Sheldon Garon
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Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in modern Japanese history, he also writes transnational/global history that spotlights the flow of ideas and institutions between Asia, Europe, and the United States. His book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, has received global attention because it suggests what Americans might learn from past and present policies to encourage household saving in Europe and East Asia.
He received the Humboldt Research Award, and has held fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Leverhulme Trust, Woodrow Wilson International Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
While at the Institute starting June 2025, he will direct the project “The Global War on Civilians, 1905-1945” funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant he was awarded on April 11, 2024. As part of that project, he is also writing a transnational history of efforts both to attack the enemy’s cities while defending one’s own “home front” in Japan, Germany, and Britain in World War II. The focus is on aerial bombardment, food insecurity, and civilian “morale”.
Research Interests
Transnational/Global History, War and Civilians, History of State-Society Relations, Saving and Consumption, Gender and Politics, Social Policy, and Labor.
The global war on civilians, 1905-1945
Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), “The Global War on Civilians, 1905-1945” is an ambitious effort to apply the methods of global history to the study of war and society around the world.
This five-year collaborative project explores the evolution of types of warfare that targeted the enemy’s civil population, focusing on (1) aerial bombardment, and civil defense against it, (2) food blockades, and home-front campaigns to ration food, and (3) efforts to “demoralize” enemy civilians, while boosting “morale” at home.
As principal investigator, Garon examines how the transnational circulation of knowledge and practices culminated by World War II in systematic attacks on civilians and the creation of home fronts that mobilized civilians. His team of researchers will connect Japan’s long World War II in China and Asia-Pacific with developments in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the USA, Spanish Civil War, and Soviet Union.
In its temporal sweep, the project investigates transnational developments in the “war on civilians”—from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, through World War I, the smaller wars of the 1930s, and finally to the assault on the cities in World War II. Bombing, blockade, and civilian morale became common features in a variety of warring states—from democracies to authoritarian regimes on Right and Left.
Key Publications
Garon, Sheldon. Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. Princeton University Press, 1997.
Garon, Sheldon. Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Latest Publication
Garon, Sheldon. “Operation STARVATION, 1945: A Transnational History of Blockades and the Defeat of Japan.”The International History Review 46 (May 2024):1–16. doi:10.1080/07075332.2024.2354246.
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