Web

Global War,
Global Catastrophe
NEW APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL HISTORY
Series Editor: Thomas Zeiler, Professor of American Diplomatic History, University

of Colorado Boulder, USA
Series Editorial Board:

Anthony Adamthwaite, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
Kathleen Burk, University College London (UK)
Louis Clerc, University of Turku (Finland)
Petra Goedde, Temple University (USA)
Francine McKenzie, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Lien-Hang Nguyen, University of Kentucky (USA)
Jason Parker, Texas A&M University (USA)
Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney (Australia)
New Approaches to International History covers international history during

the modern period and across the globe. The series incorporates new developments
in the field, such as the cultural turn and transnationalism, as well as the
classical high politics of state-centric policymaking and diplomatic relations.
Written with upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in mind, texts in
the series provide an accessible overview of international diplomatic
and transnational issues, events and actors.
Published:
Decolonization and the Cold War, edited by Leslie James
and Elisabeth Leake (2015)
Cold War Summits, Chris Tudda (2015)
The United Nations in International History, Amy Sayward (2017)
Latin American Nationalism, James F. Siekmeier (2017)
The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy, Michael L. Krenn (2017)
International Cooperation in the Early 20th Century, Daniel Gorman (2017)
Women and Gender in International History, Karen Garner (2018)
International Development, Corinna Unger (2018)
The Environment and International History, Scott Kaufman (2018)
Scandinavia and the Great Powers in the First World War, Michael Jonas (2019)
Canada and the World since 1867, Asa McKercher (2019)
The First Age of Industrial Globalization, Maartje Abbenhuis and
Gordon Morrell (2019)
Europe’s Cold War Relations, Federico Romero, Kiran Klaus Patel,
Ulrich Krotz (2019)
United States Relations with China and Iran, Osamah F. Khalil (2019)
Public Opinion and Twentieth-Century Diplomacy, Daniel Hucker (2020)
Globalizing the US Presidency, Cyrus Schayegh (2020)
The International LGBT Rights Movement, Laura Belmonte (2021)
American-Iranian Dialogues, Matthew Shannon (2021)
Forthcoming:
Reconstructing the Postwar World, Francine McKenzie
China and the United States since 1949, Elizabeth Ingleson
Series Editor Preface
New Approaches to International History takes the entire world as its
stage for exploring the history of diplomacy, broadly conceived theoretically
and thematically, and writ large across the span of the globe, during the modern
period. This series goes beyond the single goal of explaining encounters in the
world. Our aspiration is that these books provide both an introduction for
researchers new to a topic, and supplemental and essential reading in
classrooms. Thus, New Approaches serves a dual purpose that is unique from
other large-scale treatments of international history; it applies to scholarly
agendas and pedagogy. In addition, it does so against the backdrop of a
century of enormous change, conflict and progress that informed global
history but also continues to reflect on our own times.
The series offers the old and new diplomatic history to address a range
of topics that shaped the twentieth century. Engaging in international history
(including but not especially focusing on global or world history), these books
will appeal to a range of scholars and teachers situated in the humanities
and social sciences, including those in history, international relations, cultural
studies, politics and economics. We have in mind scholars, both novice and
veteran, who require an entrée into a topic, trend or technique that can
benefit their own research or education into a new field of study by crossing
boundaries in a variety of ways.
By its broad and inclusive coverage, New Approaches to International History

is also unique because it makes accessible to students current research,
methodology and themes. Incorporating cutting-edge scholarship that reflects
trends in international history, as well as addressing the classical high politics
of state-centric policymaking and diplomatic relations, these books are
designed to bring alive the myriad of approaches for digestion by advanced
undergraduates and graduate students. In preparation for the New Approaches
series, Bloomsbury surveyed courses and faculty around the world to gauge
interest and reveal core themes of relevance for their classroom use. The polling
yielded a host of topics, from war and peace to the environment; from empire
to economic integration; and from migration to nuclear arms. The effort proved
that there is a much-needed place for studies that connect scholars and students
alike to international history, and books that are especially relevant to the
teaching missions of faculty around the world.
We hope readers find this series to be appealing, challenging and thought-

provoking. Whether the history is viewed through older or newer lenses,
New Approaches to International History allows students to peer into the
modern period’s complex relations among nations, people and events to draw
their own conclusions about the tumultuous, interconnected past.
Thomas Zeiler, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

iv
Global War,
Global Catastrophe
Neutrals, Belligerents and
the Transformation of the
First World War
Maartje Abbenhuis
Ismee Tames
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Great Britain 2022
Copyright © Maartje Abbenhuis and Ismee Tames, 2022
Maartje Abbenhuis and Ismee Tames have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute

an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design: Terry Woodley

Cover image: World War I British poster for the Polish Victims Relief Fund, 1915.
Homeless Polish men, women and children carry their few possessions away
from a burning village. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Abbenhuis, Maartje M., author. | Tames, Ismee, author.
Title: Global war, global catastrophe : neutrals, belligerents and the
transformations of the First World War / Maartje Abbenhuis, Ismee Tames.
Other titles: Neutrals, belligerents and the transformations of the First World War
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: New
approaches to international history | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021012904 (print) | LCCN 2021012905 (ebook) | ISBN
9781474275859 (paperback) | ISBN 9781474275866 (hardback) | ISBN
9781474275873 (epub) | ISBN 9781474275880 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918. | World War, 1914–1918–Influence.
Classification: LCC D521 .A23 2021 (print) | LCC D521 (ebook) | DDC 940.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012904
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012905
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-7586-6

PB: 978-1-4742-7585-9
ePDF: 978-1-4742-7588-0
eBook: 978-1-4742-7587-3
Series: New Approaches to International History
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: A total global tragedy 1

1 A world of war before 1914 15
2 Germany’s invasion of Belgium and the expectations
of ‘civilized’ war 29
3 Short-war ambitions: The global importance of Britain’s
declaration of war 43
4 Long-war realities: Economic warfare and the
evolution of total war in 1915 61
5 The ‘barbarian’ next door: Total war at home
and abroad in 1915 77
6 The test of endurance: Rethinking the war in 1916 97
7 Nothing stays the same: Revolutionary transformations
in 1917 115
8 The end of neutrality? The global importance
of the United States’ declaration of war 135
9 Exit … 1918–19 157
Notes 174
Select Bibliography 213
Index 226
ILLUSTRATIONS
0.1 The World at War, Chinese map, 1917 3

1.1 ‘The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth’,
poster, 1898 20
1.2 Defensive War, German cartoon, 1914 26
2.1 ‘Destroy This Mad Brute’, American recruitment poster,
1917 32
3.1 Sword of Damocles, Brazilian illustration, 1914 44
3.2 The Bombing of Papeete, photograph, 1914 52
3.3 Soldiers in Lemnos, photograph, 1915 59
4.1 German Women Work in the Home Army, poster,
1916 65
5.1 Indian Prisoners of War in the Ottoman Empire,
1915–16 79
5.2 Lusitania, 1915 87
6.1 ‘In the Shadow of Liberty’, French cartoon, 1916 108
7.1 Alexander Kerensky, photograph, 1917 120
8.1 China in the War, Dutch cartoon, 1917 149
8.2 Greece in the War, Dutch cartoon, 1917 153
9.1 World Unrest, American cartoon, 1919 159
9.2 Women Wearing Masks, Australian photograph, 1919 162
9.3 The Spanish Flu, Dutch cartoon, 1918 163
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Surely, we do not need another history of the First World War? This book is
different, however. It attempts to expand the accepted narrative of the war
to include a whole range of communities previously considered peripheral,
including neutrals and the non-belligerent subjects of the warring empires. It
is a book that began many years ago as a conversation about how to integrate
neutrals and neutrality into the general history of the war. It evolved into a
history of the transformations that affected so many people across the world
between 1914 and 1918. We are only too acutely aware how impossible this
self-assigned task actually is. As the author Nino Haratischvili notes in her
superlative novel The Eighth Life (2019): ‘You can’t put the simultaneity of
the world into words’. By its very nature, then, this is a book of attempted
synthesis and constant questioning. By no means is it intended as a complete
history of the war. Rather, we see it as a starting point to ask new kinds
of questions about the inter-connected nature of global industrial warfare
between 1914 and 1918. We hope it inspires numerous thought-provoking
conversations.
This book would not exist without the generous support of the Netherlands
Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in
Amsterdam. Not only did the NIAS house Maartje as a fellow-in-residence
for five months in 2018, thus enabling us to work in close proximity, but
it also hosted a work-in-progress seminar and workshop with other NIAS
fellows and respected colleagues alike. We cannot thank the NIAS enough
for their support and wish to extend a warm thank you to Peter Romijn,
Remco Raben, Houssine Alloul, Uğur Üngör, Kylie Thomas and Saskia
Coenen-Snijder for their enthusiasm and input in the project. We are also
extremely grateful to Gordon Morrell, Samuël Kruizinga, Michael Neiberg,
Bernadette How, Alex Strete, Bethany Warner, Annalise Higgins, Femke
Jacobs and Mark Stevenson for their various contributions. We particularly
wish to thank our editors at Bloomsbury for their patience and support
across some difficult years, including Emma Goode, Maddie Holder, Abigail
Lane and Dan Hutchins.
Maartje Abbenhuis (Auckland), Ismee Tames (Amsterdam)
x
Introduction: A total global
tragedy
The First World War had profound global importance. It led to the collapse of
four of the world’s most powerful empires, namely those of Russia, Austria-
Hungary, Germany and the Ottomans. It almost bankrupted the French
and British empires. It occasioned the Russian revolutions of 1917 and
brought the Soviet Union into being. It confirmed that the United States and
Japan had become powerful industrial and imperial states. Historians often
describe the years 1914–18 as marking an epochal transition between the
‘long’ nineteenth century of industrial imperialism and the ‘short’ twentieth
century of extremes.1 Yet when the historian Annette Becker styled the First
World War as a ‘total global tragedy’, she was less concerned with these
age-defining characteristics than she was with the conflict’s transformative
impact on ordinary people.2 For the war’s ‘dynamic of destruction’3 left few
communities – be they belligerent or neutral – unaffected or unchanged.
In the Ugogo region of present-day Tanzania, for example, the Wagogo
people experienced the First World War as a period of extreme crisis and
offered their own portentous descriptor: Mtunya (‘the scramble’). After
1915 the Wagogo suffered the ‘worst famine in the area’s long history of
drought’, this one almost entirely manufactured by human activity.4 The
German military authorities in the region confiscated food and cattle and
conscripted 35,000 Wagogo as courier troops for their army in aid of their
local campaigns. When the British subsequently occupied the same region
in 1917, they commandeered a further 27,000 Wagogo into their Carrier
Corps and sequestered all available food resources to feed their soldiers,
leaving little for locals to consume or replant. Collectively, these acts caused
the Wagogo social order to collapse: villages were abandoned as families
looked for food, mob justice ruled, children were pawned, corpses littered
the roads and reports of cannibalism circulated. Once the 1918 global
influenza pandemic hit, very little was left of the Wagogo’s pre-war social
structures. The Mtunya’s long-term consequences cannot be overstated. It
2 GLOBAL WAR, GLOBAL CATASTROPHE
established decisive power differentials between the few wealthy locals who
managed to hang on to their cattle and land and the impoverished masses
who lost everything.5
The Wagogo’s Mtunya offers a dramatic example of the First World
War’s destructive power. It also highlights the intense emotional ties and
personal connections that ordinary people around the world had to this
global conflict. Santanu Das describes this ‘tumultuous world of feeling’ in
his recent book India, Empire and First World War Culture. In the book’s
introductory chapter, Das notes a letter sent by a Punjabi girl named
Kishan Devi in February 1916 to her father stationed as part of the Indian
Expeditionary Forces in Egypt. She asks, with intense anxiety and concern,
‘please take leave and come to meet us. Please do come. We repeat again and
again.’6 Devi’s pleas for the safe return of a beloved parent were echoed in
the letters, prayers, hopes and dreams of millions of others caught up in the
global maelstrom of warfare and state violence after July 1914.
By late 1917 there were few escapes from the condition of global warfare.
Officially, 1.4 billion people were at war out of a total world population of
1.8 billion.7 More than 70 million people died as a direct consequence of the
conflict, of whom almost 10 million were military casualties in campaigns
fought in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, across the Asia-Pacific and on the
world’s seas and oceans. The others were non-combatant victims of military
campaigns, revolutions, civil wars, famines, plagues and influenza, and of
the world’s humanitarian and material resources being diverted to aid the
warring powers. In the Middle East, anywhere between 2.5 and 10 million
non-combatants died during the war. In the words of Mustafa Aksakal, the
war ‘incinerated the [Ottoman] Empire’s social fabric’ much as it did for
the Wagogo and so many others.8 It left behind, as Leila Tarazi Fawaz so
evocatively describes, a ‘land of aching hearts’ and displaced communities.9
For many of the people who survived them, the transformations brought
on by the war years were confronting. In 1916, Léon Daudet, the French
editor of the monarchist publication Action Française, wrote a staunchly
anti-German exposé entitled ‘Une guerre totale: eux ou nous’ (‘Total war:
them or us’). Reflecting on the impact of the Verdun offensives that resulted
in more than 700,000 military casualties, Daudet explained that Germany
had forced a total war on France. This war, fought by such extreme means,
made it impossible for any German to ever be welcome in France again.10
In 1918, he further developed his definition of ‘total war’ as a struggle of
‘political, economic, commercial, industrial, intellectual, legal and financial
domains’, a war in which ‘not only the armies fight but also traditions,
institutions, customs, moral codes, emotions and especially the banks’.11
While Daudet considered total war as a phenomenon forced upon France
and its allies by their principal enemy, Germany, he acknowledged that
its impact extended well beyond the warring great powers. The war was
carried on the winds of global commerce, finance and information exchange
and was won by those who most effectively mobilized the available human
INTRODUCTION: A TOTAL GLOBAL TRAGEDY 3
ILLUSTRATION 0.1 This Chinese map of the world at war was published
late in 1917 after China declared war on Germany. The poster celebrates China’s
allies in the conflict (including Britain, France, Russia, Japan and the United States),
highlights all the belligerent countries involved (light shading) and marks the major
military theatres of warfare (dark shading). By late 1917, there were only a very few
formally neutral states left in the world (marked in white). With China’s declaration of
war, 1.4 billion people were officially at war out of a total world population of 1.8 billion.
Source: Art.IWM PST 13587, Imperial War Museum, London.
and material resources. As a result, neutral and belligerent civilians were

both victims and instruments of this total global war. They certainly counted
among its tens of millions of casualties.12
This book presents a history of the war’s global dynamic of destruction
and transformation much as Daudet did in 1918, namely as a product of
an all-consuming industrial war fought between the world’s major imperial
powers.13 It offers a wide-ranging history of the ways people, communities
and states experienced, considered and behaved in response to the First World
War. By necessity, it is a history that asks more questions than it answers. As
such, it is not a general history but an interrogative history of what happens
when the fundamental functioning of the world order unravels and what
that means for people and the functioning of their own societies.14 We take
our inspiration from the wealth of scholarship undertaken during the war’s
centennial years (2014–18), which highlights how neutral and belligerent
communities around the world were affected by and, in turn, shaped the
contours of the war as it evolved into a total global reality. In integrating
these myriad global faces of war – as Trevor Wilson once described them –15
this book aims to destabilize existing war narratives, particularly those
that present the conflict as ‘Europe’s war’.16 The First World War may have
begun in Europe, but it did not remain a singularly European venture for
very long.17
The ensuing nine chapters describe the history of the world at war
between 1914 and 1918 as it transformed into an inescapable reality. Each
chapter concentrates on a global moment of transgression (of expected
behaviours and norms) or transformation (of lived realities) and charts
its variegated impacts on individuals and communities around the world,
without aiming to emphasize one experience over another. It is a history of
transformations, of shifting horizons, perspectives and choices. It is also a
history of the inescapability of the war’s global influences, which confronted
so many at the time and subsequently. It is a history that focuses on the
sinews of globalization that existed on the eve of the war and explains that
the local and the global were intimately connected.18
Throughout the book, we turn repeatedly to Daudet’s concept of guerre
totale to describe the process by which the war’s dynamic of destruction
globalized. Much like Daudet, we define ‘total war’ as the product of a
prolonged industrial war that affected ‘all domains’ (political, economic,
commercial, industrial, intellectual, legal and financial, as well as familial,
communal and cultural). It was a global reality with a multitude of local
impacts. This book then recounts how ‘traditions, institutions, customs,
moral codes, emotions and … banks’ were mobilized in response to the
evolving landscape of war. To do this, each chapter is dedicated to a key
theme that explains how the war globalized and affected an increasing
number of states and communities, who became direct and indirect agents,
victims and sometimes beneficiaries of the war’s global dynamism.19 By 1917
few people could escape the ramifications of the global war even if they
lived in a neutral country, in an outpost of a neutral or belligerent empire
or far away from an official military front. Nor could many of them avoid
addressing the war’s economic impact on their lives and livelihoods. The
war altered the conduct of everyday lives, offered opportunities to exploit
and affected political views and moralities. Whether they lived in German-
controlled Rwanda, the neutral Dutch East Indies or on the Russian steppes,
the global war presented them all with confrontational and inescapable
realities, which linked, in the words of the historian Peter Gatrell, the ‘epic’
with the ‘domestic’.20
Of course, the path to total war was not pre-determined and its
impacts were far from uniform. The war experiences of Rwandans,
Javanese or Kazakhs were in no way ‘the same’, but they were nevertheless
interconnected. This book aims to bring out some of the ways in which ‘the
war’ became an inescapable reality for states, communities and individuals.
It also looks to explain why the war years occasioned so many revolutionary
developments. Most historians agree that the First World War ushered in
the twentieth century.21 Our book shows how the war challenged and then
unmoored pre-war norms and political values at a global and local level.
It does so by channelling contemporary reflections on and reactions to the
transformations that occurred during the war. It shows that while it would
be absurd to suggest there was a singular or universal ‘war experience’, most
contemporaries nevertheless had some kind of war experience that they
registered as important. After 1914, their lives were shaped by the contours
of this evolving global war.
The term ‘total war’ infuses many studies of warfare and no consensus
exists on its definition.22 For some, ‘total war’ defines a conflict where the
formal differentiations made between military personnel and civilians have
eroded. For others, a total war is a conflict that witnesses the complete
industrial mobilization of state and society. Yet others define total war
as a state of mind or as a war conducted without limits or restraints. It
can also be applied to wars that seek the unconditional surrender of an
enemy or the genocidal eradication or extermination of another society.23
The historian Stig Förster suggests that in its plethora of definitions, ‘total
war’ risks becoming a platitude, lacking any real use or meaning.24 Some
military and strategic historians go even further by suggesting that a state of
genuine total war cannot exist: only total nuclear meltdown or apocalyptic
violence would suffice to meet its conditions.25 In contrast, we agree with
William Mulligan that ‘total war’ remains a useful concept through which
to grasp how contemporaries understood the global and local contours of
the First World War as it progressed.26 The French Prime Minister Georges
Clemenceau, for example, launched his ministry in November 1917 with
the claim that France was now conducting a guerre integrale (integrated
war), a policy which clearly spoke to Daudet’s idea of guerre totale.27
The Wagogo’s Mtunya spoke equally powerfully to the concept of an all-
encompassing war.
By focussing on contemporary experiences, agency in and conceptions
of their world at war, this book argues that the label ‘total war’ is an apt
descriptor of the First World War and that ‘totalization’ is a useful designator
of the war’s local and global transformations. Both terms give depth and
meaning to the myriad human faces of the conflict. Much like Paul K. Saint-
Amour, we argue that the concept of ‘total war’ should not be considered as
a straightjacket to judge whether a war conformed to a pure definition. That
the Second World War was more ‘total’ than the First really does not tell us
much about either event after all.28 Rather, we see ‘total war’ as a useful lens
to ask questions of how the war evolved and how contemporaries reacted
to the expansion of the war’s reach and impact. For us, the First World War
grew into a total war as it drew in an increasing number of belligerents and
neutrals and came to affect the lives and livelihoods of an increasing number
of states, societies and individuals.
In the existing historiography, the term ‘total war’ is usually applied only
to belligerent societies, that is, to societies conducting a war. Their need
for victory at any cost determines most of the discourse around what it
meant to be at ‘total war’. But the First World War as a ‘total war’ was not
only shaped by the actions of belligerent governments, nor did it only affect
belligerent societies.29 A history of the war should acknowledge neutrals and
the local agency of citizens and subjects in determining the course, conduct
and impact of the conflict in their immediate environment. Another way to
acknowledge the totality of the First World War as a transformative exercise
is to highlight just how fundamental the war experience was for communities
outside of Europe. For example, how Kurdish tribes interacted with the
formal belligerents had an important bearing on how the war developed in
the Middle East. Similarly, African Americans’ military service in 1917 and
1918 helped to shape the politics of segregation in the United States, much
as south Asian war experiences helped to shape the politics of independence
in Mahatma Gandhi’s post-war India.30 The local and global realities of a
world at war intersected in a complex web.
One of this book’s ambitions, then, is to connect the international history
of the war (the war as conducted by governments and states) with the
experiential history of the war (the war as experienced and conducted by
individuals and communities). Our definition of total war requires both an
analysis of how a war fought between the great power belligerents expanded
its impact and reach and an analysis of how the war was perceived as
expanding by those who lived through it. Most importantly, we argue that
only by integrating the roles and experiences of neutral and belligerent states
and communities across the world can we truly appreciate the conflict’s
many metamorphoses and understand it as a ‘total war’ and ‘global tragedy’.
In 1914, ‘neutrality’ was the term used to describe countries whose
governments formally declared their intention of not joining a war fought
between other states. After 1815, neutrality was the fall-back position of
most governments when other countries went to war. In fact, across the
nineteenth century, neutrality developed into a respected and useful foreign
policy platform. It successfully helped to keep wars from expanding and
protected the economic and imperial interests of great and small powers
alike. These same powers also regulated the international laws that applied
to neutral states and their subjects in time of war. The aim of these rules was
to ensure that inter-state wars, when they occurred, could be geographically
constrained and kept from adversely affecting the international balance of
power or upsetting the international economy.31
This is not to suggest that the nineteenth century was peaceful. The
years 1815–1914 were beset with warfare and state violence, particularly in
aid of the major industrial empires’ expansion.32 Nevertheless, when wars
occurred between recognized governments, the great powers purposely and
collectively kept them from expanding. They did so by declaring neutrality
and by recognizing the rights of neutrals to continue operating as if they
were at peace. Neutrality then was an extremely useful tool of statecraft

and diplomacy, a tool that sustained the industrial empires’ hegemony
over the rest of the world.33 Many also considered neutrality as a powerful
international norm, protecting the world from unnecessary wars.
Of course, because neutral states and subjects were by definition
non-belligerent, they were not the most immediate agents of the human
catastrophe that evolved after July 1914. The actions of belligerents should
occupy any First World War historian. The history of warfare is, after all,
the history of human-made death and destruction.34 But if we take seriously
the premise that what stood this war apart from all its predecessors
was its global reach and its industrial nature, then we must do more to
understand and appreciate the roles played by neutral states and neutral
subjects. Neutrals were as much part of the integrated global economy and
international system as any belligerent state and subject. This book thus
argues for considering neutrals as agents ‘in’ war, rather than allocating
them to an existence ‘outside’ or ‘on the peripheries’ of war.
During the war, neutrals acted as economic agents, profiteers and
suppliers of arms, foodstuffs, fuels and raw materials. They served as
bankers to the belligerents, as humanitarians and offered refuge for the
war’s victims, deserters and absconders. Neutral governments offered ‘good
offices’ to their belligerent neighbours and provided havens of artistic and
ideological exile. They could also function as hubs of revolution. Neutrals
were potential belligerents. Neutral territories existed as vital geostrategic
breakers and as spaces to conduct espionage. Neutral representatives could
offer their diplomatic services as mediators and negotiators. Neutrals were
also key witnesses and judges of the war’s violence and therefore targets of the
belligerents’ public diplomacy campaigns. Significantly, while the nineteenth
century had made neutrality a common foreign policy position for states,
and many countries began the First World War in 1914 as formally declared
neutrals, far fewer remained neutral by the end of the conflict in 1918. The
general shift from neutrality to belligerency was one key transformation
of the 1914–18 war years, which also explains why neutrals ought to be
considered as important cogs in the evolution of total war.
Another key transformation occasioned by the war was the subversion
of the global economy to the belligerents’ need for victory at almost any
cost. Where in the ‘long’ nineteenth century the global economy was largely
protected from the military exigencies of its many local and imperial wars,
the First World War ended those predictabilities. In the nineteenth century,
as C.H. Stockton explained it in 1920, a ‘military war’ was supported
by a global economy that functioned as if it was operating under a
condition of a ‘commercial peace’.35 The nineteenth-century great powers
(and Britain especially) took great care to protect the parameters of that
‘commercial peace’, not least by constraining the geographic locus of most
conflicts. They also did so by codifying the rights and duties of neutrals in
international law.
Significantly, all nineteenth-century wars involved more formally

declared neutral states than belligerents. Thus, while the nineteenth century
was an extremely violent century, it was also an age of ‘limited war’. The
industrializing great powers in Europe along with the United States and
Japan determinedly used neutrality declarations to keep out of their imperial
rivals’ conflicts. In so doing, they protected their collective economic,
diplomatic and military power. In the process, they were also able to impose
their collective authority, their norms of ‘civilization’ and their claimed ‘right
to rule’ on the rest of the world. These ‘limited war’ strategies helped to keep
these empires in power by enabling them to suppress any opposition to their
imperial rule more easily.36
The First World War undid the concept of ‘limited war’ on all fronts:
military, social, political, cultural and economic. These transformations had
a profound impact on belligerent societies, on their empires and on neutrals.
The impact of economic deprivation occasioned by the war was acute in
many parts of the world, including in Europe, across Eurasia, Africa and the
Middle East. For Iranians, Libyans and Syrians, for example, the years 1915
to 1918 were years of extreme famine. One in seven Syrians died during this
period, most of them civilians. In response, the Ottoman term seferberlik
(‘mobilization’) remains a word that leads people in Syria to shudder, to this
day.37 In contrast, the initially neutral Americans and belligerent Japanese
grew tremendously wealthy by maximizing their unfettered access to the
Asia-Pacific regional economy between 1914 and 1918.38 While Europe
was at war, and the seas around Europe were militarized, the Japanese
and Americans could maximize profits and heighten their global economic
power, which had a fundamental impact on their governments’ wartime
agency and on the post-war international order.39 Yet even the United States
and Japan experienced heightened levels of social unrest in 1917 and 1918
in response to the general war situation. To call the First World War a total
war, then, is to argue that the tentacles of war stretched across the globe and
were shaped by a range of actors: neutral and belligerent, state and society,
citizen and subject. It is to accept that the war did not begin as a total global
war, although it certainly finished as such.
This history offers a patchwork of experiences that collectively help
to explain how the war transformed the world. It is not a comprehensive
history of the entire war. We do not spend any time on the origins of the
conflict, for example, nor do we provide a narrative of any battlefronts. Jörn
Leonhard’s 1,087-page Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War and
the opening volume of Hew Strachan’s First World War clearly highlight
how difficult writing a truly universal history of the war would be.40 We
have no ambitions to replicate these magisterial works nor to reinvent the
collective academic power of the Cambridge History of the First World War
and John Horne’s edited Companion to World War I.41 More modestly, we
aim to show how the global connections at play during the war provide
important context for understanding its course, conduct and legacies. If, as
a result, we sometimes prioritize ‘outlier’ examples, we do so to underscore

