Across eight nations and a quarter-century of data, researchers have traced the roots of the modern resource-intensive economy not to postwar prosperity, but to the industrial mobilization of World War II itself. The war, it turns out, was not a pause in economic history but a pivot point — one that normalized the extraction, processing, and consumption of energy and materials at a scale that peacetime institutions then inherited and amplified. The Great Acceleration of the 1950s and beyond was not a spontaneous flourishing; it was the continuation of a wartime appetite that never found a reas