 1131 and then with her son Baldwin III until 1153, and she governed in her own right through much of that time.

In the US Civil War, women on both sides ran farms, shops and plantations, sewed uniforms and raised money for the armies. The historian Jane Schultz (Women at the Front, 2004) found more than 21,000 women on the payrolls of Union army hospitals as nurses, cooks and laundresses, and estimates that several thousand more did similar work for the Confederacy. Dorothea Dix was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses in June 1861, and Clara Barton organised supplies and care at the front before founding the American Red Cross in 1881. In the South, as men left and the war went badly, white women left in charge of plantations struggled to control enslaved workers who increasingly refused to obey them or fled to Union lines.

Industrial total war needed women in factories on a much larger scale. In Britain, the "shell crisis" of 1915 led the new Ministry of Munitions to recruit women into engineering and explosives work. By the end of the war nearly a million women worked in munitions; these munitionettes earned far more than in domestic service, the largest employer of women before the war. Women also worked as bus conductors, clerks, farm labourers in the Women’s Land Army and, from 1917, in auxiliary services of the armed forces.

The photograph from Chilwell shows the image of women’s war work that the British government wanted to present: capable, uniformed and proud. The reality was harder. Munitions work was dangerous and often poisonous: TNT turned the skin of many workers yellow, which gave them the nickname "canaries", and hundreds of munitions workers died from explosions and poisoning. Women were usually paid less than the men they replaced, and trade unions agreed to accept them only on condition that they left when the men returned.

The war revolutionized the industrial position of women. It found them serfs and left them free. It not only opened to them opportunities of employment in a number of skilled trades, but, more important even than this, it revolutionized men’s minds and their conception of the sort of work of which the ordinary everyday woman was capable.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett, The Women’s Victory – and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911–1918 (1920), chapter VIII. Fawcett led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the largest organisation of non-militant suffragists, which had supported the war effort. She wrote soon after the vote was won, as a campaigner with an interest in showing that women’s war service had changed attitudes and earned them citizenship. Her claim that the war "left them free" is better evidence of how suffragists argued in 1920 than of what happened to women workers, most of whom had lost their wartime jobs by then.

Women and political rights

In several countries women won the vote during or just after a major war. Governments and parliaments presented the vote as a reward for women’s war service, but the timing also reflected campaigns that had begun long before the war and the political upheaval that the war caused.

The table of women’s suffrage and the chart of the British electorate show that the link between war and the vote was real but not simple. In Britain, under the Representation of the People Act of 1918, the women who had done most of the munitions work, young and working-class, were still too young to vote in 1918; the vote went to older women, many of whom had not done war work. France, where millions of women had worked in war industry and agriculture, did not give women the vote until 1944. The war provided an opportunity and an argument, but the outcome depended on each country’s politics.

Women as fighters and activists

In wars of independence and revolutionary wars, women often took part directly. In the Algerian War, women carried messages, weapons and money for the FLN, nursed fighters in the mountains and, in the Battle of Algiers (1956–1957), planted bombs in the European quarter of the city: on 30 September 1956 Zohra Drif left a bomb at the Milk Bar café. Djamila Bouhired was captured, tortured and sentenced to death in 1957; an international campaign saved her life. After the war the Algerian state recognised 10,949 women as veterans of the struggle (moudjahidat), a figure the historian Djamila Amrane used in her study of women in the war.

Participation did not guarantee equality after the war. Independent Algeria praised its women fighters in public memory, but few women held power, and the Family Code of 1984 placed women under male guardianship in marriage, divorce and inheritance.

Violence against women

Women in war zones faced sexual violence on a large scale. Soldiers raped women in conquered cities in the Middle Ages and in modern wars alike; rape was reported during the Mongol sack of cities, in the Nanjing massacre of 1937–1938 and by French soldiers during operations in rural Algeria. In some conflicts it was organised by the military itself, as in the Japanese system of "comfort stations" (examined in the case study of civilian life in the war in Asia and the Pacific).

For most of history sexual violence in war was treated as an unavoidable side effect of fighting and was rarely punished. This began to change only in the 1990s, when the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, judging crimes committed in the Bosnian War (1992–1995), convicted Bosnian Serb soldiers in 2001 of rape as a crime against humanity.

