The Age of Metamorphosis: Power Shifts, Role Reversals, and Social Transformations Across the Global Second World War

This special issue on The Age of Metamorphosis explores the global phenomenon of role reversals under various forms of foreign rule during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. At its core is an examination of how individuals and communities across the globe navigated the profound socio-political transformations brought about by war, occupation, and empire. Bringing together historians of Asia, Australia, as well as Eastern and Western Europe, the issue investigates an array of cases of role reversals and power shifts during this period. In doing so, it aims to move beyond spatially-bounded historiographies by foregrounding a shared socio-political dynamic that shaped the lives of millions and left parallel legacies across geographically distant regions. This Introduction provides a new conceptual framework that rethinks the protracted endings and upheavals of the global Second World War as an Age of Metamorphosis, characterized by radical changes in power relations, difficult personal choices, learning processes, and distinct legacies. A focus on this shared experience of metamorphosis across the ‘long 1940s’ highlights the drawn-out transitions and transformations undergone by ‘post-occupation’ societies worldwide, and offers a novel approach to globalising our understanding of post-war transitions and the wider legacies of the Second World War.