Faced with a political movement that was effectively unparalleled many observers found it extremely difficult to work out exactly what kind of regime they were dealing with: whose interests did it serve? First published in 1934, The Nazi Dictatorship argues both that the Nazi regime represented a clear break from pre-War ‘Prussian militarism’ and that it was not a passing fad. It describes a ‘State of Monopoly Capitalism’ in which large scale industrial and financial interests are paramount.

The first book to present an analysis of Arab response to fascism and Nazism from the perspectives of both individual countries and the Arab world at large, this collection problematizes and ultimately deconstructs the established narratives that assume most Arabs supported fascism and Nazism leading up to and during World War II. Using new source materials taken largely from Arab memoirs, archives, and print media, the articles reexamine Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi responses in the 1930s and throughout the war. While acknowledging the individuals, forces, and organizations that did support and collaborate with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism focuses on the many other Arab voices that identified with Britain and France and with the Allied cause during the war. The authors argue that many groups within Arab societies—elites and non-elites, governing forces, and civilians—rejected Nazism and fascism as totalitarian, racist, and, most important, as new, more oppressive forms of European imperialism. The essays in this volume argue that, in contrast to prevailing beliefs that Arabs were de facto supporters of Italy and Germany—since "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"—mainstream Arab forces and currents opposed the Axis powers and supported the Allies during the war. They played a significant role in the battles for control over the Middle East.

The resurgence of the far right across Europe and the emergence of the "alt-right" in the US have put the question of fascism urgently back on the agenda. For those trying to understand these forms of politics, there is no better place to start than Fascism and Dictatorship, the unrivalled Marxist study of German and Italian fascism. It carefully distinguishes between fascism as a mass movement before the seizure of power and what it becomes as an entrenched machinery of dictatorship. It compares the distinct class components of the counterrevolutionary blocs mobilised by fascism in Germany and Italy; analyses the changing relations between the petty bourgeoisie and big capital in the evolution of fascism; discusses the structures of the fascist state itself, as an emergency regime for the defence of capital; and provides a sustained and documented criticism of official Comintern attitudes and policies towards fascism in the fateful years after the Versailles settlement. Fascism and Dictatorship represents a challenging synthesis of factual evidence and conceptual analysis, a standard bearer of what Marxist political theory should be.

The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe's history. Despite such undeniably progressive developments as the radical expansion of women's suffrage and rising health standards, the era was dominated by political violence and chronic instability. Its symbols were Verdun, Guernica, and Auschwitz. By the end of this dark period, tens of millions of Europeans had been killed and more still had been displaced and permanently traumatized. If the nineteenth century gave Europeans cause to regard the future with a sense of optimism, the early twentieth century had them anticipating the destruction of civilization. The fact that so many revolutions, regime changes, dictatorships, mass killings, and civil wars took place within such a compressed time frame suggests that Europe experienced a general crisis. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 reconsiders the most significant features of this calamitous age from a transnational perspective. It demonstrates the degree to which national experiences were intertwined with those of other nations, and how each crisis was implicated in wider regional, continental, and global developments. Readers will find innovative and stimulating chapters on various political, social, and economic subjects by some of the leading scholars working on modern European history today.

The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime.

Fascists presents a new theory of fascism based on intensive analysis of the men and women who became fascists. It covers the six European countries in which fascism became most dominant - Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Spain. It is the most comprehensive analysis of who fascists actually were, what beliefs they held and what actions they committed. The book suggests that fascism was essentially a product of post World War I conditions in Europe and is unlikely to re-appear in its classic garb in the future. Nonetheless, elements of its ideology remain relevant to modern conditions and are now re-appearing, though mainly in different parts of the world.

Nazism across Borders argues that Nazi social policies were part of transnational exchanges and processes. Beyond territorial conquest, the Nazis planned to export and internationalize their version of welfare, and promoted a new kind of internationalism, pitched as a superior alternative to its liberal and Communist contenders. Since the late nineteenth century, the 'German social model' had established itself as a powerful route for escaping from the precarious conditions associated with wage work. The Nazis capitalized on this reputation, continuing some elements, but also added new measures, mainly to pursue their antisemitic, racist, and highly aggressive goals. The contributions in this collection shed new light on the complex ways in which German and Nazi ideas were received and negotiated by non-German actors and groups around the world before the Second World War. Why were they interested in what was going on in Germany? To what extent did Nazi policies emulate programmes elsewhere (for example, in Fascist Italy), and where did they serve as role models? Nazi social policies, we argue, were a benchmark that societies as diverse as Japan, Norway, and the United States considered in making their own choices. Nazism across Borders breaks new ground for the history of the Second World War and 'Hitler's empire' in Europe. How did the Nazis export their ideas when they finally occupied large swaths of the continent and what was the role of non-German actors? What were the links to the better-known stories of exploitation of lands, resources, and peoples?