our argument that this was a global war with a myriad of human faces.
Each of the following chapters addresses a key global moment, which
people at the time considered significant or registered as transgressive or
transformative. Individually, the chapters interrogate the interactions that
existed between states and communities, between people and power and
between the global and the local as they dealt with the implications of
each of these transformative moments. Collectively, the chapters offer a
chronological account of the war as it evolved into an inescapable total
global reality, which through the course of 1916, 1917 and 1918 upended
the great power order that had operated during the nineteenth century.
By the time the First World War formally came to a close in November 1918,
the world was in complete disarray, its people desperately seeking new ways
forward and new models to organize their lives and the communities and
states in which they lived.
Chapter 1 begins by outlining the expectations and experiences attached
to the idea of ‘war’ and ‘peace’ on the eve of the July crisis in 1914. It
explains the contours of the nineteenth-century international order and the
role played by warfare in that world. As such, it offers a reference point
for the rest of the book, not least because it describes what contemporaries
understood of war before the First World War challenged those expectations.
The chapter spends some time with definitions, in terms of both what
contemporaries expected of neutral and belligerent states and their people
before 1914 and how they conceived of warfare and mass violence.42
The chapter also describes global reactions to the outbreak of war on
28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, and explains that
most observers at the time did not expect that this Balkan crisis would turn
into a global conflagration within the space of little more than a week.
Chapter 2 explains the enormous importance contemporaries attached
to Germany’s invasion of neutralized Belgium and Luxembourg on the
night of 3–4 August 1914. This German act of aggression transgressed
most people’s expectations of how inter-state wars should be conducted.
The news confronted those who encountered it, which they did all over
the newspaper-reading world. Germany’s actions in the first days of August
1914 effectively turned a Balkan war (fought between Austria-Hungary
and Serbia) into a continental war (fought between Germany and Austria-
Hungary, on the one side, and Russia, Serbia, Belgium, Luxembourg and
France, on the other). In so doing, Germany ensured that the ‘limited war’
ethos that had operated at the heart of the European balance of power since
1815 had ended. The invasion also registered as a major transgression of
the expectation that neutral countries were relatively ‘safe’ spaces in time of
inter-state war. By invading Belgium, particularly, the German government
unmoored people’s expectations that wars should remain geostrategically
contained. These realizations unsettled observers. They became incensed,
however, when they learned that Germany’s armies were massacring civilians
in Belgium and northern France, acts of war that defiled all their expected
norms of ‘civilized’ warfare and the laws of war and occupation. These
acts of wanton violence became a powerful trope, which observers used
to explain what they thought the war was about. From 1914, the ‘rape of
Belgium’ motif underwrote many contemporary observations of the stakes
involved in the global war.
The German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France certainly
made Great Britain’s entry into the war more likely. Chapter 3, then, focuses
on the second key moment that globalized and totalized the war, namely
Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 4 August 1914. This act of
belligerency was entirely out of keeping with Britain’s long-term policy
of adopting neutrality when other European countries went to war with
each other. Britain had, in fact, not gone to war with another European
power since 1856. And up until Germany’s invasion of Belgium, it was
highly uncertain whether Britain would go to war to aid France at all: the
British cabinet prevaricated on the subject for days and a vocal neutrality
movement appeared in public.
What swayed the government for war, in the end, was its fear of a
German hegemon appearing in Europe which, if successful, threatened
not only British imperial security but also the underlying principles of the
nineteenth-century international system. The British government interpreted
the German invasion as breaching the principles of ‘limited war’ and
‘restraint’ that had dominated international relations between the European
states up to this time.43 But in going to war, Britain also globalized the
conflict, turning its more than 446 million imperial subjects into belligerents:
altering their everyday lives, economic realities and prospects for the future
in small and large ways.44 Britain’s entry in the war and the developing
stalemate on the western front also ensured that the possibility of a short
war ‘over by Christmas’ quickly evaporated. Alongside that realization,
contemporaries registered that every economy and thus every society might
be seriously affected by the war. The chapter describes the contours of these
global reverberations and focuses on key declarations of belligerency in
1914, including by Japan and the Ottoman empire. It also highlights the
consequences, both dire and opportunistic, for neutrals and belligerents as
they faced the prospect of a global economy now mobilized for global war.
Another major wartime transformation, the subject of Chapter 4,
came with the general realization late in 1914 that this war would not be
won quickly and would require much more concerted targeting of enemy
resources. After December 1914, then, the world witnessed the intensification
of economic warfare. Until this point of time, the belligerents had upheld
the terms of the 1909 Declaration of London and 1907 Hague Conventions,
including the rights of neutrals to trade in non-contraband items with
the belligerents. After December 1914, the idea that the belligerents were
conducting a nineteenth-century style ‘limited war’ disappeared. From
March 1915 onwards both sides increasingly rejected or revised neutral
rights and in so doing harked back to principles of unrestricted economic

warfare advanced in Europe during the early modern period. They aimed at
putting their enemy under as much economic pressure as possible.
The shift to unrestricted economic warfare highlighted that if the war
was to be won, it would be won by the side that was best able to mobilize
the world’s industrial resources and, at the same time, be able to prevent the
mobilization of its enemy’s human and material capacities. The consequences
of the transformation were profound. For one, no neutral was left unaffected.
Just as importantly, no belligerent civilian remained unaffected, however
close or far away they lived to a military front. Chapter 4 thus analyses
the kinds of questions and agency that evolved as the human impact of the
transformation to global economic warfare became more profound through
the course of 1915 and beyond. It shows how the ‘politics of hunger’45 and
the belligerents’ willingness to target civilians framed the politics of war at
a domestic and global level in neutral and belligerent societies alike. It also
shows how strong a hand greed and economic opportunism played in the
politics of war.
Chapter 5 develops the conceptual and lived implications of the
transformation to a war fought for and against civilians. It marks the year
1915 as the year belligerents willingly transgressed any and all restraints
to achieve ‘victory at any cost’. The chapter looks at the consequences of
the shift by focusing both on the mobilization of civilians for war and on
the consequences of targeting civilians as objects of military violence. It
deals with a diverse range of subjects: from the experimentation with new
forms of military armaments (such as gas, aerial bombardment and U-boat
warfare) and the institutionalization of violence at the warfronts to the
impact of industrial warfare on refugees, forced deportations, internment
policies, occupation regimes and genocide. It explains how quickly societies
at war internalized and justified violence against enemy or alien ‘Others’
both within and outside their own communities. It casts its lens across the
world and uses examples from neutral and belligerent societies to make its
case. Above all, the chapter confirms John Horne’s claim that in 1915 the
war became ‘a world in itself’ and Annette Becker’s assertion that the First
World War witnessed every form of mass and state violence imaginable.46
In Chapter 6 the focus of the book shifts to explaining the impact of this
enduring total global war on communities around the world and shows
how the experience of total war strained the social fabric of an increasing
number of communities. It argues that the near universal experience of war
weariness that set in during 1916 was a product of the seeming endlessness
of the war’s ever-expanding spiral of violence and economic insecurity.
The chapter shows how the multiple stresses of total war led individuals,
communities and governments to really question: What is this war about?
What should happen next? What should my role in the war continue to
be? This kind of questioning also opened up avenues for action, sometimes
aimed at provoking change, at others at resisting or reconfiguring existing
authorities. The chapter explains that, in large part due to the seeming
endlessness of the war, it became increasingly more difficult for governments
to mobilize and control the loyalties of their people. Their willingness to
be at war (or to remain neutral in the war) shifted in key ways through
the course of 1916. These changing loyalties made revolutionary political
change within empires and states increasingly more likely. They also altered
perceptions of what it meant to remain neutral. What international and
intermediary functions could neutrality serve if total war had become a
permanent feature of everyday life?
Chapter 7 focuses on what the historian Jay Winter calls the ‘climacteric
of 1917’, the year that the Russian revolutions erupted and reconfigured
global politics and power relations.47 During 1917, the war truly became
a ‘total global tragedy’, which unravelled the social and political fabric of
many belligerent and neutral communities. Over the succeeding months of
total war, four major powers disintegrated into revolution and civil war –
Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman empire and Germany. The others –
Britain, France, Japan, China and the United States – faced serious social
and political crises from within. In the words of Michael Neiberg, these
crises mark the year 1917 as the ‘starting point of the wars that would
shape the rest of the twentieth century and beyond’.48 He might have added
that these crises also mark the starting point of the twentieth-century era of
decolonization.
Chapter 8 focuses on the fundamental wartime transformation that
occurred in parallel to the two Russian revolutions, namely the United States’
declaration of war on Germany on 2 April 1917. This act of belligerency
was all important as it signalled the final collapse of the nineteenth-century
international order that was predicated on the willingness and ability of
individual states to declare their neutrality when others went to war. When
the United States went to war in April 1917, it went to war not only against
the Germans but also in aid of a new vision of an international order. That
vision denied neutrality as a valid foreign policy. In so doing, the United
States made it all but impossible for the world’s remaining neutrals to
uphold their formal neutrality, let alone to protect their neutral rights in
accordance to international law. They were all astutely aware that neutrality,
as an international principle steeped in nineteenth-century legal obligations,
was increasingly considered an out-dated norm that needed replacing. The
chapter thus also highlights that the transformations experienced by neutrals
of their neutrality were as much signals of the ‘climacteric’ of 1917 as the
violent revolutions that shook the world and undid its empires.
If anything, the final chapter of the book is not a proper conclusion. For
one, it does not show how the war came to an end sometime in the aftermath
of the 11 November 1918 Armistice nor in the wake of a series of peace
treaties or the establishment of the League of Nations. Rather, the chapter
argues that the transformations of the war years unleashed a tidal wave
of largely unbridgeable and ultimately unsolvable political expectations
about the shape of communities, nation-states, industrial empires and the

principles and norms that ought to define international relations. All of these
ideas and concepts may have originated in the nineteenth-century age of
industrial globalization, but the course of the First World War enabled them
to radicalize and gave them room to grow. In the aftermath of this total
global tragedy, the world and its many communities and peoples would
continue to struggle to define a way forward that could accommodate the
needs, desires and wishes of all.
14
1
A world of war before 1914
Warfare and state violence beat at the heart of the nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century global order. From 1815 on, a small number of
increasingly powerful industrializing states and empires dominated that
global order. These powers willingly used state violence to police their
territories and borders, quell resistance and assert their self-proclaimed right
to rule. They readily used violence or the threat of violence to acquire new
lands (and economic markets), to subjugate local communities, to police
dissent, to seize resources and to champion their rights as sovereign states
in international law.1 Yet while they were always willing to use warfare to
protect and advance their own interests, these same states and governing
elites tended to avoid going to war with rival or neighbouring countries.
They understood that wars were harbingers of economic malaise, popular
revolution and social unrest. As such, while only ardent pacifists argued
against Carl von Clausewitz’s principle that countries could go to war, most
nineteenth-century governments accepted that the risks of going to war with
another state were high.2 As a result, most wars conducted between states
between 1815 and 1914 were short-lived and limited in their geographic
scope. They occasioned more declarations of neutrality (by other states) than
declarations of war. In other words, diplomatic restraint and war avoidance
were as essential to maintaining the nineteenth-century global order as the
ready use of state violence to assert the right to rule over a nation or empire.
On the eve of global war in 1914, then, the world was no stranger to
warfare. But it was also no stranger to the idea that inter-state warfare
should be prevented. War avoidance and neutrality were common foreign
policy strategies in Europe and the Americas after 1815, and in Asia after
1853. Throughout the nineteenth century, many European governments
even declared their intention to adopt a long-term policy of neutrality,
acknowledging that they would not go to war against another state of their
own accord. During the 1890s and early 1900s, some of these countries –
including the Netherlands and the Scandinavian states – even considered
asking the great powers to guarantee their permanent neutrality as they
had previously done for Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. There

were, then, three types of neutral states: permanently neutralized states (like
Switzerland and Belgium, whose neutrality relied in part on the guarantees
of other states), voluntary long-term neutrals (like the United States,
China, Liberia and Siam) and occasional neutrals (states who declared
their neutrality at the outbreak of a particular war).3 Significantly, when it
came to inter-state warfare, each type of neutral had the same expectations
attached to their conduct, some of which were defined by international
law, the rest by international custom. On the eve of global war in 1914,
then, neutrality was expected to play a prominent role in any inter-state
conflict. Furthermore, any European war that developed (which many
contemporaries acknowledged as a possibility) was expected to remain
localized and geographically contained.
Neutrality thrived in the nineteenth-century international system because
it served a number of purposes. By avoiding inter-state warfare, the industrial
powers could focus their attention on expanding their industrial economies
and empires. For example, the United States used a vast amount of state
violence (including genocidal state violence) to extend its formal control
over the north American continent in the 1800s. It could do so without
seriously worrying about being attacked by another major industrial power.
In the 1890s, the United States even managed to acquire overseas territories
in southeast Asia (the Philippines), the Pacific (Hawai’i and American
Samoa) and the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Cuba), defeating a weakened
Spanish empire as well as mobilizing its own state forces against local and
indigenous populations who resisted these developments. Across the same
period, Great Britain grew the size of its ‘blue water’ empire ‘on which the
sun never set’ to administer over 24 per cent of the world’s landmass.4 It
utilized a vast amount of state violence against local populations to do so.
In both cases, security at home enabled imperial expansionism abroad.
Neutrality at home thus also enabled imperial expansionism abroad.
Imperialism and economic expansion also depended on the great power
governments’ willingness not to compete over access to the world’s seas
and oceans. Here too the ability to remain neutral when others went to
war was essential. After 1815, the British Royal Navy, the world’s largest
and strongest naval force, protected the seas against piracy threats. All
industrializing states, great and small, thrived in the nineteenth century in
large part because of their access to these open and free seas. The small
neutralized nation of Belgium grew into a major arms exporter, for example,
and had one of the world’s fastest growing industrial economies. After the
Meiji Restoration in the 1860s, Japan too developed into a major industrial
power with sizeable regional and global influence, even acquiring its own
overseas empire in Taiwan and Korea. Britain was the nineteenth century’s
biggest winner, but it was not alone. By 1900, Germany and the United States
both rivalled Britain in terms of steel production, manufacturing output and
advances in chemical output. Their collective wealth and power were, in
A WORLD OF WAR BEFORE 1914 17
part, protected by their willingness to localize inter-state wars when they

occurred and to avoid them altogether when that was possible. Of course,
this collective economic growth also occasioned increased competition,
which was manifested in a number of decisive ways, including in diplomatic
relations and cultural expressions of national prowess and rivalry.
Despite the rivalries, warfare between the major industrial powers was
generally avoided. Even when they did go to war, these powers tended to
avoid all-out economic warfare. While it was a belligerent’s right to attack
ships flying an enemy’s flag, to blockade enemy ports and impose other
economic barriers to disable their rival’s economy, they rarely exercised
those rights. For example, during the Crimean War (1853–6, involving
Russia, France, Britain, Sardinia and the Ottoman empire), none of the
belligerents wished to risk their own access to the open seas and the global
economy. They purposely contained the war, focussing on military theatres
in the Black Sea, Crimean Peninsula and Baltic. As such, they only imposed a
limited blockade on their enemy. Tellingly, both the Austrians and Prussians
remained neutral, as did the Americans, and all three utilized their formal
neutrality to expand their economic wealth and power by supplying the
belligerents with essential goods.5
The Crimean War highlights just how essential the unfettered access to
the global economy and to the open seas was considered by the world’s
major powers. They revelled in C.H. Stockton’s conception of separating
a ‘military war’ from a condition of a ‘commercial peace’.6 The years 1853
to 1856, then, marked a fundamental shift in how wars were conducted
between the Anglo-European states. From the outset of the Crimean
conflict, the belligerents ended the practice of privateering, which had been
the mainstay of economic warfare in Europe and between the European
empires during the early modern period. They sustained the right of neutrals
to trade unhindered in non-contraband goods. They also imposed strict
rules regarding the legitimate conduct of economic warfare: for example,
blockades could only be imposed if they were effective. These ideas were
sanctified in international law with the signing of the Declaration of Paris
in 1856.7
The 1856 Declaration of Paris was the first of several attempts to
create a universally recognized international law of war. The 1863 Geneva
Convention, signed initially by twelve European governments, established
the principle that in time of war, medical units would disperse aid to all
who needed it. These Red Cross units effectively functioned as a ‘neutral’
humanitarian force that operated on (or near) the battlefield. The 1868 St
Petersburg Declaration, initially signed by seventeen governments, agreed
that some weapons were too horrific for use in ‘civilized warfare’ (by which
they meant wars conducted between recognized states).8 Fifteen governments
met in Brussels in 1874 to define a ‘law of war’. Their deliberations would
become the basis on which the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907
were built. While the Hague conventions represented established wartime
practices of most European countries up to that point in time, they were

revolutionary in that they projected those expectations outwards to cover
the world: China, Japan, the United States, Persia and Siam were all
signatories of the 1899 agreements. They also focussed heavily on the rights
and obligations of neutral states, entrenching the idea that neutrality was
a protected status in time of inter-state war. Forty-four governments were
party to the 1907 Hague Conventions, including many of the Latin American
states, globalizing the application of international law in the process.
Of course, these international regulations spoke to the ability of the
Anglo-European powers to dominate the values regulating the international
environment at a political, economic, legal and even sociocultural level.
They also spoke to the fact that conceptualizations of ‘legitimate’ inter-state
warfare were commonplace in the lead-up to the First World War, including
in the international press. The Hague conventions, for example, offered a
key lens for contemporaries to ask questions of a war’s legitimacy and to
moralize about its conduct.9 Governments within and outside Europe used
these same ideas to mobilize their public diplomacy. For an inter-state war
to be considered as legitimate it had to be conducted as a defensive measure
only.10 Increasingly, aggressive warfare between states was considered
unnecessary, dangerous and against the precepts of ‘civilized’ behaviour. Yet,
despite such rhetoric, martial virtue played an equally prominent role in
Anglo-European political cultures, often defining, racializing and gendering
concepts of citizenship and duty to the community, nation and empire.11
Most importantly, inter-state warfare was not the most common type of
warfare in the nineteenth-century world. The century was filled with people’s
wars, revolutionary struggles and violent acts of resistance by subjugated
communities within these states and empires. The agents of this kind of
violence considered warfare an essential means to an essential end. How else
was change to come? How else could state power be ceded and replaced?
How else could their opposition to such power be registered? This kind of
warfare and rebellion aimed at empowerment: it contested the imposition
of foreign (colonial) rule and unwelcome governing systems, and aimed at
revolutionizing political power from below.
As the historian Antoinette Burton argues in The Trouble with Empire,
the nineteenth century was beset with wars of rebellion and resistance
against imperial authority.12 These conflicts were a constant reminder that
colonized communities did not welcome the foreigners who proclaimed
that they ruled their lives. Colonial resistance movements did not only aim
to destabilize colonial authority. They were also assertions of agency and
sovereignty ‘from below’. For the Kurdish tribes who lived in the borderlands
between the Ottoman and Persian empires, for example, the ever-changing
landscape of great power authority in their territories posed challenges but
also offered their leaders opportunities to extend and protect their own
regional influence.13 Another example is that of the desperate battle fought
near the town of Adwa which, in 1896, resulted in the Italian forces’ defeat
and the establishment of Ethiopia as an independent nation-state, a decisive

African success story.
In response to internal rebellion, few states and metropoles thought
about the rules of war that regulated so-called ‘civilized’ inter-state warfare.
At any rate, a government’s policing mechanism fell outside the purview
of international law. As a result, most governments felt entirely justified in
undertaking almost any military action to repress a local uprising, strike or
protest and to suppress the claimed rights to self-determination from among
their subjects. They were also adept at policing political activism within
and outside their metropoles, appealing to the principles of law, order and
stability to justify their actions. They also appealed to their sovereign ‘right
to rule’ to justify their actions against resistant populations. In establishing
its control over the Choson peninsula, for example, the Meiji government in
Japan repeatedly countered the Korean monarchy’s claims to independence
by invoking its own right in international law and as a ‘civilized’ state to
acquire and sustain an empire.
Within the numerous empires that stretched across the world by the early
1900s, state violence was an everyday part of life, in terms of both police
actions (to repress political unrest, economic strikes and colonial resistance)
and the means to acquire new territory, markets and human and material
resources. This kind of imperial warfare was seldom considered by its agents
in the same way as inter-state military violence. It was generally brutal and
rarely restrained. This did not mean, however, that the violence was left
unseen or that it did not evoke considered discourses about its legitimacy.
For its victims, the violence was all too real and proffered a powerful
reason why ongoing military resistance against the empire and its agents
was warranted. For its agents – the soldiers of empire – their actions were
both legitimated as essential (for the survival of the empire) and celebrated
as courageous (not least because they were conducted against supposed
‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ peoples who did not fight fair, unlike the supposed
‘civilized’ men who undertook the violence).14
Somewhat paradoxically, then, Anglo-Europeans in the nineteenth century
were both ardent proponents of regulating inter-state warfare and limiting
its spread in the name of ‘civilizing’ and humanitarian forces and agents of
extreme state violence in the name of advancing ‘civilization’ and imperial
glory. Even permanently neutral states, like Belgium, could acquire an empire
by means of warfare and rule their imperial subjects with an iron fist. Of
course, the paradox only exists if you ignore the racial categorizations that
operated in nineteenth-century Anglo-European societies. By 1900, not only
were many non-European communities subjugated into one of the Anglo-
European empires (including the United States) but they all had to operate
in an international diplomatic, economic and cultural system that forced
Anglo-European and capitalist values onto the rest.15 In other words, in
the international system that dominated the nineteenth-century world, wars
between ‘civilized’ states and people were considered according to different
ILLUSTRATION 1.1 This 1898 advertising poster for Barnum & Bailey’s circus in
the United States included re-enactments of battle scenes from Britain’s recent war in
the Sudan, which resulted in the defeat of Mahdist communities, the desecration of the
Mahdi’s tomb and decapitation of his head by Lord Kitchener’s troops. In many places
across the Anglo-world, the war was both celebrated as a heroic and essential war for
the British empire and considered an unnecessary and brutal war of imperial conquest.
Source: ‘The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth’, poster, c. 1897, Prints and
Photographs Division, Library of Congress, POS - CIRCUS - Bar. & Bai. 1897, no.
7 (C size) [P&P].
standards than wars conducted by ‘white’ against ‘non-white’ people or

those fought between or within supposedly ‘non-civilized’ communities.
From the perspective of many Anglo-Europeans at the time, there was
also no paradox. Their version of ‘progress’ required industrialization
and the adoption of standardized principles of governance and order. As
such, they defined the rights of communities in terms of the community’s
relationship to a ‘legitimate’ or ‘civilized’ state or empire. They considered
that only legitimate states (i.e. countries with a defined international border,
recognized governmental structure and system of law and order that protected
individual property rights) were allowed to conduct wars to expand their
empires and assert sovereignty. If such a state went to war with another
legitimate state, the conflict should conform with international expectations,
including the international law of war. Any state violence conducted in aid
of policing an empire, suppressing a rebellion or acquiring territory where

‘non-civilized’ peoples lived (i.e. people whom they considered to be living
outside a defined state, without set borders, a governmental structure and
system of law, or which did not recognize or protect individual property
rights) fell largely outside these strictures.16
According to these precepts, imposing limits on military violence only
worked if all involved understood and worked within the same set of rules.
Anyone who fell outside the framing of ‘civilization’ could not be expected
to behave according to the precepts of international law, and thus, need
not be treated in a ‘civilized’ manner. Thus, nineteenth-century industrial
imperialism aimed not only at the acquisition of territory, markets and
people, but also at imposing these rules, norms and structures on all
societies. In effect, the industrializing great powers colonized the world with
more than their people, goods and money. They also enforced their ways
of governing, thinking, believing and behaving on the world in order to aid
global economic and political interaction on their terms.
Still, it must be said that at no time was the use of state violence universally
condoned or accepted among these same Anglo-Europeans. While there
were certainly numerous Anglo-Europeans who accepted the need to use
military violence to advance an empire, to repress a rebellion, to overthrow
colonial resistance or even to quash an ‘alien’ people or culture, many others
disagreed and critiqued these violent acts. Context, as the historian Andrew
Fitzmaurice so ably explains, is everything.17 Consider, for example, the
British war of conquest in the Sudan in 1888 and 1889. Lord Kitchener’s
army’s successes in the region were celebrated in Britain and throughout its
settler colonies (see Illustration 1.1). Yet some of the excesses of Kitchener’s
violence were also criticized.18 The Mataura Ensign newspaper in New
Zealand, for example, described the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb and
decapitation of his body as ghoulish and unnecessary, while in England the
Anglo-Saxon Review lambasted these same events:
It will be a bad day for Britain when a piece of needless brutality can
pass unquestioned because the men who are responsible for it have been
brilliantly successful on the battlefield.
The perspective included in the Review argued: ‘we’ British must set the right
example of ‘superior civilisation, superior humanity, superior gentleness and
consideration’ because humanity expects more of civilized states than a
‘barbarous orgy of revenge’.19
Such critiques of imperial violence took place within a wider global
discourse about the potential of extending international norms, heightening
international integration and bettering all humanity within the existing
international system. At the turn of the century, internationalist idealism
thrived in many places. With the media revolution of the 1890s, such opinions
became more commonplace and globalized in part because news about acts
of state violence spread more easily and in part because there was greater
recognition of how the world and its people were interconnected.20 Many of
these media reflections focussed on the regulation of the international law of
war. Even before the first Hague peace conference was held in 1899, newspapers
around the world considered its potential to improve international affairs.
There was widespread recognition that wars were destructive and, even if
they could not be avoided, should be ameliorated and restricted. These Hague
principles and agreements certainly played a prominent role in the public
sphere between 1899 and 1914. In reporting on The Hague conferences,
but also on wars, conflicts and uprisings, global newspapers repeatedly
reflected on the concept of legitimacy: was a war or instance of state violence
conducted according to the rules? And, if not, what might that say about the
agents of the violence? Were they ‘civilized’? If they transgressed, how did
that complicate global expectations and the international situation?
The Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) offers a useful example of these
competing visions of war, not least because it was an intensely documented
media event.21 In the global press, the war was overwhelmingly recognized as
an inter-state war, pitting the Meiji empire against its Romanov counterpart.
As such, newspaper reports focused mostly on the military conduct of and
the diplomacy surrounding the war. In conducting their military campaigns,
the Japanese government was extremely careful to uphold the international
law of war.22 Japan needed to be seen as operating within the constricts of
‘legitimate’ warfare to confirm its status as ‘civilized’ and as an equal in
the international system. As a result, international lawyers accompanied
Japan’s armies in the field and Russian prisoners of war were offered all
due care as specified by the 1899 Hague Conventions.23 In the international
press, the war was also assessed in terms of the requirements of ‘legitimate’
warfare and the prescriptions of international law. This was particularly
important because of Russia’s attempts to interfere in Japan’s trade with
the neutral great powers. A considerable body of academic work appeared
on the international law of war and neutrality in relation to the conflict,
much of which also received commentary in the global press.24
In keeping with the inter-state war depiction, many editorials also
considered the Russo-Japanese War as a heroic struggle of competing
industrial empires, a war in which the Japanese ‘tiger’ defeated the Russian
‘bear’.25 In Japan, the war offered a means to advance nationalism and the
idealization of soldiers as archetypal citizens.26 The costs of warfare were also
amply illustrated. Russia’s military defeat inspired anti-Tsarist revolutions
across the Romanov lands, highlighting the unpredictable domestic impact
of warfare on the volatile subjects of this sprawling empire.27 The socialist
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg described these anti-Romanov protests as
reflective of the interconnected nature of global warfare. The destiny of
Europe, she suggested in 1904:
isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside
it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics. … This war
brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political
and economic connectedness of the world.28
For Koreans and the inhabitants of Manchuria, of course, the Russo-