War also left women as widows and carers. Widows often lost their home, income or property, and in some societies their legal position. The historian Bettine Birge (Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China, 2002) argues that women in China had gained wider property rights under the Song, but that after the Mongol conquest Yuan laws, influenced at first by the Mongol custom of levirate marriage (a widow marrying her dead husband’s brother or other male relative), and later by Confucian reformers, took away much of a widow’s right to keep her property.

The experiences of marginalised groups

Conflict affected marginalised groups in two opposite ways. A war could turn suspicion of a minority into persecution, because governments and crowds looked for internal enemies. Yet a state that needed soldiers and workers sometimes had to offer marginalised people new rights in return, and their service gave them a powerful argument for equality afterwards.

Religious and ethnic minorities as "enemies within"

The First Crusade began with an attack on Europe’s Jews. In May and June 1096, before the main armies left, bands of crusaders led by Count Emicho of Flonheim attacked the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz in the Rhineland, demanding conversion and killing those who refused. Some bishops tried to protect the Jews; in Mainz many Jews killed their own families rather than be forcibly baptised. The Rhineland massacres killed thousands and are remembered in Hebrew chronicles written in the following decades. The crusading idea of fighting the enemies of Christ abroad had been turned against non-Christians at home.

The most extreme case of a minority treated as an enemy within during the First World War was the Ottoman Empire’s destruction of its Armenian population. From April 1915 the Ottoman government, which accused Armenians of supporting the advancing Russian army, arrested Armenian leaders in Istanbul and deported Armenian communities from Anatolia towards the Syrian desert. Hundreds of thousands were massacred or died of hunger, thirst and disease on the marches and in camps; most estimates of the dead range from about 600,000 to 1.5 million.

Most historians and many states describe the deportation and killing of the Armenians as the Armenian genocide. The government of Türkiye (officially "Turkey" in English until 2022), the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, accepts that many Armenians died but rejects the term genocide, arguing that the deaths resulted from wartime conditions and intercommunal fighting. The debate shows how the experience of a marginalised group in war can remain a political question a century later.

Colonial soldiers and labourers

The First World War was fought partly by colonised peoples. More than a million Indians served in the Indian Army, which fought in France, East Africa, Mesopotamia and Palestine. France recruited roughly half a million soldiers from its colonies, most of them from North and West Africa. About 140,000 Chinese workers of the Chinese Labour Corps dug trenches and unloaded ships in France for the British and French. In the East African campaign, which was fought largely on foot through bush and swamp, Britain and Germany used hundreds of thousands of African carriers to transport supplies; tens of thousands of them died, mainly from disease, hunger and exhaustion.

Colonial soldiers and workers were paid less than Europeans, were often kept segregated, and their sacrifice was largely left out of European memorials. Their service had political consequences, however. Indian nationalists argued that India’s contribution had earned it self-government, and the disappointment of these hopes after 1918 fed the mass nationalist movement led by Gandhi from 1919–1920. Many veterans of the French colonial army later supported independence movements.

Colonised people also fought on the colonial power’s side in wars of independence. In the Algerian War, tens of thousands of Algerian Muslims served the French army as auxiliaries, known as harkis, some for pay, some to protect their families or villages, some out of hostility to the FLN. When France withdrew in 1962, most were left behind; thousands, by some estimates tens of thousands, were killed in reprisals, and the minority who reached France with their families were housed for years in camps and isolated forest hamlets. The Évian Accords of March 1962 had promised that no one would suffer reprisals for their conduct during the war, so the fate of the harkis shows how a marginalised group could be trapped between two sides and abandoned by both.

Within the warring states, some people who refused to fight also became a marginalised group. About 16,000 men in Britain registered as conscientious objectors, people who refuse military service on grounds of conscience, after conscription began in 1916. Some accepted non-combatant work; about 6,000 were imprisoned, and the most absolute objectors lost their right to vote for five years after the war.

