Chronologies: ‘Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945’

On 5th October 2022, the Second World War Network (Scotland) and the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History jointly hosted Professor Richard Overy to discuss his latest book, the New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2022 Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945.

Professor Richard Overy’s latest book, Blood and Ruins, has been described as his magnum opus: ‘a commanding global history’ of the Second World War. It invites us to consider the war as primarily an imperial conflict and recasts the way in which we view the Second World War, its origins and aftermath. Overy argues that this ‘great imperial war’ was a violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the empire building of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s. His text sits within recent historiography on the Second World War which overthrows conventional chronologies and repositions the conflict within an expanded temporal timeframe.

Professor Overy is an award-winning historian and leading authority on the Second World War. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter and has published widely on the history of the Hitler and Stalin dictatorships, the Second World War and air power in the twentieth century.

Professor Jeremy Crang facilitated the event.

The lecture took place on Wednesday 5th October 2022, 5.30-7.30pm BST, in the Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4 (Medical School, Teviot), University of Edinburgh. This was the first in-person event for the Network since formally launching.