Money was a weapon during the second world war. Money mattered at the level of elite politics and military finances, but also in the daily lives of the ordinary people who made up the British world. Omnipresent war savings propaganda and networks of mobilized activists called on everyone - from Britain, and its dominions, colonies and protectorates - to stop being consumers. This book explores the ideas, propaganda and mobilisation of this fight.

Wartime thrift was patriotic. It allowed all sorts of people to act usefully in the war effort. Patriotic savers looked at price lists and funded Britain's bombs and guns, rather than their own curtains, clothes or candies. Such saving, at least in the world of wartime propaganda, transformed Britons and British subjects into accountable, active citizens. Spending on consumer goods, conversely, associated with a pathogenic (and probably treasonous) "squander bug". Fighting with money uses case studies of propaganda and practice from Britain, Canada, Australia and Uganda to track how patriotic thrift campaigns and the investments of informed savers suggested new identities for people across the British world.

Savings campaigners fought with money both to win the war and to construct active citizenship across the British world. Afterwards, though, with military victory in a changing postwar world, savers and citizens found their new identities challenged and sometimes betrayed by imperial austerity, reconstruction, demobilization and consumerism.