Disabled veterans and sexual minorities

War also created and reshaped marginalised groups. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned from the First World War permanently disabled by wounds or disease. Disabled veterans depended on pensions, artificial limbs and charity, and many struggled to find work in economies that had no place for them. The historian Deborah Cohen (The War Come Home, 2001) compares Britain and Germany. The German state gave its disabled veterans generous pensions and legal rights to employment, yet many became bitter towards the Weimar Republic, while British veterans, who relied far more on voluntary charity and received less from the state, remained largely loyal to it.

Sexual minorities faced a different kind of exclusion. During the Second World War the US armed forces for the first time used psychiatric screening to try to keep out homosexual men, and gay and lesbian service members who were discovered could be given a blue discharge, an administrative discharge that was neither honourable nor dishonourable but cost them benefits under the GI Bill and marked them for life. The historian Allan Bérubé (Coming Out Under Fire, 1990), drawing on interviews with veterans, argues that the war nevertheless brought many gay men and women together for the first time, in the services and in wartime cities, and so helped to create the communities that later organised for their rights.

Enslaved people and the US Civil War

For about 4 million enslaved African Americans, the US Civil War was the conflict that ended slavery. Its effects on their lives came in stages. From May 1861 enslaved people began to escape to Union lines; at Fort Monroe in Virginia, General Benjamin Butler refused to return them to their owners, calling them "contraband of war" (enemy property that could be seized). Hundreds of thousands of contrabands followed, many living in crowded, disease-ridden camps run by the army.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free and opened the Union army to Black men. About 179,000 Black soldiers served in the United States Colored Troops, about a tenth of the Union army, and about 40,000 of them died. They served in segregated regiments under white officers, were paid less than white soldiers until Congress equalised pay in 1864, and faced the threat of being killed or enslaved if captured, as at Fort Pillow in Tennessee in April 1864.

Black leaders saw military service as the strongest argument for citizenship. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery in 1838, recruited for the Black regiments, including his own sons.

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.

Frederick Douglass, speech "Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army?", National Hall, Philadelphia, 6 July 1863. Douglass spoke at a recruiting meeting to persuade Black men to enlist at a time when they were paid less than white soldiers and many doubted the Union’s commitment to them. His speech is persuasion, not a description of what followed, but it shows clearly how marginalised people used service in war to claim rights.

The war ended with the abolition of slavery throughout the United States in the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified on 6 December 1865.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, section 1, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified in December 1865. As a law, it is the clearest evidence of the most important change the war made in the lives of a marginalised group. Its exception for punishment for crime was later used by Southern states to force convicted Black men, many arrested under discriminatory laws, into unpaid labour, so the text also points to the limits of the change.

What freedom meant in practice was fought over after 1865, as Southern states passed Black Codes and white terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan attacked freed people. For the formerly enslaved, the war brought freedom to marry legally, to keep families together, to move, to learn to read and to be paid for their work, but not the land or equal rights many had hoped for.

Indigenous peoples on the margins of a civil war

For Native Americans the US Civil War years brought violence and dispossession, not freedom. In Minnesota in 1862, Dakota people facing starvation after the government failed to deliver payments promised by treaty went to war with settlers; after their defeat, 38 Dakota men were hanged at Mankato on 26 December 1862, the largest mass execution in US history, and the Dakota were expelled from the state. In 1864 the US army forced about 8,000–9,000 Navajo to walk some 300 miles to a reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico (the Long Walk), where many died. In November 1864 Colorado volunteers attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Sand Creek, killing about 150–200 people, most of them women, children and the elderly.

Case study: civilian lives in the war in Asia and the Pacific, 1937–1945

The war in Asia and the Pacific shows all four lines of inquiry in a single conflict, across a region that stretched from Manchuria to New Guinea and from Burma to the west coast of the United States. It also shows how different civilians’ experiences could be within one war, depending on whether they lived in China, in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, in Japan itself or in the United States.

The timeline of civilian experience in Asia and the Pacific shows that for Chinese civilians the war lasted eight years, from July 1937 to August 1945. The Pacific war that began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 widened the conflict and brought occupation to Southeast Asia, but the war’s heaviest civilian losses had already begun in China.

