Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is The Economy of War—the machinery beneath the speeches, the quiet engine that makes conflict not only possible but increasingly likely. You asked the right questions: who, why, when. And you framed it perfectly: this becomes more and more ardent. It doesn’t stay a background detail. It moves forward until it becomes a kind of gravity.

To understand the economy of war after 1918, you have to abandon the comforting idea that war is only a political decision made in a room by a few leaders. War is also an ecosystem. It has supply chains. It has employment. It has credit. It has industrial planning. It has contracts. It has lobbyists and ministries and generals who measure security in steel. It has journalists who translate fear into public appetite. It has workers whose wages depend on production. It has towns where the factory is the town. It has elites who speak about honor while signing procurement schedules.

And after the Great War, everyone knows something they did not know so clearly before: modern war is not fought by armies alone. It is fought by entire societies. It is fought by coal and rail and petroleum and nitrates and shipping and machine tools and steel output and electrical grids and food supply and morale. It is fought in factories before it is fought in trenches. So the economy of war is not a sideline—it becomes the main stage.

Start with the simplest fact: the Great War invents “total war” as a lived economic reality. Governments learn how to conscript not only men but production. They create ministries, boards, ration systems, emergency powers. They learn how to convert peacetime industry into armaments. They learn how to standardize, quantify, and manage. They learn that bureaucracy can be a weapon. They learn that the home front is part of the front.