Japanese War was one of conquest, confirming Japan’s rising imperial
power and de facto control of the Choson kingdom. These people, most
of whom were non-combatants, were nevertheless the war’s primary
victims: the battlefronts passed across their homes and lands, their cities
were bombarded. Surprisingly, the civilians in the Russo-Japanese War
remain the least studied by historians.29 They are also the least visible
in the contemporary newspaper record. After 1905, any hopes that the
Korean people might have had to be freed from Japan’s imperial yoke
disappeared.30 The war confirmed Japan’s international right to empire.
Manchurians too now looked with unsteady eyes to the competing
claims of the Qing, Romanov and Meiji emperors to their lands. For
other southeast Asian peoples, the rise of an aggressive Japan was also
a frightening prospect, complicating the imperial power stakes at play
in their own communities.31 Filipino intellectuals, for example, looked
to alternate visions for their own future, seeking independence from the
United States and advocating for the long-term neutrality of the Philippines
to heighten their security.32
Meanwhile, neutral Anglo-European observers racialized the conflict
and questioned the martial virtues and (waning) abilities of the ‘white’
world. For if a ‘yellow’ people could win this war, then what might that
say about the supposed superiority of European civilization?33 Among most
non-Europeans, however, Japan’s victory was considered a fundamental
military success, which they might one day emulate. As such the war offered
inspiration for their own anti-imperial struggles.34 As the Gujarati newspaper
the Jam-e-Jamshed described the war: ‘the twentieth century could not
have breathed a more … encouraging message of hope into the ears of the
downtrodden nations of the East’.35 Yet depictions of the conflict around the
globe also focussed on the frightening reality of industrial warfare. Thus,
when the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, successfully mediated
a peace treaty at the war’s end he also came to be represented as a heroic
figure of international peace, the limitation of war and the promotion of
liberal internationalism more generally.
Quite in contrast to the Russo-Japanese War, the global press presented
the maelstrom of violence that typified the Balkan Wars in 1912 and
1913 as a ‘people’s war’. The neutral press fixated on the national stakes
involved in the conflict, pitting the various Balkan communities (both
ethnically and religiously defined) against the Ottoman empire first and then
against each other. War reports fixated on its human cost: its ‘outrages’,
massacres, pillaging and the great number of refugees.36 In the Balkan
Wars, international law seemed not to apply because people, rather than
states, were the driving force behind the war.37 Few Anglo-European
observers reacted with anything other than abhorrence at the conduct of the
war, although some ‘Othered’ it as a form of military violence that was only
possible on the margins of Europe among ‘semi-civilized’ people.38
Yet in the public diplomacy conducted around the war, the belligerent
Balkan governments utilized international legal norms to condemn their
enemies and promote their own cause. Such claims found ready voice in the
international press.39 For its part, the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, an internationalist organization set up in 1910 to facilitate peaceful
relations in the world, commissioned an official enquiry into the conflict by
sending observers from neutral countries (most of whom were international
lawyers) to the region and interviewing locals. The Carnegie report, published
in 1913, both documented the conflict’s extreme violence and registered
its purpose of ensuring that ‘public opinion’ be duly informed about what
happened. The report eyed the improvement of international law so that
wars like this one would become increasingly rare.40 Of course, for the
Balkan peoples who were at war, the war was not an ‘idea’ or ‘observation’.
Its violence was a lived reality.
It is one thing, then, to describe a conflict as witnessed from afar,
mediated through a neutral newspaper article, photograph, artwork, poem
or endowment report. It is quite another to assess its value in the moment.
After July 1914, warfare became an increasingly universal reality (albeit
a distinctly different reality depending on who you were and where you
lived). Nevertheless, between 1914 and 1918, more and more parts of
the world were formally at war. Even if they remained formally neutral
and removed from a military front, the socio-economic consequences of
conducting this multifaceted global war had a decisive impact on most
societies. If anything, the 1914–18 conflict globalized and normalized
warfare and extreme violence for its agents, victims and observers alike. It
also removed many of the distinctions that contemporaries in the nineteenth
century made between inter-state warfare and other forms of state and non-
state military violence.
Of course, when contemporaries considered the possibility of a future
war in the Balkan region during the July crisis in 1914, they did so entirely
in keeping with their expectations of inter-state warfare at the time. Very
few expected the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, to lead to global
war. As an example, on 1 July 1914, the Dutch-language Sumatra Post
editorialized that general opinion acknowledged this murder as a ‘political
crime’ but one that ‘will have no influence on the development of Austro-
Hungarian politics’.41 The historian Michael Neiberg shows just how
surprised Europeans were by Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on
Serbia on 28 July.42 At that stage, most contemporaries did not even expect
a large-scale inter-state war to develop, although a Balkan war was always
a possibility.43 A number of Latin American and Japanese newspapers
meanwhile talked of a potential European war breaking out along the lines
of what had happened between France and Germany in 1870–1.44 In that
conflict, the rest of Europe remained formally neutral. At any rate, most
commentators in 1914 recognized that Balkan crises were common and
that, in the end, the recent Balkan Wars had been successfully mediated
by the neutral great powers without them all becoming embroiled. In July
1914, then, the tenets of the European-backed international system seemed
to still be in place. They also analysed the outbreak of war between Austria-
Hungary and Serbia as an inter-state conflict and expected that it would
(and, at the very least, should) be conducted according to established
principles of international law.
The responsibility for the war’s expansion from a Balkan conflict to
a world war definitely lay with the European imperial governments. The
1914–18 war was the product of decisions made at the highest levels of
government, by heads of state, ministers and cabinets. This is not to say that
Europe’s crowds did not come out in patriotic support of the wars declared
by their governments. They certainly did, although not as enthusiastically
or universally as historians used to claim.45 But the First World War did
not begin as a people’s war. The impetus for the declarations of war was
embedded in the decisions made by the continent’s governing elites. The
First World War clearly began as an inter-state conflict determined by
the vagaries of European diplomacy and government decision-making
processes.46
As a result, and as they read about unfolding events in July 1914,
newspaper readers around the world expected the same diplomatic
principles and restraints that had shaped previous international crises to
apply. Thomas Munro shows how active the calls to arbitrate or mediate
the crises were using the mechanisms of The Hague’s Permanent Court of
Arbitration.47 Munro reminds us that many of the people watching the July
crisis unfold were not passive receivers of information, they were also active
agents in attempting to alter the course of government decision-making and
promote particular foreign policies.
Europe’s governments were certainly aware of the power of the people
and the dangers of rebellion and revolution orchestrated ‘from below’
both within metropoles and across their empires. As a result, they framed
their public diplomacy around the outbreak of the war in defensive terms,
which was as true for neutral governments as those who had just become
belligerents. It was also on defensive grounds that the public’s patriotism
came into play in late July and early August as the European states went
to war.48 The German parliament’s Burgfrieden (literally ‘fortress of peace’,
political truce) saw even the anti-military Social Democrats (SPD) declare
their support for the nation under attack from Russia.49 The Russian Duma
declared a similar truce with the otherwise unpopular Tsar.50 In the neutral
Netherlands, a Godsvrede (literally ‘God’s peace’, political truce) saw its
parliamentary parties work in unison to implement effective strategies to
guard the country against possible invasion and protect it from the economic
impact of an uncertain war situation.51 Declarations of a ‘state of emergency’
ILLUSTRATION 1.2 This depiction of Germany at war was published in the

Münchner Kriegsblätter [Munich War News] in August 1914. It highlights not
only the military strength of the German nation in arms (the knight and the well-
disciplined troops) but also the relative weakness of its enemies: the Russian bear
with its mouth wide open in agony, the toothless British lion flanked by a Japanese
monkey and a frightened Gallic rooster (France). The depiction reminded its readers
that Germany was conducting a defensive war and underscored the expectation that
it would come out victorious.
Source: Bruno Goldschmitt, artist, for Münchner Kriegsblätter Munich, Hans von
Weber, 1914, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-21811.
proved a very useful mechanism for governments to obtain widespread buy-

in to their belligerency and neutrality.
Of course, the benefit of hindsight allows us to see that the First World
War did not remain a war of states. As the conflict rapidly globalized and
radicalized it grew in size and scale. In response, the war acquired different
faces depending on who was affected and involved. At times it was a war
of empires, at other times, a war fought within empires or between peoples
and communities. At other moments, it was a war of revolutions, anti-
colonial resistance, religious fervour, self-determination and irredentism. In
some places it took the form of civil war. A study of the transformations
effected by the war years can tell us a great deal about how a conflict that
began as an inter-state war fought in Europe turned into a war of the world.
Such a study can also tell us much about how contemporaries internalized,
considered, debated and acted upon the changes and challenges occasioned
by the war as it evolved. The following chapters bring out the importance of
those transgressions and transformations.
Essential to this book and to our definition of total war is the
acknowledgement that not only states, but also ordinary people, were
agents of the global war. Whether as belligerent or non-belligerent actors,
they helped to shape the war’s various parameters. As a result, this book
focuses on both states and societies. It looks both to government authority
at a state level and to the individuals and communities that comprised that
state or empire. Our second major distinction is between belligerents and
neutrals. It is important to recognize that neutrality was a formal condition
assigned to a state that remained non-belligerent during a war fought by
others. In every war fought during the previous century, there had always
been more neutrals than belligerents. As a result, by 1914, it was expected
that at the outbreak of a war uninvolved governments would declare the
intention of their country (or empire) to remain neutral. Neutrality was the
fall-back position of most states. As we will see, however, neutrality did not
remain a stable foreign policy choice through the course of the 1914–18
conflict. One of the key transformations of these war years was a universal
shift away from neutrality.
But in 1914, it was generally acknowledged that a country could remain
neutral as long as its government maintained a good relationship with the
belligerents. That is to say, neutrality was sustainable as long as the country
was not invaded (when it automatically became a belligerent) and as long
as any violation of the legal and political requirements of neutral states
in time of war was policed by the neutral government and was validated
by the belligerents. According to these legal rights and duties, neutrality
maintenance was a complicated and involved business. Regardless of
how far away a military front was, neutral governments had to be seen to
mobilize troops and naval ships to patrol territorial borders. They had to
design domestic laws to prevent neutral subjects from signing up to serve
in a belligerent armed force or to keep them from smuggling contraband to
a belligerent. Above all, neutrality maintenance involved constant vigilance
and diplomatic negotiation with belligerents, for any violation could lead to
a charge of ‘unneutral behaviour’ and a corresponding declaration of war
on that neutral.
Successful neutrality maintenance was also a matter of domestic politics.
While in terms of international law, a private subject of a neutral state could
not endanger that country’s formal position of neutrality, in practice how
neutral communities behaved in relationship to a war mattered both to the
political stability of the neutral country and to their government’s relationship
with the belligerents. Neutral subjects internalized these responsibilities in
varying ways. They often mobilized their identity as neutrals to proffer
humanitarian support in the war or to engage in ‘good offices’ or mediation
attempts. They usually advocated for the international good of their own
neutrality in keeping the war from expanding. None of these positions
prevented individuals from neutral countries from sharing their opinions
and perspectives on the war, including in their news media. The Carnegie
Endowment report on the Balkan Wars, described above, is an apt example.
Its report on the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of the war was made from the self-
proclaimed position of a neutral organization manned by international
lawyers from neutral countries, who professed they could adjudicate the
war because of their ‘impartial’ standpoint and their mutual respect for the
universal values of peace and justice embedded in international law. From
all these perspectives, neutrals considered themselves the peace-keepers of
the world.
Through the course of the First World War, this peace-making role came
under such intense strain that by late 1917, many contemporaries argued
that neutrality’s peace-keeping function had not only come to an end but
that an entirely new world order was needed. But what that new world
order might look like and how it might impact one’s own life were openly
contested. For in unravelling the many foundations of the nineteenth-
century world order, neutrality included, the 1914–18 war years inspired a
wide array of alternative political narratives.
2
Germany’s invasion of
Belgium and the expectations
of ‘civilized’ war
After Austria-Hungary went to war with Serbia on 28 July 1914, most

observers feared that the conflict might escalate and expand across the
European continent. Yet many of them also hoped that the situation could
and would be localized like so many European inter-state wars of the past.
As a result, governments within and outside Europe dutifully declared
their formal neutrality. They mobilized their armed forces and manned
their borders – as was required by international law – to defend against
a potential invasion and against any violations of territorial neutrality.
Although they were wary of Russia and Germany’s mobilizations, they
also anticipated that wiser heads would rule and that this Balkan conflict
might remain geostrategically contained. These expectations of restraint
and containment altered drastically on 2 August 1914, after the German
government issued an ultimatum to neighbouring Belgium requesting free
passage for its armies on their way to attacking France.1 The following
day, the Belgian Foreign Minister refused Germany’s demand. That night
(3–4 August 1914), the German armed forces enacted their Schlieffen Plan,
simultaneously invading neutral Belgium, Luxembourg and northern France
in an attempt to encircle the French capital, Paris.2 These German invasions
transformed the character of the European war in fundamental ways and
forced observers to acknowledge that this war was evolving into a rather
frightening new reality.
Germany’s act of aggression against Belgium shocked. Neutrality was
a relatively sacred concept in the international state system in large part
because it kept inter-state warfare geographically constrained and, with it,
neutrals’ security intact. Belgium’s neutrality was particularly important to
sustaining the European balance of power system.3 The country’s neutrality
was also guaranteed by all the European great powers. By invading neutral
Belgium, Germany not only dismissed the validity of the system’s stabilizing
features, it also violated the principles that underwrote the Anglo-European
international order.4 When reports subsequently circulated of German
soldiers engaging in indiscriminate reprisal killings of Belgian and French
civilians, global outrage followed.5 As many observers saw it, the Germans
had assaulted the principles of ‘civilized’ warfare in two fundamental ways:
firstly, by ignoring Belgium’s and Luxembourg’s rights as permanent neutrals
and, secondly, by flagrantly breaching the laws of war that regulated the
conduct of inter-state warfare and occupation.
Across the neutral world, Germany’s actions were condemned as barbaric
and its behaviour considered unworthy of a ‘civilized’ state. In Argentina,
an entire magazine dedicated itself to explaining los horrores (the horrors)
of the war in Belgium with references like ‘the shame of the German army’.6
Yet to the subjects of Germany’s colonial empire, the violence enacted by the
German soldiers in Belgium and France was less surprising.7 To many other
non-European communities subjected to the rule of an Anglo-European
empire, the violence was also unremarkable. They had been exposed to all
manner of atrocities in the name of ‘civilization’ for generations. Germany’s
‘transgressions’ in invading Belgium and northern France thus seemed to
bring the excesses of imperial violence back ‘home’ to the metropole. They
seemed to turn Belgium into a colony of Germany.
In Chapter 1, we highlighted some of the paradoxes of the nineteenth-
century international system, which created a world where warfare between
supposedly ‘civilized’ states was restricted and avoided where possible. At
the same time, this world of ‘civilized restraint’ also enabled all manner of
state violence against subject communities to take place. When Germany
invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and France in August 1914, then, it did
more than expand an inter-state war to a new military theatre in Europe. In
transgressing the accepted norms and laws of inter-state warfare, it blurred
the lines between acceptable and unacceptable forms of state violence. It
made inter-state warfare look like the unregulated forms of violence used
in ‘people’s wars’, like those that raged across the Balkan region in 1912
and 1913. It also made Germany look like an imperial power subjugating
a colonial people into submission, much like it had done in Africa and
elsewhere.
According to these nineteenth-century standards, Germany’s invasion
of Belgium, Luxembourg and France could not be considered a legitimate
act of inter-state warfare. As a result, the invasion signalled that whatever
the ensuing conflict would turn into, and whomever it would involve, it
would not be a war of restraint. As such, the invasion of Belgium in 1914
represented the first major transformation of the First World War, one that
altered pre-existing conceptions of warfare and state violence in important
ways.
As we will see in the next chapter, without this German act of war, Britain
may not have become a belligerent. Yet when the British government declared
war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the German Chancellor Bethmann-
GERMANY’S INVASION OF BELGIUM 1914 31
Hollweg exclaimed that he could not understand why. After all, the Treaty
of London of 1839 that guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality was merely a ‘scrap
of paper’. In response, the British Ambassador to Berlin, Edward Goschen,
explained that Britain was honour-bound to defend Belgium and uphold
the sanctity of its international agreements or else lose the good faith and
credit it enjoyed in the world.8 As the historian Isabel Hull shows, when
Goschen used the word ‘honour’ here he referred to ‘an amalgam of legal,
moral and security considerations’, but above all, he did so to assure the
world that the British government would uphold the systemic principles that
defined the established international system.9 Many in Germany, Bethmann-
Hollweg included, summarized Britain’s position as naked self-interest and
nothing to do with honour or morality. Yet even in this exchange, the two
governments vied for the upper hand in defining the international values at
stake in this war.
Germany’s breach of its neighbouring states’ neutrality, the subsequent
murder of civilians in Belgium and northern France and the destruction of
cultural heritage in these same regions posed powerful questions about the
nature of this new European war. The rest of this chapter reflects on the sense
of rupture occasioned by these acts of violence both locally and globally. For
in an ever-expanding world of war after 4 August 1914, Germany’s acts of
aggressive violence took up a special place, both in the experience of its
victims and within global public opinion. It certainly took up a considerable
amount of attention in Allied propaganda, where the German enemy
was consistently conceptualized as a barbaric brute unable to uphold the
standards of ‘civilization’ that were supposedly embedded in the rest of the
Anglo-European world.
Allied commentators often invoked the metaphor of rape, including its
sexualized, gendered and racial connotations. In these framings, ‘poor little
Belgium’ was typecast as either an innocent child or a brutalized woman.
Germany was represented as a barbarian, no better than any supposedly
‘uncivilized’ non-European. The trope also turned the violence committed
against civilians, including women and children, into an explanation as to
why they were at war with the Germans. In so doing, they could easily
portray themselves as defenders of ‘civilization’, of ‘hearth and home’ and
of the weak everywhere. The trope mobilized the gendered and racialized
inequities in operation in the pre-1914 international order to underscore the
righteousness of the Allied war cause.10 Furthermore, by asserting the just
nature of their war against this ‘barbaric’ enemy, the Allies also mobilized a
potent narrative to justify their own transgressions of international law as
the war progressed.
For neutral countries, which included much of the world in early
August 1914, the ‘rape of Belgium’ metaphor was also effective. It certainly
seemed to require a response. Embracing their roles as the ‘peacemakers’
and ‘humanitarians’ of the international system, neutral populations acted
accordingly. As ‘objective observers’, they looked to occupy what they
ILLUSTRATION 2.1 This popular recruitment poster, designed by Harry R.

Hopps in 1918, aimed to persuade Americans that the United States’ declaration
of war on Germany in 1917 was entirely justified since Germany was an ‘uncivi-
lized’ beast. Hopps included the iconic ruins of the Cloth Hall at Ypres in the
background of the poster to make sure there was no room for misunderstanding
that the United States was going to war because Germans had violated neutral
Belgium in 1914.
Source: Harry Hopps, ‘Destroy This Mad Brute’ poster, 1917, Library of Congress
Digital Collection, LC-DIG-ds-03216.
considered the moral high ground in the war. They asserted their right to
investigate any wartime atrocity – much like the Carnegie Endowment had
done in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 – and looked for opportunities
to alleviate the suffering of the war’s many victims, which in 1914 included
sending Red Cross and ambulance units to the war fronts and marshalling
charitable aid for Belgian refugees.11 In so doing, they mobilized as neutrals
to affect the course of the war and to determine which side had the moral
imperative to win. In general, Germany was demonized in the neutral press
for its military actions in western Europe. As a result, Germany found it
very hard to reclaim the ‘hearts and minds’ of neutrals, not least because
few neutral communities considered that the country was conducting a
legitimate inter-state war along the principles of the Hague conventions and
international law. To succeed in the war, then, many Germans pinned their
hopes on a quick and decisive victory.
Another way to read the transgressive nature of Germany’s invasion is
to remember that all states were formally neutral until their government
declared war or their borders were invaded. While they waited, they
mobilized their armed forces and guarded their borders. If they bordered
a powerful belligerent country like Germany, they waited under enormous
emotional stress. The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, for example, reported
on the Netherlands’ mobilization orders on 31 July 1914 with the comment,
‘humanity, and especially its female component, watched [the mobilized
soldiers], leave as if their path led them straight to the battlefield.’12 In
France, the news of mobilization on 1 August was met with markedly more
enthusiasm, in part because of the possibility that France might finally defeat
its German foes.13 Yet here too, many of the newly mobilized troops waited
for something to happen. As one soldier recalled in his diary:
Slow hours …. Everything before us looks vague and empty …. No one

is hurried. All feverishness is gone. I don’t think about the war anymore. I
feel again that wretched sadness of empty hours in the barracks. All these
men who don’t know each other, sitting there together, no one knows
why anymore, with their bundles wrapped in a colored kerchief. When
the quartermaster comes to talk to us about the war, I say to myself: Hey!
It’s true!14
Another, finding himself in a part of France he had never been before, noted:
‘we were given some beautiful apples. We gaze at the sea, which a lot of the
men have never seen.’15 All of these mobilized men anticipated an unknown
and frightening wartime future. Back home, their families also grappled
with this possibility. Anxiety ruled supreme.
Germany’s invasion on the night of 3–4 August broke this timorous
calm. It also registered as an emotive flash point. From this moment on,
the war in Europe had become so much more than a Balkan crisis. It now
involved millions of Europeans and destabilized the perceived security of
all of Europe’s remaining neutral countries. But what confronted the world
above all else was the news of Germany’s military actions against civilians
in Belgium and northern France. In their ground breaking study German
Atrocities: A History of Denial (2002), John Horne and Alan Kramer
meticulously reconstruct the violence perpetrated by the invading soldiers.16
About 5,500 civilians in Belgium and another 1,000 in northern France
were murdered in acts of military reprisal through the course of August
and September 1914. These actions spoke not only of the military violence
of a pre-modern European world, they also invoked images of the ongoing
colonial violence conducted by Europeans against non-Europeans, including
by the Belgians themselves in Belgian-controlled Congo.17
Horne and Kramer outline the character and development of the killings
in Belgium and France and contextualize them according to the expectations
of the German soldiers who committed the acts. These Germans anticipated
meeting a hostile and treacherous population, one that would resist their
occupation by any means be it by shooting at them from within their family
home, poisoning water supplies or mutilating their wounded comrades. They
expected a host of franc-tireurs (free shooters) like those that had plagued
their predecessors during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1).18 They also
expected Belgians to resist the occupation like the subject communities
in their empire. Despite the fact that there were clear laws of war that
applied to the occupation of an enemy state, which were communicated
to all involved, many German soldiers were filled with fear and rage as
they advanced through Belgium and northern France.19 In their fury, they
turned to the local population to exact revenge for illegal deeds that almost
certainly did not occur. There were no Belgian girls who gouged out the
eyes of German wounded. No wells were poisoned by locals and it would
have been a rare act of defiance if a farmer shot at an invading soldier. Yet
in response to the illegality of these imagined acts of civilian aggression, the
Germans committed equally illegal acts of military violence.
These soldiers’ desire for exacting revenge was also fuelled by an
expectation that they should be able to defeat the Belgians quickly and
easily. To avoid a two-front war developing with Russia in the east,
Germany needed a speedy victory in western Europe. If France fell quickly,
then Germany could concentrate fully on Russia. The ‘beast in the East’
was Germany’s greatest foe, after all. But because the German advance in
Belgium and France was slower than expected, it was easier to blame the
locals than the logistical nightmare of marching and fighting without a
break along an ever-widening arc towards Paris. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan
was logistically flawed.20
Instead, the Belgian and French populations bore the brunt of Germany’s
collective military frustrations. As Kaiser Wilhelm II angrily wrote in his
private notes on 9 August 1914:
the population of Belgium […] behaved in a diabolical, not to say bestial,

manner, not one iota better than the [Russian] Cossacks. They tormented
the wounded, beat them to death, killed doctors and medical orderlies,
fired secretly […] on men harmlessly standing in the street – in fact by
prearranged signal, under leadership […] The King of the Belgians has to
be notified at once that since his people have placed themselves outside
all observance of European customs – from the frontier on, in all the
villages, not only in Liège – they will be treated accordingly.21
His words reflect what was written in many German newspapers and ego-
documents of the time. While there were some Germans who did not believe
that Belgian and French civilians attacked their troops, they also considered
it understandable that they might want to defend their homes.22 For the
German soldiers involved, it was all too easy to see the civilians as the
enemy, even if the reprisal killings were much harder to rationalize. As one
of them recalled:
We were given order to kill all civilians shooting at us, but in reality the
men of my regiment and I myself fired at all civilians we found in the
houses from which we suspected there had been shots fired; in that way
we killed women and even children. We did not do it light heartedly, but
we had received orders from our superior officers to act this way, and
not one single soldier in the active army would know to disobey an order
from the senior command. My company did not kill more than about
thirty civilians in the conditions I have just described.23
Yet some of these soldiers were no strangers to exacting extreme violence

in the name of Germany. As Mary Fulbrook shows in her book Dissonant
Lives, violence travelled from empire back to metropole in surprising ways.
She cites the example of a captain serving in the Colonial Army in German
South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) who, on returning to Germany
before the outbreak of the First World War, readily wielded the same whip
he had used on Africans on his wife, children and servants. According to a
neighbour who recalled the incident in later life, the man ‘often told me how
good things were in Africa, because one could beat up the blacks … then in
1915 he was sent to Belgium’.24
As such, it is unsurprising to find some German military leaders
condemning all Belgians as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘barbarian’ and as a ‘lesser
race’. After all, Germany had a duty to ‘civilize’ and thus could assert their
‘right to rule’ as needed. Hans Weseler, the Commander of the German
Third Reserve Corps serving near the town of Leuven/Louvain in August
1914, explained this ‘right’ in a letter to his wife as follows: ‘I do not like
these [Belgian] people … they give one the impression of being a race
which has been kept down.’25 Beseler saw the Belgians as a kind of savage,
immature people who, if ‘treated with understanding’ would one day
‘come to trust us [the Germans]’.26 In Beseler’s view, Belgium required a
colonial-style occupation with a German civilizing mission operating at its
heart. Another German general, this one retired, responded to the stories of
Belgian franc-tireurs with the comment that such behaviour was common
to ‘the hordes of inferior races, and which will serve to strike this [Belgian]
people from the ranks of the civilized nations’. Consequently, ‘the Belgians
rank with the Herero well below the level of the Hottentots!’27 According
to the general, Germany had a right to crush the rebellion on colonial and
racial grounds.
Few people outside Germany saw the invasion in this way, and there
is some evidence to suggest that a number of Germans did not either.
For many of them, the images from the invasion of Belgium – of ravaged
towns and communities, of bombed libraries and cathedrals, of refugees
in uncountable numbers – were the first hellscapes of the First World War
they encountered in their newspapers and illustrated magazines. As the
British soldier-poet Rupert Brooke described it, the fall of Antwerp mid-
August 1914 was like ‘a Dantesque Hell, terrible’ followed by an even ‘a
truer Hell. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows
and hand carts and perambulators and waggons, moving with infinite
slowness into the night’.28 The Argentine lawyer, Juan P. Ramos, used
similar language when he described the war in August 1914 as barbarism
run amok:
People are killing each other, on all the seas and in all the lands; millions
of soldiers are simply out to kill or be killed; it’s raining fire and steel;
huge battle cruisers are sinking; cities are burning and fields are being
destroyed; everywhere there is murder, immolation, plunder, violence; the
only law calls for destruction and death; mankind has stepped aside for
the lecherous and savage gorilla.29
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Germany’s invasion of Belgium that

contemporaries returned to as familiar iconography to explain the war as it
evolved.30 It was also this invasion that determined the rights and wrongs of
the whole war in many neutrals’ eyes. They did so regardless of the fact that
equally awful acts of military violence existed in the war between the Serbs
and Austro-Hungarians and would soon be occurring in military theatres
across eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.31
When it came to making sense of this new war caused by Germany, many
neutrals turned to familiar tropes and looked for testimonial accounts.
Before 1914, such reports were furnished by newspaper correspondents or
self-proclaimed neutral ‘experts’ collecting evidence of atrocity and excess.
The 1896 Sassun report, for example, narrated the Ottoman empire’s
extermination of Armenians.32 The 1901 Hobhouse report investigated
British atrocities against Afrikaners in the Second Anglo-Boer War, while the
Carnegie Endowment became famous for its 1913 Balkan War accounts.33
When the British-led Bryce report appeared in 1915, fulsomely describing
Germany’s atrocities in Belgium, its contents thus made for familiar reading.34
Alongside a relentless stream of newspaper horror stories ‘straight from the

mouths’ of Belgian refugees, Germany could not escape the bad press.
In combination, the 1915 Bryce Report and these atrocity stories had an
enormous impact on how neutral populations considered the war and how
Allied propaganda portrayed Germany’s actions. It fuelled widespread anti-
German sentiment. Already in late August 1914, Swiss newspapers wrote
lengthy reports lauding the Belgian government’s official protestations to
the German government for the breaches of international law, neutrality
and humanity committed during the occupation.35 In the United States, the
Bryce report appeared around the time a German U-boat sunk the Lusitania
passenger liner and made a distinct impact on Americans’ readiness to
consider the war in Europe as an American concern.36 The Dutch sent their
own journalists to the war fronts and into occupied territory to obtain their
own ‘reliable’ news, reporting on many of the massacres soon after they
occurred.37 As the war lengthened, neutral reporters extended their gaze,
reporting on the excessive use of violence in other theatres of war as well,
including in Serbia and in the Ottoman empire.38 They also reported on
the use of illegal military weaponry, like dum-dum bullets.39 The German
authorities responded swiftly and fully to these assertions of wrong-doing.
They misdirected information, published their own ‘neutral’ newspapers,
disseminated doubt and asserted that the Belgian atrocity stories were
inventions and all part of a clever disinformation campaign orchestrated out
of France and Britain.40 In the aftermath of the war, this media effort was
remarkably effective. In 1914 and for many of the war years, these German
disinformation campaigns largely failed to impress.41
Nevertheless, even in the war’s early months, neutral observers were
particularly adamant that they needed to see the evidence of transgression for
themselves. They were particularly wary of the possibility of exaggerations
creeping into the reports written by the belligerents and prided themselves
on their supposed objectivity, which they described as a ‘genuinely neutral
stance’.42 As an example, the Amsterdam professor of international law
A.A.H. Struycken insisted Germany was innocent of any ‘wrong-doing’ until
proven guilty. That required a thorough and fair investigation, conducted
by an impartial neutral interlocuter.43 Only by upholding the standards of
international law, so Struycken argued, could the power of neutrality and
a stable post-war international order be effectively restored.44 From this
perspective, neutrals ought to remain the arbiters of peace and justice.45 The
British jurist, John Macdonell, echoed the sentiment:
True neutrality has not meant silent neutrality; silent in the presence of
offences against laws and usages, part of the common stock of civilisation.
Nor has it meant silenced neutrality; neutral Powers, dumb spectators,
because [they are] afraid to speak of momentous controversies ….
International law has its main origins in impulses proceeding from the
consciences of men. But its only effective sanction … is the public opinion,
the collective moral influence, of the world, the open disapprobation of

those who are impartial.46
As the war progressed, however, such expectations as Struycken and

