Military conquest by Germany and Japan in World War II put vast wealth at each country's disposal. Both countries occupied territory and organized regional resources to sustain their war efforts. Economies under Occupation draws on recent research to provide an overview of occupation regimes, occupation policies, the challenges facing occupation regimes in administering conquered territories, and their successes in extracting economic and financial resources. Both nations planned economic empires: Großwirtschaftsraum [Germany's Great Economic Sphere] in Europe; Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Pacific. Conditions of war, and the fact that both empires struggled under increasing pressure as German and Japanese prospects for victory declined, made coherent economic planning and exploitation difficult. The overviews and case studies presented here provide a rich elaboration of how policies and practices functioned in the two economic zones.

Each editor gives an overview of occupation policies in his region of study, Marcel Boldorf for the European theater, Tetsuji Okazaki for the Pacific. For both Germany and Japan, economic needs influenced key decisions in going to war and in developing systems of exploitation. Boldorf provides a cogent summary and assessment of German policies in Europe, their degree of success, and the importance of the incentives they offered to European manufacturers—in terms of profits, access to raw materials, and retention of labor force—willing to produce for the German war effort. He also assesses the “room for manoeuvre” by private companies and finds little, apart from the choice of working for the Germans if they were to work at all. Okazaki stresses the Japanese practice of creating special corporations with monopoly powers in industries of interest to Japan and notes that while economic factors played a key role in Japanese aggression, that aggression in turn crippled Japan's potential for gains from empire when American forces devastated the maritime shipping capacity essential to get goods to Japan. The collection then offers eighteen essays in four sections: two short sections with essays covering each region's financial administration and use of labor, and two sections with country-level case studies examining how national economies were administered in each economic sphere and how multinationals operated under occupation regimes.

The chapters on occupation finance are particularly useful for their state-of-the-art historiography. Jonas Scherner focuses on German actions in Western Europe, where France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway provided 80 percent of Germany's total occupation tribute. He provides an excellent summary of the resource extraction challenge—how Germany obtained financial resources and used the funds. While Germany drew major quantitative benefits, its methods were crude and chaotic, in part through lack of planning and polycratic competition and in part through the inflationary consequences of its purchasing. Gregg Huff and Shinobu Majima show that Japan raised money within conquered countries mainly through money creation, which was not a viable long-term strategy, and was able to avoid hyperinflationary consequences only temporarily. In both cases, the exploitation systems aimed at short-term advantage, becoming more desperate as the strategic situations of Germany and Japan deteriorated.

In the section on labor policy, Mark Spoerer delineates the tensions between ideological and economic rationales for labor employment in German policy, the sharp contrast in the treatment of workers in Western and Eastern Europe according to race, and contraction of the German labor force despite the employment of foreign civilians, prisoners of war, and eventually concentration camp inmates. Toshio Kojima's essay on Japanese policy focuses on Manchukuo in wartime, judging the policy unsuccessful but providing no numbers to show the timing and extent of that failure.

The individual country studies provide a detailed account of how policies differed according to region. German exploitation in Western Europe, which relied on collaboration to minimize Germany's manpower commitments, encountered persistent problems of material shortages and declining output, inflation through the use of fixed-price systems and extensive black-market purchasing, and inability to recruit sufficient labor. In Eastern Europe the Germans relied on greater force, which produced higher output in Czechoslovakia but otherwise failed to resolve crises of materials and labor supply. The Japanese experience in the Pacific region contrasts with German exploitation in a number of ways. Western Europe and Czechoslovakia had strong industrial bases that the Germans wanted to employ for their own needs; they used threats and violence more than incentives (Denmark and Norway offer interesting exceptions), with limited success. The Pacific region, less advanced economically, required greater developmental efforts. The Japanese promoted national independence movements and expropriated foreign (mainly European) firms, but agricultural and industrial output fell dramatically and exploitation was crippled by the vulnerability of maritime shipping. The lack of statistical evidence in the Pacific regions allows much less precision; several essays focus on policy with no quantitative data on impact. The Burmese economy, one of the hardest hit, experienced major collapse: in 1950 it still was producing only 41 to 47 percent of its 1938 output.

The chapters on international firms present interesting material for business history, examining German steel industry operations in Western Europe, the Danish construction firm Christiani & Nielsen (which built submarine bases in France), the South Manchuria Railway Company, and the Shanghai Cotton Textile Company in China. These companies showed greater attention to long-term strategies designed to benefit their own firms as war prospects changed. Those working for the Germans clearly demonstrated that their interest in business opportunities and profits outweighed any other concerns, for politics, ethics, or morals.

This book is a collection of conference essays. The quality of content and analysis varies, and some essays would have benefited from an English language editor. But the thematic structure of the volume works very well, and its great strength lies in providing English-speaking audiences with access to new research on economic regimes and occupation policies in World War II. The editors’ conclusions provide a brief but very insightful analysis comparing the experiences in the two regions.