China under invasion

Japan’s invasion of China from 1937 brought killing, flight and hunger on an enormous scale. After the capture of the Nationalist capital, Nanjing, in December 1937, Japanese soldiers killed prisoners and civilians and raped tens of thousands of women over about six weeks. Estimates of the dead in the Nanjing massacre range from tens of thousands to more than 300,000; the Tokyo war crimes tribunal accepted a figure of more than 200,000, and the Chinese government gives 300,000. The scale is still disputed, and a minority of Japanese nationalist writers deny the massacre altogether, which has made it a lasting political issue between China and Japan.

Chinese civilians also suffered from their own government’s strategy. In June 1938 the Nationalist government breached the dykes of the Yellow River to slow the Japanese advance. The flood held up the Japanese for a time but drowned or starved hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants and made millions homeless. Japanese aircraft bombed the wartime capital, Chongqing, repeatedly from 1938 to 1943.

Tens of millions of Chinese became refugees, moving west to the interior ahead of the Japanese armies; universities, factories and government offices moved with them. The historian Rana Mitter (China’s War with Japan, 2013) argues that this mass displacement changed the relationship between the Chinese state and its people, because the Nationalist government had to feed, register and tax refugees on a scale it had never attempted. The war killed at least 14 million Chinese, and its economic damage weakened the Nationalist government before its civil war with the Communists.

Occupied Southeast Asia: forced labour and the "comfort women"

Japan presented its conquests of 1941–1942 as the liberation of Asia from Western colonial rule, under the slogan of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". For most people in the occupied territories, occupation meant requisitioning of rice, inflation caused by occupation currency, and forced labour. In the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) the Japanese mobilised hundreds of thousands, by some estimates millions, of labourers known as romusha, and sent many of them to work far from home.

The best-known forced-labour project was the Burma–Thailand railway, about 415 kilometres of track through jungle and mountains, built between September 1942 and October 1943 to supply Japanese forces in Burma. About 60,000 Allied prisoners of war worked on it and about 12,000 died. At least 180,000 Asian labourers, Burmese, Malayan Tamils, Javanese and others, were forced to work alongside them, and about 90,000 of them died. The deaths of the Asian labourers, who outnumbered the prisoners and died at a far higher rate, were for decades much less remembered than those of the Allied prisoners.

Women across the region were forced into the Japanese military’s system of "comfort stations", brothels run by or for the army. The term comfort women is the euphemism used at the time for the women held in them, most of whom were forced, tricked or sold into sexual slavery. Estimates of their number range from about 20,000 to 200,000 or more, because few records survived; most came from Korea and China, others from Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma and other occupied territories, and a few hundred were Dutch women held in Java.

For almost fifty years the survivors were silent, held back by shame and by governments that ignored them. On 14 August 1991 Kim Hak-sun, a South Korean woman then aged 67, became the first survivor to describe publicly how she had been taken to a comfort station in China in 1941. Her testimony led hundreds of other women to come forward. In August 1993 the Japanese government’s chief cabinet secretary, Kono Yohei, acknowledged that the military had been directly or indirectly involved in setting up and running comfort stations and that many women had been recruited against their will, and apologised. The issue remains disputed between Japan and South Korea.

Japanese Americans: incarceration on the home front

About 127,000 people of Japanese descent lived in the continental United States in 1941, most of them on the west coast; about two-thirds were US citizens born in the country. After Pearl Harbor, fear of sabotage and long-standing anti-Asian racism, encouraged by newspapers, politicians and farming interests that competed with Japanese American farmers, led to demands for their removal. No Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage during the war.

I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded …

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066, 19 February 1942. The order never mentions Japanese Americans: its general language about "any or all persons" gave the army a legal tool that, in practice, was used against one ethnic group on the west coast. Its purpose was to give military commanders wide discretion in a time of panic, and its wording shows how a democratic government framed a measure aimed at a minority as a neutral security decision.

Dorothea Lange’s photograph of the "I am an American" sign shows how Japanese Americans tried to assert their loyalty in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. Families had days to sell homes, farms and businesses, often at a fraction of their value, before they were taken to temporary "assembly centres" at racetracks and fairgrounds and then to ten camps in remote parts of the West and in Arkansas.