Macdonell still possessed about the role of neutrals in 1914 and early 1915
increasingly faltered as the violence committed by belligerents on all sides
expanded and as their propaganda machines went into overdrive.47 While
Germany’s conduct was rarely considered virtuous or praiseworthy, the
moral high ground asserted by the Allies in 1914 also quickly disappeared.
Neutrals too were increasingly held accountable for the material support
they extended to the belligerents: were they little more than war profiteers?
Yet throughout the war, the idea of the ‘rape’ of Belgium underwrote
how most neutrals and Germany’s enemies considered the Central Powers’
war cause. Even though most of the victims in Belgium and France were
men, the representation of these events was purposely gendered to prioritize
the women. This is not to say there was no rape in Belgium and northern
France. Every war front experienced that barbarity. But it is hard to know the
true scale of gendered violence in part because the victims of sexual assault
rarely told their stories.48 When it came to the invasion of Belgium, however,
the power of the rape metaphor lay in the fact that it raised the levels of
outrage that could be exhibited by the predominantly male reporters who
narrated the crimes, and did so in the most lurid tones. As a result, the stories
provided a ‘narrative truth’ (as Horne and Kramer describe it) to explain the
rights and wrongs of the war as it evolved.49 The ‘truth’ was hard to escape
and ensured that voyeuristic tales of sexual assault committed by an army
of ‘Attilla the Huns’ against hapless and helpless victims were repeatedly
mobilized in Allied propaganda to heighten the sense of Germany’s
transgressions against ‘civilization’.50 As the historian Nicola Gullace shows,
these depictions provided ‘propagandists with a vivid and evocative set of
images that could be used to explain the arcane language of international
law to a democratic public increasingly empowered to support or reject its
enforcement’.51 It turned the clear breach of the rule of international law
by Germany into a real-life horror story, where the privileges supposedly
enjoyed by European women and children in the safe space of their homes
were brutally cast aside by an ‘uncivilized’ beastly force.
In this way, the rape metaphor also reasserted the traditional patriarchal
order of war. Men fought for women, both to conquer them and to protect
them from conquest.52 Even in neutral China, commentators framed the war
as a reflection of European civilization in general. Western states were militant
in nature, as the journalist Chen Duxiu explained, and militancy implied
men conquering women.53 Such gendered representations also impacted
women’s ongoing roles within occupied societies. As Susan Grayzel points
out, at a certain level, women were considered a national liability because of
their vulnerability to rape and ‘infection with the bacteria of sin’ forced on
them by enemy soldiers.54 This influenced how women living in the occupied
territories of France and Belgium were seen during and especially after the
war since a degree of distrust always circulated around them about possible
(consensual or forced) sexual relations with the occupier.
The gendered and racialized nature of the commentary around the rape
metaphor was particularly important because it typecast wartime behaviour
in terms of the supposed ethno-racial characteristics of a nation or community.
The German version categorized Belgians much as it did Poles and Slavs
as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘un-European’.55 Germany’s enemies did the same with
their depictions of Germany’s reprisal killings and rape stories: the German
Huns were inhuman beasts, no better than any non-white and ‘uncivilized’
people. In both cases, such representations helped to essentialize the nature
of the war and who was fighting it. The war was no longer an ordinary inter-
state conflict, but a war pitting cultures, ‘civilizations’ and, thus, essential
values against each other, a war of eschatological proportions.56
Typecasting the enemy as the ‘barbarian’ also offered a handy rationale to
justify one’s own breaches of the law of war. If the enemy was not ‘civilized’,
it did not need to be dealt to with restraint. In the process, these depictions
essentialized the ethnic and cultural identities of the various belligerents
and made race a powerful lens through which the conduct of the war was
considered. For Catholic communities in neutral Latin America, for example,
the German Teuton race not only threatened Belgium (a small neutral
country, ‘like them’) but also risked the long-term survival of European
civilization itself. Accordingly, the Columbian writer Santiago Perez Triana
argued in 1915 that no Spanish American could be ‘pro-German’.57
The responses to the German invasion of Belgium deserve close attention.
For Dutch soldiers mobilized along the neutral Netherlands-Belgian border,
the horror of the German-Belgian war was all too real. Not only could they
hear and feel the thunder of artillery shells hitting nearby towns, they could
see the German armies pass by the frontier. Along with several journalists,
medics and a number of curious adventurists, some of them breached the
security of their own neutral zone to bring wounded soldiers back with them
and offer shelter to Belgian refugees. They also wondered fearfully about the
future of the world and the safety of their own homes.58 In response, the
Dutch government declared a ‘state of siege’ in the country’s border regions,
placing border municipalities under military control and surveillance. They
enacted laws to limit the movement of people and goods, brought in curfews
for the population and identified strangers as potential foreign spies.59
For Belgians, the reality of warfare was even more horrifying. Alongside
the dangers of the military occupation, Belgium’s non-Belgian-born residents
also had to consider their immediate futures. How should Belgians treat a
German neighbour, married to a British man, living in a Flemish town with
Belgian-born sons? The diary of Constance Graeffe offers incredible insights
into the impact the German invasion had on cosmopolitan communities
across the country.60 After 4 August 1914, a person’s national and racial
identity largely determined how they were treated by others, including by
their neighbours and the occupation authorities. Race and nationality would
continue to have an enormous impact on the evolving violence of the war
within civilian and military spaces within and outside Europe. In Chapter 5
we explore this civilian face of war in greater detail.
For Belgians, news and rumours about the executions and the destruction
of villages also sparked tremendous upheaval. Reliable news was, of course,
scarce. When Liège fell in mid-August and as the German troops marched
towards the major cities of Brussels and Antwerp, burning the historical
city and famous library of Louvain on the way, an exodus of refugees made
its way southwards into France and northwards into the Netherlands. By
October, almost a million Belgians had fled across the northern border,
increasing the population of the Netherlands by a sixth. Another 500,000
Belgians arrived in France and from there many reached Britain.61
This desperate face of humanity inspired an extraordinary humanitarian
relief effort in their host communities.62 And as the neutral world read this
news, they responded with extraordinary acts of charity aimed at alleviating
the suffering of this ‘unjust’ war waged against these ‘poor Belgians’.63 Even
though the First World War would displace tens of millions of people in
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (including more than six million subjects
of the Russian empire), these Belgian refugees transfixed the charitable
responses of much of the neutral world until the armistice of 11 November
1918.64
The news stories from Belgium in August 1914 confronted readers in
every sense. They provided a powerful rationale for Britain going to war.
When Italy joined the war on the side of the Allies in 1915, Italians too
were urged to rally behind the war cause by posters emblazoned with the
warning: ‘Italians! The horrors of Belgium and France are being repeated in
invaded Veneto!’65 Similar references were made in the United States when it
declared war on Germany in 1917 (see Illustration 2.1).
Even among non-European communities across the British empire,
Belgium’s fate provided a reason to support the war against Germany. An
anonymous poet in The Times (London) published his ‘Thoughts of an
Indian Soldier’ in September 1914 with the lines:
The foes are not sahibs

They break the word they plight
On babes their blades are whetted
Dead women know their might.66
In New Zealand, members of the Ngati Porou iwi (tribe) assembled on 3

October 1914 to declare their collective ‘appreciation of the gallant efforts
of the Belgians to repel the invader’.67 They honoured a large Belgian flag,
which they hoisted underneath the British ensign. One rangatira (chief)
even explained how the paternalistic ‘duty of care’ extended by the British
government over New Zealand now also extended over the Belgian people.
In recognition, at least as the English-language Poverty Bay Herald recounted

the event, ‘The Maoris [sic.] were met to honour the flag of the Belgians, a
people who had raised one of the hurdles over which the enemy would
have to jump before New Zealand could be reached … The meeting ended
with solid cheering for the British and the Belgians, and cordial salutes for
the allied flags.’68 In this way, the horrors encountered by Belgian families
crossed imaginative thresholds around the world and offered an identifiable
and familiar cause to fight for. In the case of Ngati Porou, it offered a clear
route to support the British empire in a just war against a clearly identifiable
moral and imperial enemy.69
It is highly significant then that as the war expanded globally after 4
July 1914, the trope of ‘civilization’ continued to dominate many local and
imperial justifications for the war. Non-European communities also utilized
it, at times to justify their support of their own metropole’s war against the
Germans and at other times as a critique of their empire’s own wartime
activities. For Kuki communities living on the contested frontiers of the
British empire in north-eastern India, for example, news of the war in Europe
filtered through even to the ‘most sleepy hill villages’ who were as ‘thirsty
of information about the war’ as anyone else.70 Their understanding of the
‘strange weapons of destruction’ and the actions of the German ‘archrival’
ensured that few were willing to be recruited into British labour corps for
service in Europe when officials called for volunteers. In their words, they
‘preferred to die in their own country’.71 The Kuki’s militant resistance to
the British empire in 1917 illustrates one way in which local resistance to
empire became fully integrated into a world of total war.
For its part, the German government readily critiqued Britain and France
for breaching the laws of war by mobilizing non-white (‘uncivilized’)
soldiers against them, firstly in Africa and the Middle East then in Europe,
suggesting that they (as opposed to the Germans) were in violation of the
standards of ‘civilized’ warfare. On 2 September 1914, Bethmann-Hollweg
even attacked the British for employing non-white soldiers and damaging
the racial integrity of Europe.72 In response, the British invoked Germany’s
genocidal activities against the Nama and Herero peoples in South-West
Africa (present-day Namibia) in 1904–5 to further underline Germany’s
lack of restraint and inherent ‘barbarism’.
When the British forces stationed in South Africa defeated their German
equivalents in German South-West Africa in 1915, the new imperial
authorities decided to collect evidence of Germany’s brutal repression of
the Herero and Nama uprising in 1904. The revolt came in response to
clear breaches by German colonists of the Damaraland Concession of 1892,
which guaranteed the Nama and Herero communities rights to land and
resources. In response, the colonial authorities decimated these communities
in what can only be called a genocidal campaign that resulted in a 45 to 50
per cent death toll.73 By invoking the outrage of the invasion of Belgium and
linking it to outrages committed by Germans against the Herero and Nama,
the British hoped to strongly underline how truly ‘uncivilized’ the German
state actually was.
What came to be known as the 1918 Blue Book Report on the Natives of
South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany remains an important
eye-witness account of the 1904–5 genocide. Like the 1915 White Book
on Belgium, the 1918 Blue Book offered a gruelling and often voyeuristic
read for contemporaries. In keeping with the long tradition of ‘impartial’ or
‘neutral’ accounts noted above, it marshalled the testimonies of witnesses
(Herero, Nama and local colonists) to make its case. The theme of
‘civilization’ appeared regularly throughout, including in claims from the
indigenous Africans that they were more ‘civilized’ than the Germans. In the
words of Chief Daniel Kariko:
We decided that we should wage war in a humane manner and would kill
only the German men who were soldiers, or who would become soldiers.
We met at secret councils and there our chiefs decided that we should
spare the lives of all German women and children. The missionaries, too,
were to be spared, and they, their wives and families and possessions were
to be protected by our people from all harm. We also decided to protect
all British and Dutch farmers and settlers and their wives and children
and property as they had always been good to us. Only German males
were regarded as our enemies, and then not young boys who could not
fight these also we spared: We gave the Germans and all others notice
that we had declared war.74
This testimony spoke to a set of norms that were familiar to the text’s target
audience: that the rules of war required the protection of civilians, of women
and children. Ergo, Germans were even less civilized than these indigenous
Africans.75
It is worth noting that in the aftermath of the war, both the 1918 Blue Book
and the 1915 White Book were dismissed as products of malignant British
propaganda against Germany. Obviating the content of the books helped
to improve Anglo-German relations in the 1920s and offered South African
and British authorities a ‘clean slate’ to reassert their imperial authority in
the Namibian region. It certainly reasserted a sense of the superiority of
‘white’ civilization writ large. In so doing, the very real suffering endured
by the Herero and Nama in 1904–5 as well as by the Belgians in 1914 was
largely silenced.76 Yet during the war, both of these cases of state violence
helped to underwrite a global discourse around the values at stake in what
many considered a war of ‘civilization’. In so many ways, then, the German
invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France in August 1914 set the tone
for an unprecedented new scale of war which, as the next chapter shows,
would soon encompass much of the world.
3
Short-war ambitions: The
global importance of Britain’s
declaration of war
While the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France was

perceived as conceptually transgressive around the belligerent and neutral
world, it was Britain’s subsequent declaration of war on 4 August 1914 that
globalized the conflict. Britain’s declaration ensured that few communities
could avoid the question: ‘what now?’ Their governments had to make
vital decisions about their country’s future as either a neutral or belligerent
in a global war in which the security of the seas and the stability of the
international economy were no longer prima facie protected or safe. As
news of Britain’s war declaration spread on 5 August 1914 and economic
uncertainty surged, many also recognized that the key precepts of the
nineteenth-century international system – open seas, limited warfare and
diplomatic restraint – were imploding. The war was transforming into a
global reality that left few communities unaffected.
Britain’s entry into the war registered as a decisive shift at all levels
of experience. On 7 August, for example, the Colombian newspaper La
Linterna described the expansion of warfare as a ‘horrendous catastrophe …
that can only end with the definitive destruction of Europe, or perhaps the
total ruin of the old western civilization.’ By 20 August it was clear that the
war could not be contained within Europe. La Linterna registered this shift
and its potential impact as follows: ‘we are on the eve of a terrible economic
crisis that can only have the most fatal results’.1 What might happen next,
however, remained unclear: the fog of war emitted a haze of unpredictability.
What did happen next was a violent reshaping of the global economy and
the world of war.
Over the course of the next few months, as a military stalemate developed
between the European belligerents, what was a short-war ambition turned
into a long-war reality. While most contemporaries clung on to the hope
ILLUSTRATION 3.1 The fear of the outbreak of war’s economic impact on

the Latin American republic of Argentina is clear from this stark magazine cover
published on 5 September 1914. The Buenos Aires’ Caras y Caratas editors chose the
symbolic representation of the ‘sword of damocles’ (in this case, scissors that might
‘cut’ the economy) to remind its readers of the war’s potentially devastating impact
on Argentina. Such fears were replicated around the neutral world.
Source: Caras y Caratas 5 September 1914, Buenos Aires, front page.
BRITAIN’S DECLARATION OF WAR 1914 45
that the war would come to a speedy conclusion, the fact that the world’s
foremost economic and naval power was now at war effectively ensured
that the war ‘would not be over by Christmas’. This chapter shows how
Britain’s shift to belligerency opened up a gamut of new challenges for states
and communities around the world. It explains how the war globalized after
4 August 1914, drawing in ever more belligerents.
The British government faced a stark choice when Germany went to war
with France and Russia: either join the war and help its Entente partners or
remain neutral and hope that the war in Europe did not alter the geostrategic
environment too radically. As many in the British Liberal Party understood,
British neutrality would in all likelihood keep the war contained in Europe
and thus keep the seas open for commerce (a vital British interest). It
would enable an agreement to be reached to keep the French and German
colonies from fighting each other as well. A European war without Britain
might be containable. It might even be highly profitable. But, as the British
Conservatives argued, a war in Europe in which Britain stayed neutral might
also lead to a German victory. In the end, the British cabinet chose war on
4 August 1914 to avoid the possibility of a German hegemon appearing in
Europe. Before the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France,
a considerable number of ministers threatened to tender their resignations
if Britain went to war to defend France. After the invasion on the night of
3–4 August, only two held to that threat. The others were now convinced
that a continental war involving Germany was too great a menace to British
interests.2 From this perspective, Britain’s belligerency was imperative and
focused entirely on containing German power, although it certainly helped
that the German invasion also transgressed some powerful public norms
about war.
The rather ill-conceived desire for a short war that could quickly remove
the German invaders out of France and Belgium was paramount for these
politicians. In their public rhetoric, they certainly expressed their faith that
the war ‘would be over by Christmas’. Of course, the possibility that the
conflict might evolve into a long and protracted affair was a risk they willingly
took, much as the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian leaderships had
also done in the preceding days. Still, while these men might have imagined
the prospect of an all-out war between Europe’s industrial powers, at heart,
they also expected that the war would not radicalize in that way.3 None
of the governments that went to war in July and early August 1914 were
eager to engage in a drawn-out conflagration. None of them had planned
for such a scenario. No strategic plans even existed for warfare between the
imperial rivals in Africa, for example.4 Instead they pinned their short-war
ambitions to a small number of decisive military victories in Europe. Ideally,
the continental war would last a matter of weeks, at most a few months.5
For Britons, the war declaration presented as a major break with the
past. For almost a century, Britain dominated the international system as
the world’s super power. Its repeated use of neutrality and its overwhelming
naval strength sustained the peace of the seas, helped to grow a globally
interconnected capitalist economy and facilitated the expansion of an
enormous global empire. By and large, Britons were proud of these
successes. They also understood that the Pax Britannica protected the
wealth and power of their global banking system and London’s money
markets.6 Many of London’s bankers and economists pushed for the
empire’s ongoing neutrality in July and early August 1914 and, in so doing,
joined a vocal pro-neutrality faction.7 When the country declared war on
4 August, however, support for king and empire became the norm among
all but the most ardent British pacifists. The invasion of Belgium helped to
sell this new norm.
Britain’s century of neutrality between 1815 and 1914 had enabled its
empire to bourgeon. By 1900, the British crown ruled more than 446 million
subjects.8 On the night of 4 August 1914, all 446 million plus officially went
to war. So too did the Royal Navy. And because the British empire went
to war, so did the outposts of the French and German empires, drawing
in several million more imperial subjects formally into the war. As of 4
August 1914, the world’s seas and oceans became potential warzones too. If
Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium concerned neutrals on a conceptual
level, Britain’s declaration of war sent the global economy into a tail spin,
taking almost everyone along with it. After 4 August 1914, the entire world
economy was at war.
Altogether then, Britain’s entry into the war presented the world with a
profoundly transformative reality. At one level, they were all confronted with
the impact of the global economic crisis occasioned by Britain’s decision.
How to manage that crisis was their most immediate concern. At another
level, they were also confronted with the prospect that new military fronts
might open up in Africa and the Asia-Pacific as enemy colonies mobilized
their imperial forces against each other. In these ways, by merely going to
war, Britain helped to ensure that this war could not remain a short-lived
event. Yet in the heady early days and weeks of the war, most contemporaries
couched their expectations of what would happen next in terms of what
they hoped would happen, namely that the war would be quickly won
by one or other side. In this way, while their warmongering language was
also couched in terms of defending empires and ‘civilization’, a short-war
ambition underwrote most of their desires and hopes for the future.
How essential the impact of Britain’s war declaration was as a globally
transformative moment is ably illustrated by Kathryn Meyer’s engaging
history of the Chinese treaty port of Shanghai.9 In 1914, Shanghai was a
‘city of strangers’, a key international port of trade and commerce that
thrived in the nineteenth-century age of open seas and open commerce.10
Both Britain and the United States had acquired official concessions from
China to run parts of the port, while the city’s administration was split
between various local, imperial Chinese and foreign interests. Wealthy
merchant families largely ran Shanghai, but the transnational Chamber of
Commerce that represented the various mercantile, industrial and banking

interests in the city also wielded a considerable amount of power. With
Britain’s declaration of war this transnational commercial zone could no
longer sustain its networks of interdependence.
The war hit locals and foreigners alike hard and fast. Firstly, British and
German ships left the port, escaping to the safer havens of Weihaiwei (a
British concession) and Tsingtao (a German concession). All other ships
delayed their departure. Most of them were unsure of global shipping
conditions or unable to acquire affordable maritime insurance. They
feared seizure by a belligerent and were uncertain of the security of their
destinations and of the economic stability of any markets for their wares.
Almost no new ships arrived in port for weeks. Unemployment skyrocketed.
Because there were no ships, labourers were not needed to unload them.
The local silk and tea industries came to a standstill as there were no foreign
buyers for these luxury items. Stock piled up in the port. Inflation hit on
imported goods but also on staples like rice. Money became scarce, gold
and silver prices shot up and gold shops closed. International business came
to a standstill. The Shanghai stock market shut down and never reopened.
Shanghai’s telegraph stations refused to transmit coded messages to protect
China’s official neutrality declared on 6 August. The transnational Chamber
of Commerce, including its neutral Chinese, Japanese and American and
belligerent British, French and German representatives, met to discuss
suitable and cooperative solutions on 8 August. Their negotiations failed
and the Chamber dissolved.11
Everyone in Shanghai hoped for a short war. They recognized a short-
term economic crisis as manageable; a long-term one was not. Only in early
1915, as the short-war illusion dissipated, did the formally neutral port of
Shanghai entrench its commercial activities along belligerent lines. By late
1915, the British and Americans set up their own nation-specific Chambers
of Commerce. Germans in Shanghai could no longer bank with British firms
or purchase insurance from them. Joint stock companies wound up their
business.12 Over the ensuing war years, the Japanese and American presence
in Shanghai increased and China asserted more sovereign and economic
power over the future of the port, in part ennobled by a ‘new and patriotic
language of trade’. Like many other non-European and neutral societies,
China gained economically from supplying the war needs of the European
belligerents and from the removal of foreign competitors in its own regional
economy. All of these opportunities only became apparent, however, once
the long-war reality set in.13
Shanghai’s story was replicated all around the world.14 In Europe,
stock market jitters first appeared with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum
to Serbia on 23 July and entrenched when it declared war on 28 July. By
1 August, most European stock markets were closed. So was Wall Street.
Tokyo followed suit. Panic ensued. As the middle classes around the world
recognized the financial dangers of a global war, they attempted to empty
their bank accounts. Gold, silver and copper disappeared from circulation
as everyone hoarded what were acknowledged as more valuable species of
exchange. Governments closed their treasuries and banks shut their doors,
fearing depletion of their reserves.15 Emergency paper money was issued
to cover basic transactions, often for the smallest denominations. The aim
was to avoid economic collapse and disaffection among populations. Prices
soared while markets and shops emptied of wares. There was no clarity on
when new supplies would arrive. Nervousness and anxiety permeated the
globe. For example, in Peru’s isolated Canete valley, a three- or four-day
horseback journey from Lima, the prefect called an emergency meeting of
local merchants on 10 August aimed at avoiding food shortages and rioting.
Meanwhile, in the Peruvian cities, banks and factories closed, unemployment
spread and food prices mounted.16
Britain’s war declaration and the general war situation in Europe in
August 1914 had a schismatic impact on global trade and, thus, on local
economic and social realities. As ports lay idle, crops around the world
rotted away. The agricultural economies in Latin America, Asia and Africa
had trouble recovering from the loss of a stable European market. The
impact was particularly heavy for luxury crops, like coffee, tea, silk and
even ‘exotic’ feathers.17 These export industries did not recover during the
war as the warring states prioritized shipping of essential goods. But even
Chile’s nitrate crops, which sustained the country’s economy and were an
essential war material, could not reach manufacturing plants in Europe in
August 1914. This caused immense economic suffering for Chileans.18 The
Japanese government, for its part, felt compelled to subsidize the local silk
industry for the loss of its profits.19 Cotton farmers in the southern United
States would recoup their 1914 losses once trade with Britain, France and
the European neutrals could reasonably resume but in August 1914 they
were only fearful of a complete collapse of their industry.20
Shanghai’s cotton weavers sourced new cotton supplies from the Chinese
mainland in 1915, illustrating how enterprising individuals could and did
profit from the changing economic landscape of war.21 In August 1914, as
African cash crops accumulated on docks, locals outed their frustrations
by rioting and looting. As an example, social unrest permeated British-
controlled Nigeria once it became clear that palm oil and palm kernels could
no longer be traded with their main pre-war markets in Germany.22 Colonial
authorities across the continent were duly concerned. But given that imports
of European manufactured goods also ground to a halt– a more permanent
development – long-term inflationary pressures were guaranteed. Although
they could not know this at the time, this war for resources would only
radicalize after 1914, accentuating the strains on workers and their families
alike. In referencing these economic impacts, Marxists felt justified in
asserting that the global war was a tragedy for the world’s working classes,
who were exploited as soldiers and labourers to sustain a capitalist world
at war.23
In the long term, the ability of a local or regional economy to recover

