Interwar period

In the context of the history of the twentieth century, the interwar period or interbellum (Latin: inter-, "between" + bellum, "war") was the period between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II—the period beginning with the Armistice with Germany that concluded World War I in 1918 and the following Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and ending in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

Description

This period of history was marked by turmoil as Europe struggled to recover from the devastation of the First World War and destabilising effects of the loss of a number of monarchies, including those of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. Later a period of considerable prosperity (the Roaring Twenties) followed, but this changed dramatically with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. It was during this time that the Weimar Republic in Germany gave way to two episodes of political and economic turmoil, the first culminated in the German hyperinflation of 1923 and the failed Beer Hall Putsch of that same year. The second convulsion, brought on by the worldwide depression, resulted in the rise of Nazism. In Asia, Japan became an ever more assertive power, especially with regard to China.