The chart of the camps shows the scale of the incarceration of Japanese Americans. About 120,000 people lived for up to three and a half years behind barbed wire in barrack blocks, with shared toilets and mess halls that undermined family life. In 1943 the government asked adults to answer a loyalty questionnaire; those whose answers were judged disloyal were sent to Tule Lake, which became a segregation centre. In Korematsu v. United States (December 1944) the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion orders.

At the same time, about 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the US armed forces. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up of Japanese American volunteers, many from the camps, fought in Italy and France and became one of the most decorated units of its size in American history. Like Black Union soldiers eighty years earlier, they used military service to claim the full citizenship their government had denied their families. Canada removed about 22,000 Japanese Canadians from its Pacific coast in the same way. The US government formally apologised in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person who had been incarcerated.

Japan’s home front and the bombing of Japanese cities

Japanese civilians lived under increasing state control and shortage. Rice, clothing and fuel were rationed, neighbourhood associations organised daily life, and from 1944 unmarried women could be conscripted for factory work through women’s volunteer labour corps. Many Japanese women entered industry and agriculture, although the government preferred to keep married women at home.

From late 1944 American bombers attacked Japanese cities. In the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945, incendiary bombs burned about 40 square kilometres of densely packed wooden housing and killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in a single night. More than sixty Japanese cities were burned by August 1945. On Okinawa, where US and Japanese forces fought from April to June 1945, tens of thousands of civilians died, by some estimates a quarter of the island’s population, some of them forced or pressured by Japanese soldiers to kill themselves rather than surrender. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and more than 70,000 in Nagasaki by the end of the year, were the last stage of a bombing campaign that had already made Japanese civilians the war’s direct targets.

What the case study shows

Comparing the impact of conflict across the core cases

Comparing the six core conflicts shows which effects were common to almost all wars and which depended on the type of war, the period and the region. The table of the core cases sets out the main evidence for each line of inquiry.

Which effects were common to all conflicts?

Every core conflict killed large numbers of people, destroyed property and uprooted families, and in every one the effects were unequal. In each, some groups were treated as enemies within: Rhineland Jews in 1096, southern Chinese under the Yuan, Native Americans in the 1860s, Armenians in 1915, Japanese Americans in 1942 and the harkis in 1962. Suspicion of an internal enemy appears to be one of the most constant social effects of conflict across eight centuries and four regions.

What changed over time?

Industrial total war changed the scale and reach of these effects. Medieval wars affected civilians mainly along the routes of armies and in besieged cities; the world wars reached into every household through conscription, rationing, propaganda and bombing. Only industrial wars needed women’s labour in such numbers that governments actively recruited them, which is why the debate about war and women’s rights centres on the twentieth century.

Wars of independence and civil wars had a different pattern. In the US Civil War and the Algerian War the conflict was about who would belong to the nation and on what terms, so its outcome changed the legal status of whole groups: enslaved people became citizens, Algerians became citizens of a new state, while pieds-noirs and harkis lost their homeland. In these wars the impact on marginalised groups was the central issue of the conflict itself, not a side effect.

Which effects lasted?

Some changes were permanent: the abolition of slavery in the United States, the end of French rule in Algeria, the destruction of the Armenian communities of Anatolia and the Mongol-led reunification of China. Others were reversed: women’s jobs in British munitions factories, the legal gains of Algerian women fighters. A useful test is whether a change was written into law and institutions (the Thirteenth Amendment, the vote) or depended on wartime need (munitions jobs), since the second kind usually ended when the need did.

Perspectives and debates

Did war transform women’s lives?

The most developed debate about the impact of conflict on people’s lives concerns women. In The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965) and War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (1974), Arthur Marwick argued that total war was a powerful agent of social change. Because modern war depended on the participation of the whole population, groups whose participation was needed, such as women and organised workers, gained bargaining power, status and rights. He pointed to women’s war work and the vote of 1918 as evidence.

From the 1980s feminist historians challenged this. Gail Braybon (Women Workers in the First World War, 1981) argued that women’s war work was always treated as temporary, that employers and unions expected and enforced their return home, and that attitudes to women’s proper role barely changed. Penny Summerfield (Women Workers in the Second World War, 1984) reached a similar conclusion for the Second World War: the state organised women’s war work around the assumption that their primary role was in the home.