from the initial economic shock occasioned on 4–5 August 1914 depended
in large part on its ongoing role in the war, its proximity to ‘safe’ trade
routes and distance from military theatres on land and sea. It also depended
on whether its society remained neutral or became a belligerent. As a ‘long-
war reality’ dawned in December 1914 (as the next chapter shows), the
expansion of the belligerents’ economic warfare tactics ensured that all
these economies and communities were subsumed as economic agents in
the wider world of war. Very few escaped the impact of global industrial
warfare.
But in August 1914, global anxiety was fed in part by the realization that
the free-trade and open-seas principles of the past had ended. For one, enemy
belligerents could no longer trade with each other, a particularly disruptive
realization given that Germany was Britain’s second biggest export market
and London’s banks financed much of Germany’s mercantile trade.24 In turn,
Germany blockaded Russia’s Baltic ports, hampering Russia’s access to the
open seas and its economic security.25 For the neutral world, Britain’s entry
into the war also ended any certainty about the ongoing legitimacy and
security of their rights as neutrals to open and free trade. What measures
would the belligerents impose on neutral trade with the enemy? Would
they adopt the terms of the 1909 Declaration of London, which Britain
had refused to ratify in 1911, but which offered broad guarantees for
neutral trade? What kind of contraband declarations would the belligerents
impose? How would they conduct their military campaigns against each
other’s shipping? Were German ports in Europe and around the German
colonies still open to neutral ships? How would such shipping be protected
or insurable? What would happen when neutral ships were sunk by military
action? Would the conduct of maritime warfare risk neutrality and turn
neutrals into belligerents?
These questions were urgent in a way that they had not been in the wars
of the previous century. At no time between 1815 and 1914 were there
so many great power belligerents or so many powerful navies at war with
each other. While the rights and expectations of neutrals were more clearly
defined by international law in 1914 than ever before, the changing ratio
of neutrals-to-belligerents expanded the uncertainty. For only the United
States, the Ottoman empire and Japan were left as neutral great powers on
5 August. Of the three, only the United States would remain a neutral great
power by the end of the year. In this light, Germany’s invasion of neutral
Belgium signalled further uncertainty for the security of the world’s many
smaller and weaker neutral states and their imperial outposts.
The British government had not planned effectively for the possibility of
a general European war, let alone a global economic war. From 4 August
on, it improvised a range of economic policies focused on reassuring its
own people, banks, insurance companies and merchants that their economic
futures were secure.26 Thus, even before its declaration of war (at 11 pm
on 4 August), the British government established a State Insurance office

to prevent a collapse of global shipping (or rather of global shipping that
advantaged British interests). The office opened its doors the following day.
Effectively, such policies were the British government’s way of announcing
that the seas remained ‘open for business’ for all bar its enemies. The
government also (rather controversially) agreed to abide by the Declaration
of London in line with its allies France and Russia, thereby fully embracing
a short-war plan and reassuring the world’s neutrals that their long-term
economic security was safe.
Still, the London banks also refused to issue any international credit,
called in international loans and rethought their peacetime insurance
policies. The impact was felt around the world. Many ships stayed in port,
and the recall of loans and investments made an immediate impression on
the struggling investment economies in Africa, the Middle East and Latin
America.27 As Britain also declared all-out warfare on German and Austro-
Hungarian trade, blockading Germany’s ports from afar and seizing all
merchant vessels flying a German or Austro-Hungarian flag, the German
merchant marine disappeared from the world’s oceans within days. Most of
it would eventually be reflagged by enterprising neutral companies.28
The German leadership, for its part, had planned more effectively for a
war with Britain, even if it had not expected the British to go to war. While
Germany’s armies invaded neutral Belgium, it avoided an invasion of its other
western neutral neighbour, the Netherlands, in order to maximize its access
to the substantial Dutch network of global trade. The Netherlands and the
other border neutrals in Scandinavia and Switzerland would offer Germany
an economic ‘windpipe’ through which it could breathe, as General von
Moltke planned when he revised the Schlieffen Plan in 1909.29 Throughout
the war, these same border neutrals were considered the bane of the Allied
blockade. But on 4–5 August 1914, these neutrals were as economically and
psychologically distressed as the rest of the world.
For Germans and Austro-Hungarians, the British-French actions of early
August 1914 made the necessity of a short war all too pressing. That sense
of urgency was heightened when British troops disconnected the German
telegraph cable laid across the Atlantic Ocean on 4 August and disassembled
German telegraph stations in Samoa, New Guinea, and German East and
West Africa over the coming weeks, severing the communication networks
between the German metropole and its imperial outposts.30 The Central
Powers, then, pinned their hopes on the successful implementation of the
Schlieffen Plan in western Europe, the defeat of Serbia by Austria-Hungary
and a slow mobilization of Russian forces in the east. All three plans proved
unrealized by December, but in the opening weeks of war their potential
fulfilment underwrote German and Austro-Hungarian ambitions.
The cutting of telegraph cables, however, illustrates another
fundamental transformative impact of Britain’s war declaration. Where
until 4 August 1914, the world’s waterways were highways of relatively
open communication, trade and exchange aided by the expectation that

ships and cables should be able to cross those waters unencumbered, after
4 August the security of these same communication routes ended. Not
only did the ownership of the cables determine which ones continued to
function, it also determined what kind of information could circulate on
them. To protect the territorial integrity of neutral states, for example,
telegraph stations in neutral territories were instructed to refuse enciphered
messages as they might contain military sensitive information that
favoured one belligerent over another. Coded business transactions that
passed across neutral and belligerent networks thus became beleaguered.
The German-controlled cables no longer worked. Trade and investment
relationships around the world faltered in turn, while clandestine use
of neutral telegraphic networks became a major issue for neutral and
belligerent governments alike.31
Mercantile and passenger shipping companies also had to consider the
dangers of maritime warfare. As the British, French, Russian and German
navies were now at war, the seas around Europe and the belligerent colonies
became militarized. How to protect passengers and cargo, and thus profits,
preoccupied business leaders in belligerent and neutral countries alike. It
was not only a question of who could trade with whom and what could
be carried on board neutral and belligerent ships but also which shipping
routes and ports were safe from attack, blockade and interference. Access
into and out of Europe’s port cities was now precarious, which had the
dual effect of making trade with Britain and Europe more lucrative (as
prices would inevitably rise there) and less predictable. After August 1914,
then, great profits could be garnered but almost always only at great risk.
The economic, social and political reverberations of these consequences
impacted the whole world, not least when the great power belligerents
stepped up their economic warfare measures after December 1914 and
coopted neutrals in the process.
But in August 1914, the economic situation was already dire. It heightened
further as the British and French navies blockaded access to the North Sea
and Channel and patrolled the Mediterranean, and as the German navy
mined the entrance of the Baltic Sea and kept the Russian navy in its northern
ports. The battle of Heligoland Bight fought on 28 August between the
British and German navies highlighted the dangers of navigating Europe’s
seas. That all the world’s oceans had become highways of warfare became
all too evident when the Royal Navy bombed German telegraph stations
in Dar-es-Salaam and Tanga in August, and as German raiders sunk enemy
merchant ships in the Pacific Ocean, Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas,
around the African continent (including on Lake Tanganyika) and along the
Atlantic coast of Latin America.32 It was made even more obvious to neutral
newspaper readers when on 22 September, two German cruisers bombed the
Tahitian port of Papeete, devastating the town and killing two residents.33
Beyond the seas, Europe’s colonial empires also went to war on 5 August.
This too was a radical development. Most nineteenth-century wars between
ILLUSTRATION 3.2 On 22 September 1914, the German armoured cruisers SMS

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau bombed the Pacific port-town of Papeete in French-controlled
Tahiti, sinking the French gunboat Zélée and freighter Walkure, damaging the town’s
fortifications and defences and killing two residents. The local authorities had already
destroyed the town’s stockpile of coal to prevent its capture by the German ships.
Source: Le Miroir, 6 December 1914, Wikipedia.org.
the European states purposely avoided spill-over into their colonial empires.
Wars in Europe were almost always kept separate from colonial warfare
(another feature of the Anglo-European ‘limited war’ ethos). If Britain had
stayed neutral in Germany and Austria-Hungary’s war with Russia, Belgium
and France in 1914, the neutrality of the British empire would in all likelihood
have prevented conflict between the German, Belgian and French imperial
outposts. The principles of the 1885 Treaty of Berlin would probably have
applied. Certainly, a neutral Britain could have made a very strong case that
a war in Europe did not need to extend into the extra-European world.
But as a belligerent, the British empire was too formidable not to take
war to its much weaker German imperial rival. The opportunity to eradicate
and acquire the German empire presented an enticing opportunity for the
British and French governments, upon which they quickly capitalized.34 New
Zealand soldiers were asked to invade the islands of German Samoa, which
they successfully completed on 29 August, without loss of life. An Australian
force acquired German New Guinea on 11 September.35 In Africa, German
Togoland fell on 26 August to a combined French-British force. Cameroon’s
German ports were occupied in September, while German South-West Africa
was invaded by South Africans that same month too. It submitted to British
control in the middle of 1915.36
The African continent remained at war until 1918, costing millions
of people their lives and livelihoods, particularly in south-east Africa.
The military campaigns pitting the largely African army of the German
Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck against British- and (later)
Portuguese-led forces decimated local communities in a prolonged war
of attrition. Central Africa too sustained long-term military campaigns
between Belgian and German forces, with decisive impact on locals.
Most of the communities affected by these military actions experienced
them as extensions of European imperialism: their lives continued to
be interrupted by Europeans in highly violent ways. Yet, as we will see
in Chapter 6, these conflicts also brought about opportunities for local
agency and resistance.
The net result of Britain’s war declaration was that hundreds of millions
of people across the world came to experience warfare in very direct and
immediate ways. In the space it took the earth to make one full turn on
its axis, warfare had become a global reality. The mobilization of armies
and navies unsettled the normal state of affairs in neutral and belligerent
communities alike. P.H. Ritter described the impact of the Netherlands’
mobilization declaration on one Dutch town:
Such a deadly silence hung around the packed-together crowd that one
could hear the birds chirping in the gardens behind the houses. When it
was announced that fifteen military intakes of conscripts would be called
up, a breath of dismay, like a sudden wind surge, spread through the
crowd. One woman fell unconscious. Other women started to cry silently,
and buzzing and stumbling the crowd parted into the small streets where
their dull footsteps echoed from the walls of the houses, which absorbed
an unrest never known before.37
Ritter’s description bears and eerie resemblance to a diary entry of a Shi’ite

cleric in the southern Lebanese village of Nabatiyya on 3 August when the
(still neutral) Ottoman empire declared its general mobilization:
The people were deeply troubled and agitated …. They gathered in small
groups in public spaces, astonished and bewildered, as if confronting
the Day of Judgement. Some wanted to flee – but where could they go?
Others wanted to escape, but there was no way out.38
Meanwhile in eastern Africa, as Michelle Moyd shows, the war arrived first
‘as a rumour’. She narrates how:
Mzee Ali … recalled how he first heard in late 1914 of the ‘great and
terrible war’ … : From the talk around the campfires we knew this was
to be no ordinary war. … We knew from the gravity of the discussions
that this war would come to our land and that only then would we fully
comprehend its nature.39
In Europe, Africa and the Middle East, more than 18 million men took up
arms in late July and early August 1914. Millions more volunteered for
military service over the coming months; others were forcibly conscripted.
Aside from the emotional shock mobilization engendered in these families
and communities, let alone the cataclysm of violence many of them would
soon experience, the removal of so many men from the civilian workforce
had a decisive impact. It also militarized familial and communal settings.
Uniforms and military declarations dominated civilian life in many
communities after August 1914.
The white British Dominions were particularly enthusiastic in mobilizing
for the war. While Ireland and South Africa posed some issues, not least
when a group of opportunistic Afrikaners under leadership of Niklaas
‘Siener’ van Rensberg attempted to take over the government (a rebellion
that was quickly repressed by the local authorities), even here the call for
a war against ‘barbaric’ Germany was well supported.40 Among non-white
subjects of the British and French empires, the mobilization for war was
generally received with more circumspection but also with recognition that
the war offered opportunities to advance a range of political ambitions, be
they in support of or against the Anglo-European imperial authorities.
Some Maori, for example, saw a possibility in loyally serving King and
empire to gain greater political recognition as full citizens of Aotearoa New
Zealand.41 Some Australian Aborigines, Polynesian, Caribbean, Vietnamese,
Cambodian, Algerian and Canada’s First Nation communities mobilized
in support of their empire’s war effort for similar reasons: the promise of
greater political representation, racial equality and recognition within the
empire and local polity.42 In India too, numerous elites argued in favour of
war to advance their status as loyal imperial subjects worthy of greater self-
governance and possible Dominion-status.43 The opening months of war
thus reflected the equivalence of Burgfrieden and expressions of national
honour in a number of colonial outposts. Support for an embattled empire
would (so these supporters thought) only lead to political advantages within
the empire once the war finished. Their loyalty to empire seemed well
founded, particularly when they were endorsed by supportive appeals from
the imperial authorities themselves. That motivation remained for many
months, sometimes years. Much of it would not survive the whole war.44
Equally alert to the geostrategic opportunities presented by the outbreak
of global war were other indigenous and colonized communities who
looked to advance their pre-existing anti-imperial agendas. Many south-
east Asians had a nuanced understanding of the global implications and
geostrategic parameters of the war. Whether they were formally neutral
(as was the case for China, Siam and the Dutch East Indies) or formed
part of a belligerent empire (as was the case for Singapore, Malaysia and
French Indo-China), the global war influenced how these communities
considered and reconfigured their political and economic interests after 4
August. As the historian Heather Streets-Salter highlights, many anti-French
and anti-British revolutionaries in south-east Asia successfully lobbied for

German government support to fund and resource their resistance activities
against their common enemy. They often did so from neutral territories.
These activities helped to destabilize the British and French wartime empires
in due measure.45
For the United States, the expansion of the war was also of grave concern.
The country declared its neutrality on 4 August, as it had in all foreign wars
since 1796. There was some hope that the European war might benefit the
American economy.46 The opening of the Panama Canal on 15 August 1914
further heightened the opportunism for the neutral Americans to take over a
large portion of European trade in the Atlantic and Pacific regions as well as
sustain the war economies of the belligerents in Europe. The Latin American
states also declared their neutrality: why partake in a war of empires that
offered no clear advantages? The neutrality of the two American continents
(barring Canada of course) established a key geostrategic neutral zone,
sustaining the regional economy in ways that particularly favoured the
United States and also offered the belligerent British and French essential
advantages.
Many of Europe’s smaller states also adopted neutrality, as did Spain.
Even Italy declared its neutrality in early August. The Italian government’s
decision not to join its allies Germany and Austria-Hungary in their war was
based on a foreign policy of ‘sacred egoism’, as the Italian foreign minister
announced.47 In August 1914, Italy had nothing as yet to gain from the
conflict and much to lose. The Italian government was particularly wary
that if it went to war it would embolden the anti-imperial opposition against
Italian rule in Abyssinia (Ethiopia).48 Italy’s neutrality in 1914 held off an
Ethiopian independence movement’s bid for power, albeit only until 1916.
When Italy’s government entered the war against the Central Powers in May
1915, it did so with other imperial aims in mind, particularly acquiring a
number of Austro-Hungarian territories.49 Yet Italy’s gamble did not pay
off. By the war’s end not only was Italy facing social, economic and political
disarray, a civil war in Abyssinia brought an end to the Italian administration
there and initiated Haile Selassie’s regency.
Many communities in Africa and the Middle East also understood
how the war altered their futures. As early as August 1914, Tutsi tribes in
German-controlled Rwanda raided their Hutu neighbours in the Belgian-
held Congo, utilizing the imperial governments’ belligerency as part of their
rationale.50 This local war escalated so that by 1916 a Belgian-led Force
Majeure from the Congo, peopled largely by local soldiers, invaded German
Rwanda and Burundi and successfully seized Tabora in September. The
Belgian government formally extended a protectorate over Rwanda on 6
April 1917.51 For many African and Middle Eastern communities, the war
of the world thus became part and parcel of their local and imperial rivalries.
Similarly, after the Ottoman entry into the war, several Kurdish communities
mobilized in support of the empire, helping to occupy Russian-controlled
Azerbaijan and raiding and razing local Nestorian Christian communities,

who supported their co-religionist Russians and attacked the Muslim Kurds
in turn.52
For the Persian (Iranian) government, however, the outbreak of war was
disastrous. Aiming to protect Persia’s sovereign independence, it declared
formal neutrality. But since a belligerent Russia occupied the northern
reaches of Persia and a belligerent Britain administered the southern region,
remaining non-belligerent proved impossible. Both powers eyed up Persia’s
oil reserves. Meanwhile, for the Swedish police troops already serving in
Persia as neutral peacekeepers (they were there to train police officers, aid
with tax collection and combat brigandage), the dangers were deemed
too great. After declaring Sweden’s neutrality in the war, its government
recalled the entire force back to Sweden.53 Persia became a key warfront.
Representatives of the great power belligerents repeatedly negotiated with
local communities, including Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Azerbaijani and
Muslim groups, for their support in an attempt to destabilize their enemies’
interests.54 These deals not only prevented the Persian government from
sustaining effective rule, but also had long-term legacies for the stability
and political cohesion of the region after 1918.55 Persia, then, was the third
neutral state (after Belgium and Luxembourg) to fall victim to the great
powers’ war. It was not the last.
Still, in 1914, neutrality was a respected and expected foreign policy choice
for states. The great power belligerents well understood the importance
of keeping particular countries neutral. They were also cognizant of the
obligations and requirements of neutrality. But with Britain’s entry, the war
involved more great power belligerents than any previous conflict fought
since 1815. Who was going to advance and protect neutral rights in a war
dominated by great power belligerents? President Woodrow Wilson’s United
States seemed willing to take up this mantle. Japan’s future as a neutral,
however, was less obvious.
Britain’s war declaration presented the Japanese government with a
tantalizing prospect. With much of Europe at war, virtually all of Japan’s
imperial rivals in the Asia-Pacific region (aside from the United States)
were pre-occupied. Given that Japan could legitimately call upon its formal
alliance with Britain to go to war with Germany, it faced the possibility
of expanding its Asia-Pacific empire without much opposition.56 Japan
declared war on Germany on 27 August 1914. It attacked and occupied
the German-Chinese treaty port of Tsingtao, which fell on 7 November, and
acquired the Marshall, Mariana and Caroline Islands and the Jaluitt Atoll
by the end of the year.57 The Japanese Navy further patrolled the Pacific and
Indian Oceans, hounding what was left of the German navy out of these
seas, convoying British and French troop ships and securing these waters for
the safe passage of merchant vessels.58 The regional Asia-Pacific economy
grew during the war in large part because of Japan’s protective role. While
the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black Seas would become
increasingly treacherous to navigate, the Pacific and Indian Oceans remained

relatively safe zones for shipping. That Japan was the ultimate beneficiary of
these developments was almost inevitable. The longer Europe’s war lasted,
the greater Japan’s economic gains.
In China, the shift to global warfare on 4–5 August 1914 registered as
weiji (great crisis, literally ‘danger opportunity’).59 The loss of European
imperial agency in the region meant that only the American government
was left to protect the ‘open door’ policy that had dominated Chinese
foreign and economic relations throughout the previous two decades.
Japan’s invasion of Tsingtao frightened the Chinese. Their fears were fully
realized when Japan capitalized on its position of power by issuing a set of
twenty-one demands expanding Japanese control over Tsingtao, Manchuria
and Chinese economic affairs for the foreseeable future. The twenty-one
demands signed by China in March 1915 are considered one of China’s
ignoble moments. For the United States too, Japanese belligerency and
expansionism during the war heightened the rivalry between these two major
Pacific powers. Meanwhile, the notion that Japan might threaten other Asia-
Pacific communities permeated the region. Still, as the historian Xu Guoqi
shows, the changing landscape of imperial order in the Asia-Pacific region
was also regarded as an opportunity for the Chinese to reassert themselves
into the international diplomatic order.60
If Japan’s war declaration was unimaginable without Britain’s entry into
the war, so too was that of the Ottoman empire. Until Britain joined the
war, the Young Turk government could imagine itself as a neutral power,
situated on the periphery of a European continental war. With Britain’s
entry in the war, the geostrategic threats to the empire mushroomed, as
did the possibility that the victors (on either side) would not hesitate to
dismember the empire at the conflict’s conclusion. Since Russia presented
the greatest threat, a war fought on the side of the Allies was unthinkable.
A war on the side of the Central Powers offered a wealth of opportunities,
not least the possibility to expand and Turkify the empire.61 From early
August 1914, then, the Ottoman government negotiated an alliance with
the Central Powers, promising military aid against Russia at the earliest
opportunity. It took until late October to fulfil this secret promise.62 On
attacking the Russian fleet in the Black Sea on 29 October, the vast Ottoman
empire with its immensely diverse population went to war. It opened up new
military fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and Persia, made the Suez
Canal less safe and cut Russia off from the Mediterranean Sea.63
Even if opportunism drove its decision to enter the war, the Ottoman
government publicly presented the war as a defensive enterprise.64 Much
like Christianity was mobilized as a rationale for war and in the defence of
‘civilization’ in Europe, the Ottoman sultan declared jihad (holy war) on all
Christians in early November.65 Jihad had numerous faces aimed both at
mobilizing Muslim subjects of the Ottoman sultan in a ‘just’ and ‘necessary’
war and at inspiring Muslim subjects of enemy empires to incite anti-imperial
rebellion from below.66 Jihad confronted all the Christian powers, including
the neutral Netherlands whose East Indian colonies counted millions of
Muslims.67 With good reason, the British and French colonial authorities
worried about the potential impact of jihad on a colonial rebellion among
their Islamic subjects. Across Africa, south and south-east Asia, Muslims
were inspired by the jihad to reassess their relationships to the local imperial
authority and the wider world at war.68
There is much historiographical debate about the success of the 1914
jihad declaration.69 At one level, jihad legitimated certain wartime actions,
not least the systematic targeting of Christian populations within the
Ottoman realm. Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East, which
were shaky at the best of times, drastically declined after August 1914.70
There is also evidence to suggest that for some Muslims, the call to battle
helped to solidify their support for the Ottoman war effort. But jihad also
validated a massive Turkification enterprise throughout the empire. On the
grounds that only loyal subjects to the empire could be trusted and to pre-
empt the creation of ‘fifth-column’ guerilla forces, the Ottoman government
ordered the massive displacement of ‘suspect’ civilians, including millions
of Christians.71 Through the course of 1915, these Christians would be
systematically eliminated by the Ottoman government in a distinctly
genocidal campaign. Identifying the ‘enemy within’ was a common strategy
utilized in all belligerent societies, however, and one that reflected widespread
colonial imperial practices before the war too.
In the opening months of war, the giddy heights of the short-war ambition
were reached. These are best reflected in the extravagant plans of military
leaders on all sides. In hindsight, British expectations for the defeat of
Germany and its own rising global power, Germany’s hopes for an enlarged
central European empire, and France’s expectations for the restitution of
Alsace-Lorraine and other territorial acquisitions seem fantastical, callous
reflections of how out-of-touch these leaders were with the desperate
suffering of their subjects and soldiers. Still, these military men were not
the only ones looking to maximize the opportunities a successful short war
might provide. Japanese hopes for a sizeable Asian empire and recognition
of their great power status and the Chinese government’s wish to reinsert
itself on the international arena were equally prominent ambitions in the
opening months of war. So too were Vietnamese hopes for independence
and many indigenous communities’ desires to achieve political recognition
for their wartime military service, Indian and Irish hopes for Home Rule,
and even some suffragettes to achieve the vote for women. The expectation
that wartime service and support could lead to post-war gain were all too
common in the 1914 war months.
These 1914 ambitions lingered as a reference point as the war progressed.
But in December 1914, everyone first had to endure the recognition that the
war would not be over before ‘the leaves fall off the trees’ as Kaiser Wilhelm
II had promised the German population in August.72 Their collective
ILLUSTRATION 3.3 This photograph, taken on the Greek island of Lemnos

in 1915, shows soldiers from the various Allied armies preparing to invade the
Gallipoli peninsula. The invasion, waged from 25 April 1915, involved troops
from around the French and British empires, including from India, New Zealand,
Australia, Ireland, Malta, Egypt, Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia and Newfoundland.
Source: Photograph, Lemnos, 1915, Bain News Service, Library of Congress,
LC-DIG-ggbain-20400.
short-war ambitions were overtaken by a long-war reality. That realization

proffered terrifying prospects, not least because the first five months of war
had already cost millions of people their lives and livelihoods, including a
casualty count of a third of the Russian army (around 1.8 million men),
half of the Belgian army, 90 per cent of the Ottoman Third Army and 1.25
million Austro-Hungarian troops.73 From 1915 on, the lack of a decisive
victory by any of the great power belligerents would lead the world on a
path to total war.74
60
4
Long-war realities: Economic
warfare and the evolution of total
war in 1915
The opening months of war in 1914 were immensely destructive for the
European belligerents. By the time winter descended, not only had they
endured phenomenally high casualty counts, their military stockpiles were
also largely exhausted. By November, the British Expeditionary Force in
northern France and Belgium had run out of sandbags. In the middle of
November, the German army facing them across the western front only had
enough artillery shells to last them four more days of concerted attacks.1
By this stage, generals in every belligerent army complained about serious
armaments shortages, alongside the scarcity of much else, including blankets,
uniforms, fuels, fodder, medical supplies and horses.2 For the belligerents
involved, restocking their armies in the field with essentials had become
a priority. But the logistics involved were staggering, requiring wholesale
increases in manufacturing capacity which in turn necessitated the building
of factories and machinery, the acquisition of skilled labour, raw materials
and fuels, the expansion of transportation capacity and enough money to
pay for it all. Given that in August 1914, none of the belligerent metropoles
were self-sufficient even in terms of food supply, prioritizing access to the
foods, fuels and raw materials had become essential to the viability of the
belligerents’ war campaigns.3
That all the major belligerent powers experienced serious military
shortages in these early months underlines how deeply embedded their desire –
and perhaps even their expectation – for a quick victory had been at the
war’s outset.4 It also underscores how deeply they had underestimated their
enemies’ ability to defend. As the western front entrenched after the Battle
of the Marne and as victory eluded the armies on Europe’s extensive eastern
and Caucasian fronts through November, the likelihood of a ‘long war’
dawned as an inescapable reality.5 That realization presented the belligerent
governments with unenviable options. None of them were willing to sue

