Thomas Bottelier is an historian of international relations and of war in the 20th century. He teaches European and international history, as well as the history of violence and conflict studies, on the History course.
Bottelier specialises in the Second World War from a global perspective, from the earliest instances of violence in Asia, in the early 1930s, to the war's long aftermath in societies across the world. His research sits at the intersection of military, diplomatic and political-economic history, and focuses in particular on the Allies of the Second World War, the origins of their alliance, and functioning as a coalition. He is also interested in other alliances and military coalitions, primarily in the first half of the 20th century, and related topics such as, internationalism, militarism and navalism, maritime war, war mobilisation, geo-economic competition and war-economic aid, mainly in and from Britain, France, the United States and their empires.
Bottelier studied Social History in Rotterdam and Political and Social Sciences in Florence. He took his PhD in 2019 from King's College London, where he defended a thesis on Franco-British-American military and industrial cooperation in the 1930s and 1940s. The thesis argued that these liberal, imperial great powers and eventual Allies began cooperating much earlier, and that their cooperation was much closer, than the literature would suggest. Indeed, their military cooperation was so close that contemporaries called it supranational; a comparison with the League of Nations or the European Communities is more than fair. Admirals and generals, in other words, can be internationalists too. Bottelier is currently working on a book based on this project but extended with much new research, provisionally titled Machine-Age Alliance.
Recently Bottelier has become more and more interested in the world economy at war in the 1940s. Specifically, he's interested in studying the Allies as an economic bloc, formed by the enormous war-economic aid that they gave each other, in the form of foreign aid programmes such as the US's Lend-Lease Act, Canada's ‘billion-dollar gift’ and Mutual Aid, and so-called Reciprocal Aid given, among others, by Britain, France, Egypt, and also Belgium and the Netherlands and their colonies. Before coming to Utrecht, Bottelier led a postdoc project at Sciences Po Paris on this subject.