For the US Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust (Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, 1996) argues that the war changed elite Southern women’s expectations: left to manage plantations and enslaved people without men, many lost faith in the Confederacy and in the promise of male protection, yet after the war most sought to restore the old order rather than claim new rights.

The views can be reconciled in part by distinguishing between kinds of change. Marwick is strongest on political and cultural change (the vote, new opportunities, a shift in public argument), his critics on economic and domestic continuity (jobs, pay, the division of household labour). The answer also depends on which women are studied: middle-class women gained more lasting opportunities than working-class women, and the debate has focused on Britain and the United States far more than on women in China, Algeria or Korea.

Who freed the slaves?

Historians also debate who was responsible for the change in enslaved people’s lives during the US Civil War. Historians of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, led by Ira Berlin, emphasise self-emancipation: enslaved people freed themselves by fleeing to Union lines, working for the army and enlisting, which forced the government to act. James McPherson ("Who Freed the Slaves?", 1995) and Allen Guelzo (Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 2004) reply that without Lincoln’s decisions and Union victory, escapes could not have ended slavery as a legal institution. Many historians now combine the two: enslaved people’s actions made emancipation a war aim, and the Union’s power made it law.

Whose experiences are recorded?

The evidence for the impact of conflict is uneven. Literate elites, governments and soldiers left most of the written records; peasants, enslaved people, colonised labourers and women left far fewer. Historians have tried to recover these voices through oral history (the Densho archive of Japanese American testimony, interviews with Algerian women veterans), through survivors’ public testimony (Kim Hak-sun) and by reading official records against their grain.

Perspective also shapes how events are remembered. Carole Hillenbrand (The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 1999) showed how differently Muslim writers understood the Crusades from the European accounts that long dominated the subject. Arguments over death tolls (Jerusalem in 1099, Nanjing in 1937, the Algerian War) show that counting the dead is itself part of how communities remember a conflict, so historians compare figures from different sides and explain why they differ before choosing one.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Section A: a concept question on continuity and change

Section B Part A: a marginalised group

Section B Part A: economic impact

Section B Part B: women and conflict

Self-check

• To do:

  I can distinguish between combatants and civilians, home front and front line, and short-term and long-term effects of conflict.

• To do:

  I can define total war and explain how it extended the effects of conflict to the whole population.

• To do:

  I can explain how governments paid for wars and how taxation, borrowing, printing money, requisitioning and blockade affected ordinary people.

• To do:

  I can use specific evidence of economic impact from at least three core conflicts, including who gained as well as who lost.

• To do:

  I can explain who bore the cost of reconstruction after a war, with examples from France after 1918, Japan after 1945 and the American South after 1865.

• To do:

  I can explain the social impact of conflict: deaths, disease and trauma, displacement and camps, state control, atrocity and memory.

• To do:

  I can explain how conflict changed relations between classes, using the draft laws and riots of the US Civil War and wartime Britain.

• To do:

  I can explain why estimates of death tolls differ and use ranges correctly.

• To do:

  I can describe women’s work in at least two conflicts and judge how far their gains lasted.

• To do:

  I can explain the link between war and women’s suffrage, with examples where it held and where it did not.

• To do:

  I can explain the experiences of women as fighters and as victims of sexual violence, using precise and sensitive language.

• To do:

  I can define a marginalised group and explain how conflict brought both persecution and opportunity to such groups.

• To do:

  I can explain how war affected disabled veterans and sexual minorities as marginalised groups.

• To do:

  I can explain the experiences of enslaved people, Black soldiers and Native Americans in the US Civil War.

• To do:

  I can explain the experience of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, using Executive Order 9066 and the evidence of the camps.

• To do:

  I can use the case study of civilian lives in the war in Asia and the Pacific to illustrate all four lines of inquiry.

• To do:

  I can compare the impact of conflict across cases from different regions and periods.

• To do:

  I can outline the debate between Marwick and his critics about war and women, and the debate about who freed the slaves.