for peace. But they also recognized that to have a realistic chance at victory,
radical changes needed to be made to their wartime policies, especially in
terms of logistics and military supply. The prospect of a long war required
careful consideration of these enduring economic and material needs. If
their material advantages could be maximized and those of their enemies
minimized, then the possibility of a quick victory remained.
The ‘long-war reality’ that set in during the European winter of 1914
thus did not end the belligerent governments’ hopes for a speedy victory.6
Rather, it repositioned their planning around how to achieve victory by
recognizing the central importance of mobilizing all available human,
industrial, financial and material resources for the war.7 Where before 1914
most European states expended around 4 per cent of their GDP on their
armed forces, the shift to total war ensured that their entire economic output
was repurposed to serve the needs of the war.8 After November 1914, the
global economy was also weaponized to serve the needs of the belligerent
powers. Inevitably, neutrals and the ‘limited’ economic warfare practices of
the past became targets of the shift.9 This chapter explains how the shift to
a long-war reality transformed the conduct of the economic war. It does so
by describing the impact of these developments on neutral and belligerent
communities alike, including the Netherlands, Colombia, the United States,
Liberia, Shanghai, Port Said, India, Japan, the Ottoman empire and Russia.
By traversing the world of economic warfare in 1915, the chapter
illustrates how deeply interconnected the global economy remained during
the war and how singularly important the shift to economic warfare was
to communities everywhere. It also shows how banks, shipping companies,
manufacturers, suppliers of raw materials and insurers aided and abetted the
belligerents’ insatiable need for money and military supplies. It highlights
how the premise of neutrality – the right to stay out of another country’s
war – was affected by the shift to economic warfare and how the actions of
neutral governments, people and institutions influenced wider perceptions
of what ‘the war’ was about. Chapter 5 follows on by describing how no
civilian community anywhere was prima facie safe from the destructive
violence of the war from 1915. At any rate, by the end of the year many
of them understood, as the German newspaper the Kölnische Zeitung
explained it on 3 October 1915, that this was a ‘war of holding out’, a war
of survival.10
If in August 1914, people laboured under the illusion that the war might
present a short-lived interruption of pre-war economic practices and that
‘business as usual’ would soon resume, after November 1914 that illusion
had surely burst. From this point on, the belligerent governments prioritized
the material and industrial needs of victory. At home, they reconfigured
domestic laws and bureaucratic practices, requisitioned and rationed
resources, imposed new taxes and mobilized civilians into essential ‘war
work’. Peacetime industries converted into arsenals. Raw materials, food
LONG-WAR REALITIES 63
and fuel stuffs were consigned to prioritize military production and supply.
In metropoles and imperial outposts alike, ‘the war’ increasingly governed
the contours of everyday life.
Military planners in all the major belligerent capitals reconsidered their
strategic plans after November 1914, with an eye to securing key resources
and disrupting their enemies’ supply routes. The Indian Expeditionary Force
attacked and occupied the Mesopotamian city of Basra on 11 November,
for example, to protect British access to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s
installations at Abadan.11 In February 1915, an Ottoman force of 22,000
troops assaulted the British-controlled Suez canal hoping to dissever this key
international highway of trade and troop movements.12 In April, a combined
force of British, French and imperial troops invaded the Ottoman empire’s
Gallipoli peninsula seeking to reinstate Russian shipping access through the
Dardanelles Straits and to disrupt the land-bridge by which the German,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires supplied and supported each other
by road and rail. As the historian Hew Strachan explains it, in 1915 ‘the
attack on the Dardanelles provided the epicentre for the hopes and fears of
all the belligerents’.13 When the Gallipoli invasion failed, the Allies looked
to support the Serbian war effort by driving a wedge into the region from
out of the (formerly neutral) Greek port of Thessaloniki. The Salonika front
tied up tens of thousands of troops and placed the region under long-term
military occupation.
Across the 1914–15 winter months, the belligerent powers also expanded
their economic warfare practices, targeting first their enemies and then the
neutrals who supplied them.14 The expansion of these economic policies
might have looked like a tit-for-tat series of reprisal measures, each step
escalating its reach so as best to interrupt the enemy’s war effort.15 In reality,
the belligerent authorities on both sides carefully considered the short- and
long-term liabilities of their economic policy decisions: the French and
British governments argued about them incessantly, while their legal advisers
clearly explained how the measures violated existing international laws.16
Balancing the needs of victory in the immediate term against the dangers of
alienating a neutral government (who might join the war against them) and
the fear of setting new legal precedents that might disrupt their own interests
as neutrals in a future war remained an utmost consideration.17 But where
in August 1914 the belligerents accepted the principles of the Declaration of
London and the rights of neutrals to trade, the shift to a ‘long-war reality’
ensured that belligerency increasingly overruled neutrality.18 Throughout
the previous century, the reverse had been true.19
When Germany mined parts of the North Sea in August 1914, it sought
to prevent the British Royal Navy from directly blockading its ports. In
October 1914, the Royal Navy mined the mouth of the English Channel
hoping to keep neutral cargo from reaching Germany through the ports of
Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Hamburg. At this point, however, both navies
also provided neutrals with maps to navigate around their mines.20 A British
Order of Council on 29 October, subsequently, expanded the war on neutral

trade by declaring all foodstuffs destined for the enemy as contraband and
thus liable for capture. The declaration also made neutral ship captains
responsible for ‘proving’ that their cargo would not reach Germany,
Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman empire. The legal protections offered to
neutral traders to freely cross the open seas had effectively ended.21 Four
days later, the British naval vessel HMS Audacious sank on a newly laid
German minefield off the northern coast of Ireland. In retaliation, the British
government declared the entire North Sea a ‘military area’ and warned all
unauthorized ships to keep away. Effectively, the British used the rationale
of ‘military endangerment’ to allow it to monitor, intercept and board all
neutral ships found in the zone.22
The North Sea became even more treacherous when on 4 February 1915,
the German government announced its own warzone around the British
Isles and declared all ships caught in the zone at risk of being sunk without
warning by its fleet of submersible U-boats.23 The French and British felt
compelled to adopt a more coordinated ‘offensive economic warfare’
strategy in response, one that targeted the trade of Germany’s contiguous
neutrals especially.24 Collectively, these actions ensured that no neutral cargo
intercepted by a belligerent navy anywhere in the world was prima facie safe
from capture after March 1915. Furthermore, no neutral ship intercepted
in and around the European continent was safe from being sunk on sight.
Historians often explain the shift to ‘total war’ during the First World
War as the product of the belligerent governments’ willingness to prioritize
victory at any cost. Their definition of total war stresses three interdependent
components: firstly, the mobilization of all elements of state and society
in aid of a country’s war effort; secondly, the conscription and coercion
of all available human and material resources to support a belligerent’s
war effort; and, thirdly, the strategic targeting of an enemy’s economic,
material and human resources.25 In other words, the shift to total war made
everyone in a belligerent society responsible for the successful conduct of
the war. In a society at ‘total war’, as Illustration 4.1 emphasizes, the female
labourer working in a factory making artillery shells was often considered
as important to the success of a country’s war effort as the male soldier on
a battlefield. The corollary was, of course, that the labourer working in an
enemy factory was deemed as legitimate a target of military violence as any
enemy troops. But so was a neutral shipping company supplying an enemy
with goods or a neutral bank underwriting an enemy war loan.
The shift to total war ensured not only that the belligerents willingly
wielded blockade and hunger as weapons against enemy civilians but also
against neutral populations. The shift to total war thus presented neutral
states, neutral commerce and neutral populations with a new set of wartime
expectations and realities as well. Their economic security, their sovereign
independence and their non-belligerency were all at risk of succumbing to
the shifting sands of total war. While neutrals had subsidized the financial
ILLUSTRATION 4.1 This propaganda poster, first published in 1916 by the

German War Office, reminded its audience of the essential role German women
played in sustaining the military war effort. Entitled ‘German Women Work in the
Home Army’, the poster depicted a female factory labourer passing a grenade, that
she has presumably built, to a male soldier. Positioning her at the centre of the poster
and assigning her equal size and space to the male soldier communicated the
essence of the concept of total war: civilians and soldiers alike were needed to win
this war. She had his back. Without her, the war could not be won.
Source: Gottfried Kirchbach, ‘Deutsche Frauen arbeitet im Heimatheer!’ Poster,
1916, Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2013/3085.
and material needs of belligerents for centuries, their right to do so was

always contested. The maintenance of neutrality always involved a balancing
act between belligerent and neutral interpretations of international law and
diplomatic agreement. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, neutral
rights had stabilized. Until 1914, the right of neutrals to trade freely with
each other and in limited capacity with belligerents was well-established.
Great Britain’s position as the nineteenth-century’s economic and imperial
superpower, for one, was predicated on its ability to remain non-belligerent
when its industrial rivals were at war. But in the context of the shift to total
economic warfare in early 1915, a neutral country’s right to profit from the
war or to supply a belligerent came under increasing scrutiny and attack.
Moreover, as the historian Pierre Renouvin explains, if it was ‘on the backs
of neutrals that the economic warfare was pursued’ then neutrals’ economic
agency was increasingly considered a weapon in the war. As a result, to

conduct a successful total war required the curtailment of neutral rights.26
The economic war for and against neutrality played out in a surprising
number of ways. The capture of the Dutch merchant vessel, the Zaanstroom,
by a German U-boat in 1915 offers a compelling example. The Zaanstroom’s
captain recounted the incident in a compendium of Dutch-language stories
entitled The Dutch Merchant Marine in Wartime, which was published in
the Netherlands in 1930. According to the account, the Zaanstroom left its
neutral Dutch port on 17 March bound for England. It soon entered the
English Channel looking to evade a known minefield but was intercepted by
the U28 instead. In keeping with long-established search-and-visit practices
at sea, the U-boat crew set a small team on board to determine the nature of
the Zaanstroom’s cargo. Alongside a number of guns and other (unspecified)
military contraband, the team found several Belgian men, all of whom
claimed refugee status. By international law, a belligerent could seize a
neutral merchant ship if it suspected it of carrying contraband. Furthermore,
the Hague Conventions of 1907 specified that any enemy soldiers found on
board a neutral ship were liable for capture as prisoners of war, as long as
the neutral vessel had not rescued them during a naval battle. As a result, and
all very properly, the U28 crew raised a German flag on the Zaanstroom and
accompanied the ship to the German-occupied Belgian port of Zeebrugge. In
Zeebrugge, the Belgian men were imprisoned. The Dutch crew was offered
safe passage back to the Netherlands, by way of an armoured train with
boarded windows (so they could not spy on German military installations).
The ship was requisitioned. A Hamburg prize court subsequently declared
that no compensation was due to the Dutch ship owner for the vessel or its
cargo since the Zaanstroom carried enemy soldiers and contraband. In the
end, the ship lay idle in Zeebrugge alongside dozens of other requisitioned
vessels until the Germans abandoned the city in October 1918 and sunk
them all.27
The fate of the Zaanstroom tells us many things about the expansion of
economic warfare in 1915. Firstly, it highlights just how precarious global
shipping had become. In an environment where the capture or sinking of
neutral ships (and their cargo) became all too likely, no ship was safe. Thus, its
passengers and crew were not safe either. Between 1914 and 1918, thousands
of ships were sunk off the coasts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East
and across the Atlantic Ocean. As a random example, Tanzania’s territorial
waters in the Indian Ocean today host no less than thirteen First World
War wrecks.28 Thousands more ships were requisitioned by the belligerents.
Such losses were not as prevalent in the Asia-Pacific region however, largely
because the German and Austro-Hungarian navies did not operate there as
consistently. As we will see, the boon this safety offered the regional Asia-
Pacific economy was substantial.
The Zaanstroom incident thus also highlights how the capture and
destruction of neutral vessels simultaneously made shipping more precarious
and more valuable. As the historian Samuël Kruizinga describes it, the crews
of neutral ships suffered mental health breakdowns as readily as neutral
shipping companies enjoyed massive profits from sending their ships out
to sea. At least until April 1917 – when the United States entered the
war and changed the global economic landscape yet again – neutral and
Entente shipping companies like the one that owned the Zaanstroom made
phenomenal profits.29 So did their insurers and the farmers and manufacturers
who successively supplied the wartime needs of the belligerents. The
economic impact of the First World War was one of extremes. A select range
of states, businesses and companies, individuals and communities became
very wealthy during the war and particularly so in the 1914–16 years. But
most did not.30
Balancing the cost-benefit ratio of neutral trade played a key role in all
the belligerent governments’ economic warfare strategies. It also ensured
that neutral governments were in constant diplomatic negotiation with
the belligerents, balancing their own security and economic needs with the
diplomatic requests and demands of the warring states. As a result, neutral
governments felt compelled to micro-manage the economic behaviour of
their citizens and subjects, with an eye to mobilizing, requisitioning and
rationing essential resources when necessary to protect the neutral nation as
it navigated through the war. As a result, ‘the war’ governed the contours of
everyday life in neutral states and empires.31
The Zaanstroom incident also shows up just how much rules and
protocols continued to matter in the waging of economic warfare. Even
though the U28 might have sunk the Zaanstroom, the German war effort
had more to gain from boarding and capturing its cargo than sinking the
vessel immediately. If we are to believe the captain’s account, the U28
intercepted the Zaanstroom ‘by the book’. The German crew kept strictly
to the legal requirements of international naval practices. The 1930 Dutch
compendium is chock-full of similar boarding and requisitioning stories.
Keeping to ‘the rules’ mattered for Germany’s ongoing relationship with
the Netherlands, a border neutral its government wished to court and
mobilize as an essential supplier of its economic war needs. It also enabled
the Germans to claim that they were not ‘uncivilized’ and that their war
was conducted as international law dictated, an essential weapon in
their ongoing propaganda campaign to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of
neutrals.32
From the belligerents’ perspective, managing neutral trade and finance
made all the difference in the success of their economic warfare strategies.
The Allied blockade of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire,
for example, could only be effectively maintained if these enemies did not
receive undue aid from a border neutral. In managing these neutrals’ access
to global trade, however, they inevitably contracted their economic well-
being. As a result, while some European neutrals made immense profits from
the war – not least by smuggling goods into belligerent territory or offering
private bank loans – most of them despaired in the face of shortages,

rationing, inflation and a burgeoning black-market economy.33
For more distant neutrals, like the Latin American countries, the shift
to a ‘long war’ had equally decisive economic and social consequences.
The already weak Colombian economy, for example, suffered acutely from
the long-term loss of access to the European import and export market.
Through the course of 1915, foreign credit disappeared, coffee and banana
prices fell further and the loss of customs duties from European imports
crippled the state budget. The ensuing deficit saw José Vincente Concha’s
government reduce expenses by shutting down government ministries,
defunding schools and public work schemes and deferring pensions.
According to the historian Jane Rausch, even the leprosy asylum in Agua de
Dios ‘disgorged its hapless inmates’ onto the streets for lack of funds to pay
staff. Colombians’ dissatisfaction with these developments had numerous
political repercussions which heightened the already violent rivalries that
existed between the Republican and Liberal camps in society.34
Colombia’s pre-war economic relationships with Europe did not
improve during the war. Increasingly, the only hope for economic recovery
lay with the highly unpopular United States.35 Given the United States’
role in the seizure of the isthmus of Panama in 1903 and the subsequent
opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, Colombians were extremely wary
of American imperialism. That wariness heightened when the United States
Congress repeatedly refused to ratify the Thomson-Urrutia treaty that was
signed in April 1914, offering an apology to the Colombian people for the
Panama situation and providing their government with US$25 million in
compensation.36
That both the United States and Colombia participated in the Inter-
American High Commission that met in Washington DC in May 1915 to
discuss ‘closer and more satisfactory financial relations among the American
republics’ is, therefore, highly relevant.37 That event, a pre-cursor to the Pan-
American Union, brought representatives of Latin America’s independent
states and the United States government together to negotiate a common
approach to banking, transportation and commerce in the context of the
global war.38 After May 1915, Colombia became increasingly economically
dependent on the United States. Whereas Colombian exports to and imports
from Europe had almost halved since 1913, the United States’ share of
Colombian exports increased by a quarter and its import share expanded
by nearly two-thirds by the end of 1915.39 Furthermore, investments by
American-owned companies in Colombian oil, platinum mines and banana
crops heightened the United States’ informal interests in the country.
Between 1915 and 1918, Colombia ‘moved steadily into the United States
commercial orbit’, as did many of its immediate neighbours.40
For the United States, the 1915 Inter-American High Commission
meeting signalled greater regional security and heightened its own
economic advantages as the world’s sole remaining neutral great power.
Its economic growth through the course of the war was built in part on
its ability to replace European investors, shipping and exports across the
south American continent.41 Even more decisively, it utilized the European
powers’ preoccupation with the war to expand its formal empire across the
Caribbean too. The United States invaded the island of Haiti in July 1915,
with an eye to protecting the mouth of the Panama Canal.42 The Dominican
Republic and Cuba followed in 1916 and 1917 respectively.43 As the United
States expanded its imperial power in the context of the lengthening global
war, it reinforced the notion that the entire central and south American
region had become a neutral bulwark in the war.
Across the region, Latin Americans viewed the United States’ ‘commercial
conquest’ of their economies as troubling. Their newspapers lamented that
their people were being treated as ‘war booty’ of the powerful northern
neutral. Their governments were placed under considerable political pressure
from the people to counter the expansionism.44 Still, the reorientation
towards the United States also helped to stabilize what were increasingly
unstable economic entities.
This regional American geostrategic neutral zone also offered decisive
advantages to the belligerents who could most easily access them.45 The
United States’ direct support of the Allied war effort between 1915 and April
1917 (when it formally joined the war as a belligerent) was enormous.46 In
oil supplies alone, the United States dominated. Where in 1914, the British
army had operated 827 cars and 15 motorbikes and owned a few dozen
aeroplanes, by late 1918 it utilized 56,000 tanks, 58,000 motor vehicles
and 55,000 aircraft in its daily military operations.47 All of these machines
required oil to run. The United States supplied the majority of Britain’s
wartime oil needs, although the Basra oil fields increased their output from
1,600 barrels per day in 1914 to 18,000 in 1917.48
Well beyond oil, though, the British government maximized its purchasing
power in the United States by commissioning the J.P. Morgan company to
be its financial representative. As a private enterprise, J.P. Morgan could
raise bank loans in the United States for the British state as well as acquire
a wide array of essential goods, which it then shipped on to Britain. After
May 1915, the newly established British Ministry of Munitions employed a
further 1,600 private individuals to buy up even more American products.
Collectively, these efforts ensured that by early 1917, the British government
spent a phenomenal US$83 million (approximately US$1.6 billion in today’s
terms) per week procuring American resources.49 Without the United States,
the Allied war effort would have faltered.
It is really no surprise then that Germany aimed to undermine American
shipping access to Britain and sought to maximize its own access to (neutral)
Romania’s oil fields as well as to the oil resources under (belligerent) Ottoman
control.50 Increasingly, its economic warfare practices aimed not only to
intercept ships and acquire cargo, but also to sink as much of the neutral
merchant marine destined for Britain and France as possible. In turn, the
British-French blockade of Central Powers increasingly targeted Germany’s

border neutrals. Neutral governments and trading companies invented a
range of innovative trade agreements with the belligerents to accommodate
these changes. As an example, the Dutch government set up the Netherlands
Oversea Trust Company (NOT), a private shareholding entity consisting
of banks, shipping companies and commercial enterprises. The NOT
acted as an official ‘back-channel’ to the Dutch government and entered
into commercial agreements with the British government that covered all
Dutch overseas trade. In turn, the NOT guaranteed that all consigned goods
carried by Dutch ships would be consumed domestically and, thus, not
re-exported to Germany. While the NOT agreements tied Dutch wartime
trade to British oversight, it also opened up the possibility for the wholesale
export of Dutch-origin products to Germany.51 Despite heightened NOT
controls and British interference, Dutch-German trade flourished well into
1916.52 Smuggling along the Dutch-German and Dutch-Belgian borders was
also rife, as it was on Switzerland’s and Denmark’s land borders too, where
similar consignment policies were implemented.53
One of the most drastic signs of the radicalization of British economic
warfare practices in 1915 was its government’s decision to blacklist all
German companies and enterprises regardless of whether they operated
in a neutral country. Even hiring German-born workers could result in a
blacklisting of a neutral company and, thus, an end to its ability to operate
effectively within the global economy. Blacklisting bankrupted thousands
of German-owned enterprises globally, causing widespread unemployment
and heightening social tensions in a number of neutral countries. In Latin
America, alongside numerous public protests against blacklisting, the
suspension of British coal supplies to several German-owned electricity
companies even resulted in blackouts in the cities of Valparaíso (Chile),
Vina del Mar (Chile) and Buenos Aires (Argentina).54 According to the
historian Philip Dehne, the Allied powers’ full-frontal attack on German
commercial and financial interests was a powerful weapon of war.55 It also
had a fundamental impact on neutral communities.
The African neutral state of Liberia offers an excellent example.
Surrounded by the belligerent outposts of Sierra Leone (Britain) and French
West Africa (present-day Ivory Coast and Guinea), Liberia was a particularly
vulnerable neutral state. Before the war, 80 per cent of its government
revenue came from customs duties, a substantial amount of which came
from German import trade.56 Almost two-thirds of Liberia’s external trade
in 1913 was with Germany. German investors owned Liberia’s key electricity
and telegraph companies as well as the steamboat service that navigated the
Kavalli River.57 The outbreak of the First World War devastated the Liberian
economy. Not only was neutral Liberia not a priority supply port for the
French or British, who preferred Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast, but
Germany’s shipping trade with Liberia also halted.
In a recent book, the historian Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhuri describes how

the impact of the war, the cessation of German shipping and the blacklisting
of German companies by the British in 1915 resulted in a ‘complete
disaster’. The numbers of ships calling into Liberian ports fell from 1,322
in 1913 (more than half of which were German) to a mere 245 in 1917
(two-thirds of which were British).58 In response to the declining size of its
coffers, the Liberian government (much like the Colombian government)
attempted to cut costs by drastic means. Its freeze on paying out wages and
the introduction of stamp duties on gin, tobacco and other luxuries failed to
recoup anywhere near the lost revenue. Instead, it turned to a controversial
Hut Tax imposed on every building structure in the country, the collection of
which only resulted in widespread social upheaval, political strife and police
violence. Meanwhile, Liberian produce and products piled up in warehouses
and ports, unable to find ships and export markets.
The cosmopolitan entrepot cities of the world, like Shanghai and Bombay,
also made drastic readjustments in 1915 to accommodate the new global
realities of economic warfare. Shanghai’s Chamber of Commerce wound
up and the various commercial enterprises in the city were regulated along
belligerent lines. Others, like the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank were forcibly shut
down.59 The growing animosity between rival resident communities made
the management of social cohesion in Shanghai especially difficult.60 This
was particularly so between Shanghai’s Chinese and Japanese populations.
After Japan’s invasion of Tsingtao and the issuing of the twenty-one
demands in early 1915, Shanghai Chinese protested by boycotting Japanese
goods and stores. Animosity increased on Shanghai’s streets. In response,
the Japanese Residents’ Association formed armed self-defence units and
‘vigilance committees’ that looked to shield the city’s 30,000 Japanese
residents and their children from such attacks.61
Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, faced equally challenging
realities. At the outset of the war, the Egyptian government had declared
its intention to keep the canal open for all warship traffic (as it was obliged
to do according to the terms of the 1888 Constantinople Convention).
Very quickly, the impact of global economic warfare resulted in the British
interfering with these Egyptian directives and canal trade. In September,
British troops landed in the canal zone, looking to defend it against attack
and in December, Britain expanded its authority over the khedive with the
appointment of Sir Henry McMahon as High Commissioner.62 The impact
of Egypt’s incorporation into the world of war was particularly acute in Port
Said. Not only did tensions between various ethnicities (particularly those
from enemy communities) repeatedly spill over, so did the demographic
composition of the city’s residents change, especially once the city’s
authorities denied access to the port to crew who held enemy passports
(even if they came in on a neutral vessel). During 1916, German U-boats
repeatedly shelled Port Said, heightening residents’ insecurities and ensuring
an increased military presence in the city and across the canal zone. In
recounting these developments, the historian Valeska Huber stresses that
while the cosmopolitan composition of Port Said altered during the war, the
heightened presence of troops from all over the French and British empires
(including from Madagascar and India) leant an ongoing cosmopolitan and
military nature to its socio-economic landscape.63 The war entrenched Port
Said’s and the Suez canal’s place within the British empire.
Meanwhile, Indians also quailed at the impact of the early months of the
war on their economic interests. In the twelve months before May 1914,
only 37.6 per cent of Indian exports were sold within the British empire.
The rest ended up elsewhere, often in Germany or Russia. With the outbreak
of war in August 1914, not only did India lose their second largest source
of imported goods (Germany), but with Ottoman entry into the war in
October, it also lost access to the Black Sea economy.64 The bombing of
the port city of Madras (Chennai) on 22 September 1914 by the German
light cruiser SMS Emden further signalled to the entire British empire that
it was as much at war as Britain itself. With the shift to long-war economic
planning, the British government assessed the potential of mobilizing India’s
vast human and material resources. It was reluctant to ask too much of
India, fearing protests and anti-imperial rebellion. Still, by the end of the
war, the south Asian sub-continent had supplied 172,815 animals and
3,691,836 tonnes of supplies to the Allies, alongside more than 1.4 million
troops.65 In 1917 and 1918, India offered two vast ‘gifts’ of 100 million
pounds to the British government, paid for by ‘war loan’ subscriptions made
by the Indian population.66 India thus played a key role in sustaining the
British war effort.
Between 1915 and 1918, India’s balance of trade also shifted: it exported
more than it imported and its financial wealth expanded, not least because it
became a stable investment economy. India’s industrialization (much like that
of Japan) expanded in turn. The Tata Iron and Steel Works grew, as did the
number of hydro-electric projects, bringing electricity to cities like Bombay.67
By redirecting some of its export trade to the Asia-Pacific region, including
to the Russian port of Vladivostok and Japan, India was able to come out
of the war economically rejuvenated, even if its population suffered from
the same inflationary pressures as the rest of the world.68 These economic
developments had a significant impact on south Asian perspectives of their
role in the empire and heightened the politics of nationalism and demands
of self-rule and self-determination.
How ably well-functioning and industrial economies could supply the
belligerent needs of the European great powers is well illustrated by the
example of Japan. While Japan mounted military campaigns against German-
held territories in the Asia-Pacific, in general the Japanese government did
not sustain a heavily militarized nation-at-arms between 1914 and 1918.
Rather, the war years offered only incentives to grow Japan’s industries,
finances and economy.69 The economic power of the Japanese state grew
as its banks offered more than 1 billion yen’s worth of loans and shipped
a multitude of goods, products and crops to its European allies.70 Japanese
cities witnessed a 17 per cent growth as their industries boomed. But its
slums also grew alongside.71 The loss of European ships out of the Asia-
Pacific region offered further opportunities. By 1917, Japanese companies
controlled 55 per cent of the Pacific Ocean’s mercantile trade, much of
which had been dominated by Britain before 1914.72 By 1918, its foreign
trade share had increased by 300 per cent, its gold reserves ballooned and
Japanese investments in the Malaysian and Borneo plantation economies
heightened.73
Yet the war did not leave all Japanese people better off. Inflation,
declining wages and the scarcity of rice crops seriously affected the daily
lives of most Japanese. Discourses about ‘wantonly wasteful’ war profiteers
resulted in the imposition of an Anti-Profiteering Law in 1916 and the
government imposed rationing, price checks and restrictions on the sale of
essential goods as well.74 Many Japanese protested the undue interference in
their economy by the British, not least when German-Japanese firms were
blacklisted and a ban on luxury imports was imposed in Britain in 1916.75
The gap between rich and poor grew drastically during the war years,
drawing more middle-class men and women into the wage economy in the
hope of making ends meet. The socio-economic impact of the war left Japan
facing significant political challenges, including a spate of ‘rice riots’ and
workers’ strikes involving tens of thousands of people in 1917 and 1918.76
For the Ottoman empire, the economic consequences of the shift to
long-term economic warfare were truly drastic. The British and French
navies blockaded the Ottoman empire in the Mediterranean and Red seas
and around the Arabian gulf from the moment the Ottoman government
declared war in October 1914. They also intercepted camel traders entering
the empire from across Arabia.77 The Ottoman empire’s own closure of the
Dardanelles further exacerbated the supply problems, as did its requisitioning
policies and heightened taxation.78 The impact was fundamental for all
residents of the empire. Starvation affected communities across present-
day Syria, Lebanon and Palestine in 1915. The combination of blockade, a
locust plague and the Ottoman empire’s inability to centralize the movement
of resources effectively brought these regions close to social collapse that
year.79 In 1916, the entire empire (and much of Persia too) faced starvation
as a drought exacerbated the already meagre local supplies.
Given that the Ottomans were also dependent on foreign coal supplies
and that the Allied blockade prevented the export of local cash crops, locals
kept themselves alive by burning trees. The ecological consequences were
phenomenal and resulted in widespread deforestation and the cutting down
of old-growth olive groves and fruit orchards.80 Hyper-inflation ensued
and criminality expanded in the wake of these developments as did reports
of cannibalism and the spread of serious diseases like bubonic plague,
typhoid and typhus.81 Social crisis was inevitable. It is no surprise then to
find that for Middle Eastern communities, the First World War registers
as a ‘war of civilians’, a war, as the historian Najwa al-Qattan describes,
of ‘near annihilation’ that created a ‘world of beggars and beasts, animals
and cannibals’. A war that caused a rupture in time.82 Already in 1915, the
Ottoman empire’s subjects understood the meaning of total war in the most
fundamental of terms.
The Russian Romanov empire struggled in similar ways. The example
of India highlights how essential the impact of the German blockade of
the Baltic ports and the Ottoman closure of Dardanelles Straits was to the
viability of Russian wartime economy.83 As any good history of the Russian
revolutions of 1917 explains, the origins of Russian unrest and social
instability in 1917 lie in the inability of the Russian state to coordinate its
resources effectively to ensure an adequate standard of living for the Russian
people.84 The questions at play were not only about the ability of the Russian
government to effectively mobilize the domestic economy and industry for
total war. Russia’s troubles were also a product of the economic warfare
strategies conducted by its enemies. Whereas in 1913, the Russian balance
of trade sat at a healthy 146.1 million roubles, by the end of 1914 it faced
an import-export deficiency of 141.9 million roubles. By the end of 1915 the
Romanov government’s deficit sat at 8.8 billion roubles, a staggering 75.8
per cent of its overall outlay that year.85 Increasingly, the government relied
on its French and British allies to rescue it from financial disaster, although
it never managed to break through these essential supply issues.
Altogether the disruptive changes brought on by the shift to total
economic warfare in early 1915 were global in nature and impact. They
caused enormous alterations in trade patterns impacting on living standards
and human suffering. The shift ensured that food security became a weapon
of war, a weapon wielded against belligerent and neutral communities alike.
As the next chapter highlights, the limits of this ‘total war’ did not end with
the economy, they expanded to military violence as well. But as this chapter
highlights, very few people in the world were left unaffected by the war’s
economic effects.
Unsurprisingly, it was also in response to these everyday impacts of the
economic war that people around the world recast their understanding of
what ‘the war’ was about. The language of ‘just war’ – what was allowed,
permissible or expected in terms of the belligerent and neutral behaviour
in time of war – altered as the war progressed. Those perspectives involved
neutrals as much as belligerents. The ‘war profiteer’ was a hated trope
in neutral and belligerent communities alike. As such, the experience of
economic warfare in 1915 helped to ‘de-bound’ the norms and expectations
of the war globally.86 In many neutral countries, heated and at times
polemical political debates evolved about the value of remaining neutral and
of which belligerent side to support. These debates were informed by local
knowledge and prejudices as much as they were a reflection on the military
and economic progress of the wider world at war. The relative value of a
country’s ongoing neutrality played a powerful hand in these debates.87 For

