I'm John Bachelor with Professor Paul Thomas Chamberlain.

Very helpful book, scorched earth.

Helpful for right now.

This is not ancient history.

This is the world you live in.

It was carved up by the victors in 1945.

That would be the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and the American Empire.

And Paul, you end the book very, very fetchingly that the war did not end imperialism. Imperialism ended the war. Please explain, Professor.

So I would argue that the conventional interpretation of the Second World War is that this is the incident in world history that finally drive, it drives the final nail into the coffin of colonial empire, right?

Colonialism essentially dies in World War II. It almost collapsed in World War I,

but it's really World War II that finally ends all of that. What I argue in the book is that

what we really need to do when we think about World War II is see this not as a conflict that is being fought by various nation states, but rather a conflict that's being fought by empires.

The Axis powers are aspiring empires. The British Empire is the largest empire in the world. The French Empire is the second largest empire. The United States has an empire.

The Soviet Union is kind of consolidating control of its empire

and reclaiming parts of the old Russian Empire.

And China is sort of re-emerging as an imperial power on the world stage.

And it's only through the process of the war that these sort of older imperial powers like the British Empire are sort of laid low.

German, Japanese, and Italian imperial ambitions are just gutted.

They're completely destroyed by the allied powers.

And the strain that is involved in fighting the war

forces American and Soviet leaders to build their nations

into what we now understand as superpowers. And these superpowers are essentially,

...