neutrals like the United States in 1915, for example, the idea that the war
had unleashed a ‘will to profit’ at almost any cost evolved. While President
Woodrow Wilson continued to assert America’s right to ‘innocent trade’, this
conceptualization became increasingly untenable.88 As Chapter 6 highlights,
neutral communities responded to such claims by asserting alternative
neutral virtues, like humanitarianism. Unsurprisingly, then, it was in neutral
countries that the inherent value of the war was often most contested.89 But
as the next chapter also shows, after 1915, there was nary a community that
did not consider their future without some reference to ‘the war’.
76
5
The ‘barbarian’ next door: Total
war at home and abroad in 1915
As the Sixth Division of the Indian Expeditionary Force D (IEF-D) fought its
way on behalf of the British empire through Ottoman-ruled Mesopotamia in
1915, it occupied the towns of Basra, Qurna, Nasiriyah and Kut al-Amara.
Amidst the violence, one of the division’s Indian officers, Captain Kalyan
Kumar Mukherji, wrote a letter to his family asking an important question:
what had the enemy done to deserve this destructive fate?1 Privately, he
may also have wondered what he might have done to deserve a similarly
destructive fate. For by the time the IEF-D retreated from the Battle of
Ctesiphon back to Kut al-Amara on 3 December, it had endured tremendous
casualties.2 Soon, they were besieged in the town by the Ottoman Sixth Army.
Cut off from logistical support and without adequate rations, the 3,350
residents and 11,600 combatants in Kut suffered from severe malnutrition.3
Many died. The Hindu, Sikh and Gurkha troops were particularly affected
as they could not eat the only available protein: horse and mule flesh.4
Disaffection set in among the rank-and-file, helped along by some
judicious Ottoman leaflets, written in Urdu and Hindi that urged the soldiers
to defect. All up, seventy-two of them took up the offer. The few who were
caught escaping were summarily executed by their officers.5 In an attempt
to prevent news of the calamitous siege spreading through India and the rest
of the British empire, the military leadership in Kut denied the Indian troops
the right to write home.6 As an officer, Mukherji was exempt from the ban.
He wrote to his mother in April 1915:
After three months with very little to eat the troops are starving. The
mortality rate in the hospital has soared. In the last 15 days many have
died for lack of food. Of what use is medicine now? There’s nothing to
eat. People are coming to the hospital because starvation has made them
weak. With nothing to give them, how can we help? Apart from that,
there are no medicines left either.7
When all the food ran out on 29 April 1916, the town surrendered.8 It was
a jubilant day for the Ottoman empire. As one veteran recorded in his diary:
‘the English have never faced such a defeat anywhere’.9 For the emaciated
survivors of Kut, however, only more horror followed. The Jewish and Arab
civilian residents were held responsible for aiding the British occupiers and
were hanged from gallows to die.10 The British and Indian occupying soldiers
were taken as prisoners of war, most of them forced on a 160-kilometre
march across the desert to Baghdad. Thousands of them perished, either
due to starvation, dehydration, sunstroke or when they fell behind and were
left to the mercy of local raiders. Many of the survivors, Mukherji included,
subsequently died working on the Anatolia to Baghdad railway or in one of
the Ottoman empire’s neglected prisoner-of-war camps.11
In 1928, Mukherji’s grandmother published a memoir, in which she
included copies of her grandson’s war letters.12 One of those letters, written
before the siege of Kut in October 1915, reflected on the violent and
seemingly endless nature of the world war:
Unless something surprising happens suddenly – I don’t see why a war of

this kind should not go on for 20 years. So long as Germany can keep itself
supplied with provisions and weaponry I don’t think this [the British]
side will be able to advance. Nor does it seem possible for Germany
to advance any further into France. … In this one year of war a crore
of people (English, German, Russian, French, Indian, African together)
have been killed or wounded. Another crore of families are heart-broken
because of ‘Selfish nationalism: a most inhuman sentiment’. In other
words this war is proof that this brutal and selfish love of country – that
this awful, malign, sentiment is an obstacle for all humankind.13
Meanwhile, the British commander at Kut, Major-General Charles

Townshend, mobilized his sense of ethnic superiority and loyalty to empire
to reposition blame for the Kut disaster away from himself. He placed it
squarely at the feet of the Sixth Division’s Indian ‘sepoys’. ‘How easy the
defence of Kut would have been,’ he wrote, ‘had my division been an all
British one instead of a composite one.’14
The siege of Kut al-Amara offers an all too telling example of the human
costs of the shift to total war in 1915. The military stalemate or state of
‘mutual siege’15 that evolved in 1915 ensured that the belligerent powers
not only expanded their economic warfare’s parameters (as discussed
in the previous chapter), but also escalated their use of military violence
against soldiers and civilians alike. The warring governments’ willingness
to mobilize their military power to win ‘at almost any cost’ ensured that
few communities were effectively safe from harm. Total war required total
commitment to a belligerent cause: every advantage needed to be exploited,
no leeway could be allowed. Ultimately, the questions of ‘who to trust?’
and ‘what to do with those you distrust?’ dominated the military, economic
THE ‘BARBARIAN’ NEXT DOOR 79
ILLUSTRATION 5.1 This photograph of a group of Indian survivors of the siege

of Kut al-Amara (1915–1916) was taken during an exchange of prisoners between
the Ottoman and British empires in 1916. The soldiers not only suffered from
severe malnutrition during the four-month siege but also from maltreatment by the
Ottoman authorities once they were taken prisoner.
Source: Wikipedia.com.
and cultural mobilization of societies at war. Increasingly, they dominated

neutral societies too.
As explained in Chapter 4, the move to a long-war reality in 1915 helped
to radicalize the actions of the belligerent powers vis-à-vis their enemies and
neutrals. That chapter highlights some of the human costs of the shift to total
economic warfare. This chapter focuses on the totalization of the military
conduct of the war through 1915. It concentrates on the uses made of state
violence to facilitate military, strategic and economic advantages in the war
and to enforce compliance on subject, occupied and neutral populations.
Above all, it asks how the concepts of ‘loyalty’, ‘identity’ and ‘responsibility
to the state’ were mobilized within communities to justify and warrant the
escalation of violence against those who ‘could not be trusted’ and against
those who were not ‘on one’s side’.
The expansion of the total war ethos and the need for victory at almost
any cost had numerous consequences. At a state level it ensured that
belligerent governments mobilized the human and material resources at
their command to augment their chances of military success. This made
the civilian working for the war economy as valuable (and by extension
expendable) as the front-line soldier. It also made anyone aiding the enemy’s
war efforts – be they an actual enemy, a neutral, or a suspicious ‘Other’ living
in one’s own community – a justifiable target for surveillance, incarceration
and even eradication. The ‘barbarian’ living next door was as dangerous as
the one trying to kill you from afar. The results of the shift to the ‘total war’
mindset, then, were decisive.
Some of the most enduring images of the First World War’s many
hellscapes are of the industrialized trench lines that appeared on Europe’s
western front through the course of 1915. The belligerent powers did
everything they could think of to break the impasse on this front. Through
1915, their industrial production geared up. New weapons were invented;
their calibres expanded. The number of aeroplanes, machine guns, artillery
pieces, bullets and explosive shells proliferated. So, too, did the number
of soldiers manning the front. Their attacks across ‘no man’s land’ were
repeatedly repelled. Craters great and small pockmarked the trench lines that
snaked for thousands of kilometres across southern Belgium and northern
France, filled with mangled barbed wire, military debris and half-buried
fragments of dead horses and human bodies. Along the more mobile fronts
in eastern and southern Europe as well as in the Caucasus and Middle East,
villages and towns disappeared under the waxing and waning onslaught of
repeated military attacks.
As the war entrenched, both sets of belligerents experimented with
new weaponry, willingly violating the international laws of war. Their
scientists, including those working in universities across Britain, France
and Germany, experimented with chemical weapons, militarizing their
academic institutions in the process.16 The French trialled tear gas bullets
on the battlefield in August 1914 (to little effect), while the British worked
on sulphur dioxide weaponry. The Germans inserted tear gas and other
chemicals into artillery shells, which they fired across the western front
in October 1914 and used against the Russians on the Vistula in January
1915 (again with little effect).17 On 22 April 1915, however, Germany
successfully released chlorine gas from carefully placed cylinders on the
Gheluvelt peninsula near Ypres (in Belgium). As the gas distended across
‘no man’s land’ and the Allied trenches, it caused panic, then havoc among
the troops stationed there. This silent ‘unseen’ weapon that attacked the
internal organs was feared by soldiers and condemned by neutral and
belligerent communities alike, only in part because it was proscribed
by The Hague Conventions.18 As the German writer serving as part of
the Saxon Hussar regiment at Gheluvelt, Rudolf Binding, noted while
retrieving his fallen enemies’ guns: ‘The effects of the successful gas attack
were horrible. I am not pleased with the idea of poisoning men. Of course,
the entire world will rage about it first and then imitate us. All the dead
lie on their backs, with clenched fists, the whole field is yellow.’19 From
this point on, and despite the fact that gas warfare was far from effective
in ensuring a strategic breakthrough, chemical agents were produced by
every belligerent (and many neutrals too) and featured as a weapon on
almost every military front.20
What the use of chemical agents in 1915 highlights, above all, was the
belligerents’ desperation to win. Not only did they accept almost any degree
of suffering endured by their soldiers, but they were also willing to risk the
lives of enemy and neutral civilians. Bombs dropped from aeroplanes and
dirigibles extended the range of the violence, including against factories,
towns, railway lines and depots.21 These bombs made total war a military
reality for the many Europeans who otherwise lived far away from a military
front. Even the European neutrals were not safe when stray bombers
accidentally released their loads on neutral territory. The indiscriminate
mining of seas and waterways – sinking fishing vessels, passenger ships and
neutral commerce – further extended the violence. The expansion of the
Allied economic blockade in 1915 to include all foodstuffs, which risked
malnutrition and starvation among enemy and neutral civilians, further
expanded and intensified the conflict. The retaliatory use of U-boats by
Germany to target any ship sailing to or from Britain and France from
February 1915 on made the war fought against civilians in Europe all-
encompassing. It certainly did not stay contained in Europe.
Across 1915, the unprecedented expansion of military violence ensured
that the war became, what the historian John Horne so evocatively describes
as, a ‘world in itself’.22 Soldier artists and poets reflected on the personal
hell that was their war, often invoking the industrial and impersonal nature
of the violence they faced: the artillery that blew limbs right off or bodies
to smithereens, the shrapnel that shattered skin and ruined organs, the gas
masks that disfigured faces, the barbed wire that trapped them in ‘no man’s
land’, the ‘chiwaya’ sound of machine guns popping like popcorn in a tin
(as the Chichewa soldiers from south-east Africa recalled from their western
front experiences).23
But, as the historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau reminds us, none of
this violence was actually impersonal. Soldiers were the war’s first victims
but also its primary agents. Their weapons were both friends (protecting
them from potential harm) and turned them into killers.24 Unsurprisingly,
a soldier’s war experience was profoundly transformative. The trauma
reshaped personalities, inspired reflections about the war and why they were
fighting (much like Mukherji’s letters cited above) and incited questions of
loyalty to their comrades-in-arms and the authorities who caused them to
fight.
Given that soldiers came from all over the world, their war experiences
reverberated globally too. The In Flanders’ Field Museum in Ypres lists more
than fifty nationalities of veterans who served and died in the region between
1914 and 1918.25 The cosmopolitan nature of the western front, which by
the end of 1915 included soldiers and military labourers from China and
all parts of the French and British empires in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and
Caribbean, astounded some of them. One South African soldier serving with
the South African Native Labour Corps in France was surprised ‘to see the
different kinds of human races from all parts of the world’.26 Other African
troops acknowledged that they lost their fear of ‘killing a white man’ on the
western front.27 Many were only too alert to the ongoing racial hierarchies
at play in this war of the world, which was being fought for the power and
prestige of Europeans.28
Neutrals too bore witness to military violence, often at a distance through
refugee accounts or voyeuristically through newspaper articles, photographs
and moving pictures.29 Occasionally, they witnessed it first hand, as medics
at a war front, as passengers or crew on a ship navigating the militarized
seas, or even when stray bombs dropped on neutral soil or a loose sea mine
exploded on a neutral beach. They asked equally searching questions of
their own loyalties, identities and responsibilities in the war.
If ‘soldiers are made to get themselves killed’, as Napoleon so famously
quipped, then belligerent states needed persuasive reasons to promote,
enforce and, at times, coerce their citizens and subjects to undertake this vital
role. In all cases, soldiers needed to be convinced that the cause for which
they were offering up their (and their families’) lives was worth the sacrifice.
The question of loyalty to a war cause was always riven with tensions. Why
would a young man from a west African town leave everything familiar
behind to fight in a war on behalf of a colonial government who did not
recognize his rights as a citizen of France? Why would Kalyan Mukherji join
the Indian Expeditionary Force to fight for an empire that repeatedly rejected
his country’s requests for self-determination? Why would the families of any
new soldier allow them to serve in a war that might get them killed?
The answers to these questions lay in a complex web of loyalties and
obligations, in which personal convictions and concepts of duty played
vital roles. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, some soldiers were convinced
that the war was fought for the survival of civilization itself. For others the
violence committed by the enemy fixated a hatred or a desire for revenge.30
Yet others went to war for the adventure, a chance to see the world or to
‘test one’s manhood’ as one Nyasaland volunteer noted years later.31 For
many, the opportunism of ‘proving’ one’s loyalty to the nation or empire by
showing up to fight, regardless of the costs, was all-important. Others went
to war because they had no choice. Loyalty, in this sense, could also aim at
political and economic gains. As we noted in Chapter 2, this could include
ambitions for gaining greater equality be it for a colonized community or a
marginalized group. Most women in belligerent societies did not have the
right to vote, for example. Some of them hoped that by fully supporting
the war they might gain greater recognition of their right to participate as
equals in political society alongside men.32
The belligerent governments certainly mobilized the promise of post-

war gains to persuade volunteers to join up and to assuage the fears of
conscripted troops. Recruitment posters in India, published in an array of
local languages, enticed volunteers with the promise of free clothes and a
good wage alongside an opportunity to fulfil a duty to King and empire,
to ‘demonstrate bravery’ and ‘do one’s family proud’.33 Across the British
Dominions and in Ireland too, similarly styled posters asked ‘Your chums
are fighting? Why aren’t you?’34 Meanwhile Bantu recruits for the South
African Native Labour Contingent were asked by their local newspaper
to ‘play our part’ in this ‘world war’ because ‘without you, your white
comrades cannot do anything, they cannot fight and provide labour at the
same time’. Thus, ‘please, everyone who loves his country and respects the
British Government, join this war without hesitation. Forward! Forward!’35
As will become clear in the next chapter, maintaining these loyalties became
increasingly difficult as the war lengthened into 1916 and beyond. Loyalties
could shift, and they were much more likely to do so in the face of terrible
odds or consequences. As a western-front veteran from Nyasaland recalled:
‘The government told the chief that there was war; the chief informed his
people. He asked us young people to help the [British] government fight the
Germans. I lost confidence in the chief; he was a betrayer. He would make
us die in the war.’36 For an Indian soldier, the ‘moral contract’ he thought
he had signed with the British empire was nullified when he was not sent
home after suffering a terrible wound and enduring an extensive stay in a
British hospital. His loyalty, as Santanu Das explains, was not honoured by
the government who had called on his gallant services in the first place.37
Instead he was made to go back to fight a war of horrors. Another Punjabi
soldier serving on the western front also begged his family in 1915: ‘For
God’s sake, don’t come, don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe … tell
my brother Muhammud Yakub for God’s sake not to enlist.’38 His words are
almost identical to those of a Vietnamese soldier who wrote home urging his
friends to resist recruitment: ‘My friend! It is better that you do not come
here. I would advise you to come here in peacetime. But it is wartime. Stay
there.’39
What all these developments also had in common was that the shift
to total war resulted in an ever-increasing emphasis on identity. National
and imperial identities sat at the heart of most belligerent discourses: their
war was fought in defence of the nation, the empire, the people and the
foundations of ‘civilization’ against the existential threats presented by
enemy nations, empires and people. To that end, military service supposedly
existed as a unifying force, bringing the nation and empire together against
a common enemy.40 The result of such ‘unifying’ conceptualizations was that
anyone who was not a clearly identifiable member of the nation or empire,
or did not abide by the requirements to serve the nation or empire, could be
targeted as a potential threat.
As John Horne explains, these enemies lived not only far away, but also
in one’s own community, in one’s street, and could possibly be counted
among one’s friends and colleagues. The shift to total war, thus, also resulted
in a shift to identifying ‘treasonable element[s] who potentially threatened
the national or imperial effort with betrayal’.41 Fear and suspicion about
these alien ‘Others’ heightened popular anxieties. States, communities and
individuals alike played up pre-existing prejudices to root out these ‘enemies
within’. Nationality, ethnicity, religious or pacifist beliefs, even gender, age
and class, all played their part in informing on suspicious ‘Others’, whose
loyalty to the war cause was not immediately obvious and, at the very least,
ought to be policed.
Acting on these suspicions often resulted in more violence. In almost
every belligerent society, enemy subjects were incarcerated in internment
camps. Foreign shops and businesses were eschewed, while spy mania
captured the public’s imagination. Most states introduced border security
measures, extended passport-control systems and supervised the movement
of people and goods across their territory. The state played an increasingly
invasive role in the lives of individuals, monitoring communities for signs of
wavering loyalty and pushing them to sacrifice even more in service of the
war. But so too did ordinary people. The shift to questioning the loyalties
and identities of one’s neighbours also extended to neutral countries, whose
governments and populace increasingly feared that an unseen ‘enemy within’
was working for one or other belligerent and would force them to join the
war.42
Altogether, throughout 1915 the idea that countries and communities
had a ‘right to use violence’ to police their societies against the threat of the
‘enemy within’ became normalized. The socio-political dynamics of the war
thus also framed new conceptions of ‘loyalty’ and ‘belonging’, purposely
excluding those that did not fit. None of this happened, however, without
also inspiring a massive amount of public questioning. A case study of the
global response to the sinking of the British luxury liner, the RMS Lusitania,
on 7 May 1915 brings out the interplay of these dynamics of violence,
loyalty and identity all too well.
When the commander of the U20 U-boat decided to torpedo the Lusitania
on intercepting the large Cunard liner off the coast of southern Ireland,
he understood many things.43 He knew that the ship was sailing under
instruction of the British Admiralty and had enough weapons on board to
be converted into an armoured cruiser, ready for war service.44 He knew it
was travelling within Germany’s declared warzone while visiting two enemy
harbours (Liverpool and Cherbourg). He also understood that the Lusitania
was a luxury cruise ship, with nine passenger decks, transporting hundreds of
civilians from Britain via France to New York. There is no question that the
commander felt within his rights to torpedo the ship, sinking it and leaving
its hapless passengers and crew to drown or be picked up by nearby vessels.
This was war, after all. The neutral Americans on-board had, at least, been
warned by the German government, who had placed advertisements in a

number of New York newspapers not to travel through Germany’s declared
war zone at the risk of losing their lives.
Lusitania’s sinking cost 1,198 passengers and crew their lives. Their
bodies beached on the Irish coast, to be buried in local cemeteries. While it
was not the first (or, for that matter, last) passenger ship to be sunk as part
of Germany’s U-boat campaigns in 1915, it was the largest and caused the
greatest number of civilian deaths as well as the greatest number of deaths
among citizens of neutral countries (including 128 Americans). What almost
no one could have foreseen was the storm of protest and outrage that ensued
in response to the sinking, nor the acts of violence that it provoked against
Germans, Austrians and other enemy ‘aliens’ around the Allied world.
The Lusitania inspired emotive responses among all who encountered
the news of its sinking. If they were pro-German, they were enraged by the
need for Germany to use such horrifying and retaliatory tactics in the first
place. After all, the German warzone was established to fight back against
the British and French-imposed ‘hunger blockade’ which, as the German
Foreign Office’s formal response to the Lusitania attack argued, constituted
a barbaric ‘plan of starving the civilian population of Germany’.45 ‘Gott mit
uns!’ (God with us!) and ‘Gott strafe Engeland!’ (God punish England!)
became rallying cries for revenge across Germanophone communities.46
These popular German representations celebrated the Lusitania’s sinking
as an essential act in a righteous war against a barbaric enemy.47 German
academics published treatises that carefully explained the legalities of
Germany’s actions and emphasized the breaches of the law made by their
enemies.48
Outside these German communities, the more common response was
outrage directed at Germany for breaching the standards of civilized warfare,
yet again. For centuries, the law of war at sea required warships to warn
targets that they would be sunk, so that the people on board could safely
exit them. It also required that nearby vessels (including the warship itself)
would pick up any survivors. Neither of these things happened in 1915.
Given the concurrence of the Lusitania incident with Germany’s release of
gas warfare at Ypres and the publication of the Bryce report, any value that
pro-German propaganda may have had in neutral and enemy communities
before May 1915 collapsed.49 Americans were particularly outraged. They
also feared that due to Germany’s actions, the United States might be forced
to become a belligerent, ending their long-term isolationist foreign policy.50
Importantly, this neutral outrage mattered to the German government. It
could not afford to risk the United States’ entry into the war, nor that of its
closest neutral neighbours. It relied too heavily on the economic resources
that could still be obtained from the Scandinavians, Swiss and Dutch, and
feared what opening another military front so close to its borders might do
to its chances of victory. As a result, in September 1915, it officially halted
its indiscriminate U-boat campaigns. This did not mean that neutral ships
or passenger liners were not sunk by German warships after 1915. Several
dozen were, and Germany resumed its wholesale U-boat attacks in 1917.
But when these sinkings involved a neutral vessel, the German government
often extended some kind of compensation or formal apology, as they had
done with the Zaanstroom.51 But the public relations damage could not be
undone. As Frank Trommler so persuasively argues, the Lusitania became a
‘free floating signifier of aggression’ that Germany could not escape.52 Much
like the ‘rape of Belgium’ motif, the Lusitania fed anti-German propaganda
and popular actions throughout the war.
The Lusitania also inspired a range of popular reprisal actions against
German communities. Throughout May 1915, in Britain, France and Russia,
locals targeted (alleged) German families and businesses with violence.
The riots in London were some of the worst recorded in British history,
resulting in the mobilization of 30,000 special constables and the wounding
of 257 people, the looting of shops and widespread damage to German
and Austrian community spaces.53 These ‘amazing scenes of wreckage’, as a
New Zealand newspaper described them,54 were also repeated in Moscow,
where locals combined anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism to attack ‘alien’
residents with German-sounding names regardless of whether they had
lived in their community for generations or whether they were actually
German.55 Despite the fact that both London and Moscow had thrived as
cosmopolitan spaces prior to the war and contained tens of thousands of
Germanophone residents, after May 1915 their identity as ‘Germans’ made
them particularly unsafe.
The Lusitania sinking thus offered an emotionally charged outlet for
the pent-up fears and frustrations that the war exacted in many belligerent
communities. It provided a justifiable rationale to identify, isolate and (in
the case of Russia above) even to murder these alien ‘Others’.56 Such acts of
‘civic cleansing’, as Nicoletta Gullace describes them, offered the powerless
a measure of control over ‘the war’ by identifying even more vulnerable
individuals they could attack. Inevitably, these acts of identification, isolation
and eradication reimagined entire communities.57
In the ethnic melting-pot port city of Liverpool, for example, the Lusitania
inspired a group of slum-dwelling Irish port workers, whose families had
lost so many of their ‘best’ men to the western front, to the Royal Navy
and to the merchant marine, to take action. Once the list of Lusitania’s
drowned passengers and crew (many of whom were locals) were released,
their communal grief broke. As the then fourteen-year-old Pat O’Mara
recalled in his memoirs, the local fish-and-chip shop owner, Mrs Seymour,
led the mob to attack anyone and anything remotely German. Previously
well-respected and admired members of the community, who were now
identified as having some (however tenuous) link to Germany, had their
shop windows knocked in and looted. Mr Yaag, the butcher whose sons
were serving in the British army in France, had no inkling that he might be
considered ‘suspicious’. When the mob came to his shop, he appeared at the
ILLUSTRATION 5.2 This powerful and emotive recruitment poster, designed by

the American artist Fred Spear in response to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in
1915, reminded its (mainly British) audience about Germany’s perfidy in sinking
the passenger liner, killing innocents. It hoped to inspire belligerent populations to
volunteer their service to fight the ‘barbaric’ Germans who allowed such acts to
happen.
Source: Fred Spear, artist, ‘Enlist’, recruitment poster, 1915, Sackett and Wilhelms
Corporation, in Library of Congress, POS - US.S656, no. 1, LC-DIG-ppmsca-50552.
door full of smiles, but he nevertheless had his belly ‘kicked in’.58 As Gullace
describes: ‘The bonds of friendship and even kinship rarely mitigated the
attacks on Germans. O’Mara even sacked the house of his own uncle and
thought little of “having fun” at the expense of his former friends.’59
Across Britain and its Dominions in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and
South Africa, similar riots broke out. They were particularly heated in multi-
ethnic South Africa, where the war had repeatedly strained the competing
loyalties of South Africa’s various communities. In Pietermaritzburg, a
town of 8,000 Europeans (Anglophone, European and Afrikaner), 8,000
indigenous Africans and 7,000 Indians, the heated language of the Lusitania
news led to an outward showing of support for the British empire by the
Anglophone community. Over the course of two nights, this mob, singing
patriotic songs accompanied by bugle and drum, attacked German shops,
burnt property and damaged public spaces.60 Johannesburg also experienced
such riots, as did Cape Town and Durban. Here too, the chance to assert
control over public space by invoking loyalty to the wider imperial war
cause played a key role. For, as the Johannesburg Star explained: ‘it was
not the hooligan who was at work [during the Lusitania riots of 12 May].
It was the well-dressed man, … who was determined to wipe something off
his slate.’61
The Lusitania incident highlights how the emotions of war preyed on the
interchange between state and society. Governments certainly mobilized this
popular anti-enemy fervour through their own propaganda and laws, in part
to keep the loyalty of their population fully focused on ‘winning the war’.
After May 1915, the Allied governments also heightened their actions against
enemy ‘aliens’ residing in their countries. In Australia, parliamentarians
called for the seizure of German businesses and private property.62 In New
Zealand’s capital city of Wellington, the local German-language professor
at Victoria College was asked to ‘abstain from communicating with other
Germans’ in order to keep his academic appointment.63 Ultimately, German
and Austrian residents, regardless of whether they were naturalized or born
locally, were picked up and imprisoned in camps. Across the British empire,
from Gibraltar to Sri Lanka to the Samoan islands, tens of thousands of
enemy ‘aliens’ were corralled into camps, quarantined from the rest of
society.64 The rest of the belligerent world followed suit, setting up prison
camps to intern their enemy ‘Others’.65 Even neutrals used imprisonment as
a way of controlling foreign residents who might complicate or endanger
their neutrality.66 Between 1914 and 1918, the neutral Netherlands had
camps for Belgian refugees, for foreign soldiers who had violated neutrality
by entering Dutch territory, for former prisoners of war who had escaped
their camps in Germany, and even for impoverished Dutch migrants who
returned from Belgium and Germany but could not afford the cost of living
‘back home’.67
These acts of incarceration ensured that the First World War, as the
historian Panikos Panayi argues, became a ‘turning point in the persecution
of minorities’.68 The impact on internees was predictably powerful.69 As

Richard Noschke, a German-born clerk who lived in London’s East Ham,
explained to his children:
I often wonder how was it possible that the English people after me being
a Resident in that Country for 25 years with an English wife, a grown up
Family, the best of Character, 20 years in one situation, could turn on me
so bitter … I had made many friends … but I am sorry to say, that nearly
all … have turned against me, even my own direct family relations never
even sent me as much as a postcard all the time I was interned.70
Yet even in neutral countries, these popular inclinations to strident

nationalism, racism and xenophobia pitted migrant communities (from
enemy countries) against each other.71 Across the world, these empathies
estranged family members and rejigged loyalties. They also offered a ready
feeding ground for more extreme acts of violence.72
In territories newly occupied by an invading army, the interplay between
violence and loyalty was particularly volatile. The Germans who invaded
Belgium, Luxembourg and France in August 1914 were by no means
alone in treating the local population with extreme violence. Even though
The Hague Conventions outlined basic humanitarian responsibilities for
occupying armies, conquest bred its own logic, as Sophie de Schaepdrijver
notes.73 Inevitably, the needs of the war outweighed any responsibility that
the occupying forces may have felt to uphold the international laws of war.
The occupier’s law prevailed, militarily and administratively. As a result, any
resident in occupation who could be considered a danger to the war effort –
such as a spy, propagandist or even a person of the ‘wrong’ religion or
ethnicity – could be suppressed, incarcerated or removed. ‘Needless mouths’
had to be made productive to support the war effort, which included forcing
enemy civilians to work in essential industries and moving them into prison-
like work camps.74 Occupation also opened up spaces for colonization and
imperial expansion, be it in Europe or the Middle East, Japanese-occupied
Tsingtao or the New Zealand-occupied Samoan islands.
Across 1915 and beyond, occupied territories became, in the words
of Annette Becker, a testing ground for population displacement and
repression: ‘To some extent these zones became the laboratories of an
atypical front whose “artillery” and “gas” took the form of exodus,
deportation, forced labor or the concentration camp.’75 The transgressions
that occurred on the military fronts, thus, had their counterparts in the
transgressions that occurred against these ‘suspicious’ civilian populations.
In occupied territories that experienced invasions and counter invasions
in quick succession (including for the residents of Kut al-Amara described
at the start of this chapter), the dangers were particularly acute. How one
differentiated an enemy from a friend altered with each oscillation of power
and authority. How to prove one’s reliability to the new authorities could
mean the difference between life and death, deportation or a chance to share
in the spoils of war.76 Civilians in occupation were rarely passive victims.
They played vital roles in the dynamics of power, control and governance of
occupied regions. Some of them saw new opportunities when an invading
army arrived because they had suffered so much under the previous regime.
Others collaborated to save their own lives, to profiteer or to advance their
own political influence. A few resisted the occupation authorities, risking
everything in the name of loyalty to a bigger cause, or because alternate
routes were closed to them, for example, when they were classified as enemy
‘aliens’ or as traitors by the state or their neighbours.
As an example, consider the war experiences of the people who lived in the
expansive Galician borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the
Russian armies first attacked Austria-Hungary in the autumn of 1914. Well
before the Russian invasion, the Austro-Hungarian authorities were fearful
of the anti-imperial loyalties of Galicia’s population, including its Poles,
Ukrainians and Ruthenians. As ‘little Russians’, the 3.2 million Ruthenians
of Galicia were particularly worrisome, not least as Tsar Nicholas II had
ambitions to reacquire Galicia as part of the Russian empire.77 As a result,
some 600,000 Ruthenians were forcibly moved out of Galicia’s border
regions by the Austro-Hungarian authorities and housed in improvised
refugee camps further west. If they refused to move, they faced instant
retribution and were treated as potential enemy collaborators. Paranoia
spurred the violence. Already in 1914, the corpses of Ruthenian villagers
littered roadsides, ‘bobbing in the wind’ hanging from trees, in scenes that
would be replayed in occupied Serbia in 1915.78 As the Austrian Chief of
the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, explained: ‘we fight on
our own territory as in a hostile land.’79 Of the Ruthenians who made it to
the camps, more than a third perished of malnutrition or disease.80
Once the Russian forces captured Galicia in 1914, they too used
extreme force to cleanse the region of its ‘unreliable’ civilian residents.
In first instance, they targeted the region’s 872,000 Jews and 90,000
German-Austrians.81 Pogroms, robberies, sexual assaults, murder and the
wholesale destruction of property were common place activities conducted
by the Russian forces in Galicia through the course of 1914 and 1915.82
They also promoted local Ruthenians to the status of full Russians, in
the hope of Russifying the region quickly.83 Yet because of their desperate
and violent efforts, the Russian occupiers increasingly alienated the locals.
Hundreds of thousands fled into Austria-Hungary, escaping the Russian
occupation. These refugees needed places to stay and food to sustain them.
Through 1915, Galicia’s refugees as well as those escaping the empire’s
Italian territories (after Italy joined the war in April) were perceived as
‘unnecessary co-eaters’ by the communities in which they reluctantly re-
housed.84 Annoyance, fear and anxiety upset social cohesion and loyalties
even in these unoccupied regions.
Significantly, Galicia was recaptured twice more before the end of the war.
In May 1915, a combined German and Austrian force drove the Russians
out, re-occupying the territory. In response, hundreds of thousands of

Ruthenians fled to Russia. In 1916, under the leadership of General Brusilov,
the Russian occupiers returned, reclaiming large parts of Galicia as their
own. Each invasion, hugely violent and costly in terms of military casualties,
also caused immense civilian suffering. For as Alexander Watson explains,
‘the warring Habsburg and Romanov Empires’ racialized fantasies of
treason and brutal reprisals interlocking and spiraling’ ultimately uprooted,
killed and deported millions of supposedly ‘disloyal’ residents and turned
Galicia into a bloodbath.85
Across the borderlands between Russia and its enemies, similar acts
of ‘civic cleansing’ and ‘denationalization’86 occurred. These included the
deportation by the Russians of hundreds of thousands of ‘hostile’ locals
from the Baltics and Poland, many of whom ended up in exile in Siberia.87
Each side framed the religious and ethnic ties of the various communities
as a reason to displace, incarcerate or kill them off.88 Russian pogroms
against Jews and Muslims in the Caucasus were common.89 The Russians
also mobilized Armenian and Georgian volunteers into regiments to
attack Kurdish tribal forces. These Kurds, in turn, mobilized themselves in
support of the Ottoman empire’s declaration of jihad against their Christian
opponents and in the hope of obtaining greater regional autonomy.90
Through the course of 1915, the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman empire
authorized the ‘cleansing’ of its Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christian
communities. The claim that these Christians were loyal to the enemy
because of their religion and their history of anti-imperial politics presented
an emotive rationale to declare them an internal security threat. Policing
that risk empowered the agents of the Ottoman state to forcibly relocate
1.1 million Greeks out of the empire’s Balkan borderlands in 1914 and to
murder more than 1.5 million Armenians through the course of 1915.91 The
Armenian genocide involved mass executions, death marches, concentration
camps and starvation tactics. Many of the young Armenian women –
estimates range up to 200,000 in total – were not killed but kidnapped,
married off to Muslim men, enslaved and sexually assaulted. As one of these
women recalled of her enslavement at the age of twelve by a Kurdish family:
The Vali’s wife loved me like a mother, and he loved me like a lover …
and I love nobody. What did they leave me to love when they killed the
last of my family?92
In combination with the famine that wrecked much of the Middle East in
1915, these acts of personal violence cleft the social fabric of the Ottoman
empire.93
These stories of wartime suffering also illustrate how a ‘home front’ was
rarely a ‘safe’ place or an ‘escape’ from the war. Death, disease and violence
occurred on all the war’s fronts, at home and abroad. Soldiers worried about
the families they left behind as much as any family worried about those
who had ‘gone to war’. In this world of total war, then, belligerent civilians
were far from passive agents or bystanders. As Leila Fawaz explains in

her history of Ottoman society coping with the daily struggles of wartime
survival: ‘while those in more modest social circles avoided drawing the
attention of officials, relying for survival on their own wit, resourcefulness,
and networks of family and friends, others played the system and sought
out ways to profit from the war.’94 That sentence could also have been
written about occupied Belgium, northern France, Serbia, Romania, Galicia
or Poland during the war or about any number of belligerent societies in
Europe, Asia and Africa.95
Significantly, neutral communities did not escape the war’s spiral of
violence nor the questioning of the loyalties that it entailed. A neutral
country was not necessarily a ‘safe’ space, even if it was usually safer than
a belligerent space. Chapter 6 describes some of the ways in which neutral
communities and governments mobilized their neutrality to ‘do good’ in the
war and to mediate or alleviate its violence. Yet more often than not, there
was very little neutrals could do but bear witness to the war’s violence and
to write their reports. Yet in reporting, they also undertook a vital role: they
made the war’s extremes more publicly visible. As David Monger argues, the
neutral diplomats stationed in the Ottoman empire helped to make sure that
news of the Armenian genocide was shared with the world.96 And in sharing
the news, these neutrals ensured that questions of whether such violence was
warranted permeated the global media as well.
The belligerents were also highly alert to the power of the neutral press.
Capturing the ‘hearts and minds’ of the neutrals was considered vitally
important. After all, today’s neutral could be tomorrow’s enemy. As a result,
while public diplomacy was important before 1914, the First World War elevated
its stakes exponentially.97 To this end, the British government set up a secret War
Propaganda Bureau in 1914 to influence neutral media.98 The Germans too
quickly realized that offering neutral journalists access to the warfront helped
to mitigate some of the anti-German war news.99 It took the French much
longer to mobilize neutral reporters in the same way, but soon even Belgium’s
government-in-exile operated an active press campaign in neutral countries.
That so much energy was expended on the ‘war of words’ in neutral
spaces highlights just how significant the belligerent governments believed
the support of neutrals to be. It also recognized how essential the global
public sphere was to determining acceptable ‘norms’ of warfare. As a result,
much of the propaganda that aimed at shaping the loyalty of neutrals was
similar to the messages that belligerent governments projected to their own
populations. In both cases, presenting a convincing case for the necessity of
a certain wartime action, especially when it transgressed existing norms or
breached an international law, was paramount.
All the great power belligerents engaged in extensive propaganda
campaigns aimed at persuading neutral and subject populations that their side
was fighting a ‘just war’ against an ideological enemy and that, unlike their
enemies, their own war activities were lawful. Such messages were promoted
in a multitude of ways. They published books, pamphlets and documents

‘proving’ the enemy’s responsibility for the war. They payed journalists to
publish belligerent-friendly reports. The British were particularly adept at
circulating glossy illustrated war magazines. Of these, the Spanish-language
America Latina and Portuguese O Espelho circulated across Latin America
on fortnightly basis. Around 75,000 copies of Al Hakikat were regularly
disseminated across the Middle East in Arabic, Persian, Hindustani and
Turkish. Cheng Pao, a Mandarin-language periodical promoting the Allied
war effort, had a regular distribution of 108,000. Even more impressive was
the distribution of 750,000 copies of the monthly War Pictorial in English,
French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Greek, Danish,
Swedish, German, alongside Senji Gaho (Japanese), Warta Yang Tulus
(Malay), Satya Vani (Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil) and Jang Akhbar,
which was published in Hindi, Urdu and Gurumkhi.100
Some of this neutral targeting was very specific. The French government,
for example, funded a newspaper in Spain entitled Iberia, which was run by
a pro-Catalan independence group and aimed both at Catalan self-rule and
at advancing a pro-Entente neutrality policy for Spain.101 For its part, the
Ottoman government used its special services to promote jihad and incite
Muslim communities across the world to rise up against the British and
French empires.102 In response, the British targeted Muslim communities
with anti-German messages that also aimed at discrediting the Ottoman
empire. They even tried to persuade Chinese Muslims that the Germans
were anti-Islamic in intent.103
The neutral United States presented a particularly important and captive
audience for these belligerent propaganda ministrations. The American
media landscape was inundated with opinions, perspectives and calls for and
against wartime action.104 Even the Encyclopedia Britannica – the British
empire’s foremost authority on knowledge – advertised its Britannica Book
of the War in American newspapers on the grounds that ‘you want to know
the merits of the Great War, of course’.105 Hollywood produced a range of
full-length cinematic documentaries, often funded directly by the belligerent
governments, looking to persuade American and other neutral audiences of
wartime events and their significance.106
As we have seen, Germany had a distinct disadvantage in these media
wars. But, as both belligerent sides expanded their warmongering, targeted
civilians and repeatedly breached the laws of war, their representations of the
enemy’s inherent barbarism, left many wondering whether the descent into
total war had caused morality itself to collapse globally.107 The journalist
Juan José de Soiza Reilly, who was stationed in Europe to report on the
progress of the war for an Argentine newspaper, mobilized increasingly
more anti-war reflections in his reports. At times, he critiqued the ‘silent war
of famine’ that Britain enforced on Germany. At others, he despaired at the
‘true war, the one I see, the one I hear, the one I smell’, ‘the common war,
the vulgar, dirty, stinking war of human beings who eat one another, like
cannibals’, a war which had its own dynamism of destruction.108
While many neutrals grew weary of the war through 1915, many
belligerent communities grew wary of neutrals. In Britain, German-
speaking Swiss nationals were often interned as enemy aliens. Any protests
to this internment were rebuked with claims that Swiss neutrality was
itself suspect (in part because of Switzerland’s proximity to Germany and
Austria-Hungary).109 Where, in Germany at the start of the war, businesses
actively recruited workers from neighbouring neutral countries for their
essential industries, after 1915, municipalities started repatriating these
workers (and other residents from neutral countries) when they lost their
jobs or their German-born soldier husbands. Without the means to survive
or support the German war effort, these ‘useless eaters’ from ‘suspect’
countries were not supported like German-born residents.110 Similarly,
through 1915 more than 150,000 workers from neutral China travelled
on the Trans-Siberian Railway to take up jobs in essential Russian war
industries. Increasingly, their presence exacerbated social tensions and
heightened fears among the Russians that these neutral foreigners were
German spies or saboteurs.111 Through the course of 1915, then, the value
of neutrality became suspect.
Yet a non-belligerent’s war experience could be as profoundly
transformative and traumatic as that of any soldier.112 Whether as a neutral
or belligerent civilian, a refugee or interned individual, child or adult, the
personal experience of war inspired new questions and reflections.113 It also
brought the most unlikely combinations of people in contact with each other:
be it a New Zealand X-ray technician working among the array of multi-
national soldiers fighting for the French and British on the Salonika front in
Greece, or her Canadian nurse counterpart stationed on the Mediterranean
island of Lemnos;114 be it a German soldier captured during the siege of
Tsingtao, who spent the rest of his war years in a Japanese internment camp
or a journalist from neutral Latin America reporting the war straight from
the western front; be it a Turkish prisoner of war captured on the Anatolian
front with Russia, interned in Siberia and finally repatriated back to Turkey
in 1922 out of the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok;115 or be it Mukherji’s
compatriot, Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari, an orderly working for the Bengal
Ambulance Corps who served in a hospital in Aleppo and witnessed the
slaughter of the Armenians. Santanu Das describes Sarbadhikari’s wartime
memoirs, which were published in 1957 under the title Abhi le Baghdad
(‘So much for taking Baghdad’), as ‘All Quiet on the Western Front turned
upside down – from a noncombatant, non-white and non-Western Front
perspective’.116 Sarbadhikari’s memoirs speak of the horror of the battlefield,
the terror experienced by the wounded, and the personal friends and enemies
made in the melting-pot of a wartime hospital site, where individuals from
all over the globe unexpectedly met and asked new questions of themselves
and each other. As Sarbadhikari retrospectively framed his conversations

with wounded Ottoman soldiers:
We spoke of our lands, our joys and sorrows … One thing that they
always used to say was, ‘This war that we are fighting – what is our stake
in this? Why are we slashing each others’ throats? You stay in Hindustan,
we in Turkey, we do not know each other, share no enmity, and yet we
became enemies overnight because one or two people deemed it so’.117
What Sarbadhikari’s experiences highlight, above all, was that the loyalties
expected of subjects and citizens in total war were not only hard to maintain
but also shifted in response to the actual experience of war. The escalation
of violence through the course of 1915 – this ‘world in itself’ – reflected how
vital the dynamics of loyalty and distrust were in belligerent and neutral
communities. As we will see in the next few chapters, those dynamics were
mercurial, prone to change with the shifting sands of the war and with
shifting perceptions of ‘what is this war about?’ and ‘what does it mean for
me?’118 As the war dragged on into a seemingly endless test of endurance
through the course of 1916, many of the loyalties it initially inspired shifted.
Belligerent and neutral governments found it increasingly difficult to sustain
or coerce the support of their subjects and citizens in the face of mounting
casualty rates, rationing and inflation.
96
6
The test of endurance:
Rethinking the war in 1916
When Léon Daudet first used the term guerre totale (total war) in a 1916
editorial, he did so to describe his anxieties about the seemingly endless
nature of the war.1 As a staunch monarchist, Daudet was no stranger to
controversy. He had gained renown in France for his spy stories and anti-
German polemics.2 In this editorial, however, his main concern was to
acknowledge that ‘the war’ had transformed into a brutal, inescapable and
all-encompassing reality.3 The editorial emphasized how the war forced dire
‘life-or-death’ choices on soldiers and civilians alike. Its brutality infiltrated
every French person’s life.4 When in 1918, Daudet subsequently expanded
his definition of ‘total war’ as a struggle of ‘political, economic, commercial,
industrial, intellectual, legal and financial domains’, he did so to give
historical form to these collective war experiences.5
This chapter focuses on the year 1916 as a fulcrum of the condition
of total global war that developed through the course of 1915. For while
the ‘mutual siege’ between the major belligerents did not ease in 1916, and
would not ease for almost two more years after that, the willingness of
ordinary people to accept and accommodate ‘the war’ in their lives started to
shift, sometimes in radical ways. War weariness was a global phenomenon.
In the face of this weariness and as they experienced ever greater economic
deprivations, many questioned the existing narratives as to why this war
was being fought or why their neutrality needed to be upheld. In growing
numbers, they began to push-back against the authorities who were asking
them to sacrifice even more. In this contentious interplay between state and
society about what the total war demanded of each of them lay the root
cause of enormous social and political instability.
Despite engaging in some extremely destructive military campaigns
and suffering enormous casualty counts, neither set of belligerents made a
decisive strategic breakthrough between January and December 1916. In
one of the most devastating days of the entire war, the British empire lost
57,000 soldiers during the first twenty-four hours of its Somme offensive.
The battle for the Somme in the summer of 1916 caused more than a
million casualties altogether.6 The French empire too ‘bled white’ its army,
losing 351,000 troops defending the Verdun salient from a German attack.
The Germans lost an almost equal number of casualties.7 Russia’s 1916
Brusilov offensives may have been the ‘greatest victory seen on any front’
and enabled Russia to re-occupy Galicia, yet they failed to collapse the
Austro-Hungarian front by the onset of winter.8 These Galician campaigns
resulted in more than 1.2 million military casualties, including the capture
of 300,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war.9 It also exhausted Russia’s
and Austria-Hungary’s armies to the point of open rebellion. The campaigns
fought in central Africa in and around Cameroon and the Congo and in
south-east Africa in 1916 resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, especially
among the African-born carrier corps.10 Strategic stasis in 1916, much as
it had done in 1915, involved an incredible amount of human endeavour,
violence, grief and suffering.
The continuity of total war strained the global economy to breaking point
as well. While the situation worsened in 1917 and 1918, during 1916 the
economic war fought at sea caused a massive loss of shipping. The longer
the war dragged on, the more intense its impact became on global supply
chains. Consider, for example, the impact of the inability to get essential
fertilizer chemicals from Latin America to farms in Europe, Africa, Asia
and Australasia. Without adequate fertilizers, crop production declined. As
crop production declined, so did the amount of food available for human
and animal consumption. As human eaters were prioritized, cattle were
culled (offering only temporary relief).11 Without cattle, however, a source
of natural fertilizers declined, reducing the ability of farmers to grow future
food crops. The harvests of 1916 were smaller than usual. Even the neutral
United States suffered from shortages that year, increasing the cost of food
by an average of 46 per cent.12 In combination with the massive war loans
taken out by the belligerent powers, these distribution issues caused spiralling
inflation, a global rise in the cost of living and heightened unemployment
in non-essential industries.13 Social and economic distress was a global
phenomenon through 1916 in ways that far exceeded the stresses of the first
two years of war.
In Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire, the
declining availability of food and fuel stuffs had dire consequences. Even
before the start of what came to be known in Germany as the ‘turnip winter’
of 1916–17, supplies of essential goods deteriorated drastically. By this time,
Austro-Hungarians were eating a third less grain than they had in 1913. The
Ottoman empire’s deficit sat at 229 per cent of its GDP that year, most of
which was spent on its military needs and not in alleviating the enormous
shortages facing its civilian population.14 In Germany, the lack of food
resulted in the average adult weight dropping from 60 kg in 1914 to 49 kg in
1917, while German children were documented to be anywhere between
RETHINKING THE WAR IN 1916 99
3 and 5 cm shorter than their pre-war peers.15 In December 1916, the

Russian secret police reported that in many towns and cities, ‘children are
starving in the most literal sense of the word’.16
These belligerent metropoles were not alone. In eastern Africa, the repeated
requisitioning of the Wagogo’s people, cattle and food by the German and
British armed forces decimated their communities’ social cohesion. In
Nyasaland and Malawi too, the British military appropriated entire crops
and cattle stocks in 1916 (and again in 1917), causing starvation, the spread
of disease and social collapse.17 In neutral Spain, a skewed balance of trade in
1916 (massively favouring exports over imports) helped to bolster inflation
and resulted in what locals called a crisis de subsistencias (subsistence
crisis).18 When bakers in Chicago doubled bread prices in August 1916 due
to the rising cost of wheat, angry delegates of the National Housewives’
League protested to Congress and demanded that the White House protect
domestic consumption over the profits that could be gained by selling to the
warring powers.19 In the Austro-Hungarian occupation zone of the neutral
territory of Albania, the 329 residents of the small mountain-top village
of Mallakastër fled into Italy or turned to begging in the nearby town of
Fier to escape starvation. By 1918, only seventy-nine residents were left
in the village.20 Even Koreans experienced rice shortages, as the Japanese
imperial authorities requisitioned rice stocks to offset the needs of their own
metropole first.21
With hindsight, it is easy to frame 1916 as a year of ‘frustration and
failure’ (as David Stevenson does),22 of ‘impasse’ (as per Robin Prior)23
and of ‘wearing down and holding out’ (according to Jörn Leonhard).24 It
certainly was a year in which universal war weariness set in and people’s
willingness to support their country’s or empire’s war efforts declined
substantially.25 Yet for those who lived through it, 1916 was experienced
mostly as a process of unravelling, in which the multiple stresses of the war
situation also offered up opportunities for action, to provoke changes, to
resist authority and to rethink the war and its impact.
Across 1916, food riots, strikes and protest marches erupted in cities around
the world, including in occupied Poland and Belgium, neutral Switzerland,
Portugal and the Netherlands, war-torn Britain, France, Italy, Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Russia.26 In rural areas too, people grew increasingly
tired of the suffering they had to endure. In the words of Benjamin Ziemann,
the peasantry in most belligerent empires were ‘continually overworked,
physically exhausted and … emotionally strained’.27 In town and countryside
alike, people became more willing to criticize their governments and to
blame their neighbours and fellow citizens for not doing enough to share
the burden of the war equitably. The ‘enemy within’ could now be one’s ‘less
than loyal’ neighbour, the person who did not ration their food or work hard
enough, or the one who failed to hang out the flag, sing the national anthem
or refused to volunteer for essential services. The politics of blame strained
the politics of wartime loyalty through 1916, at times risking the cohesion
of states and communities completely. In hindsight, 1916 can be seen as

a ‘tipping point for the intensification of protests, riots, uprisings and …
revolutions’.28 It was also the year in which contemporaries, like Daudet,
started to recognize that the political, economic and social structures of the
pre-war era were failing.
The inability of the great power belligerents to achieve an all-important
strategic breakthrough during 1916 came at a huge cost to their ability
to sustainably govern their countries, their empires and the international
environment in general. The careful balancing acts they had maintained
in 1914 and 1915 – between inspiring the support and loyalty of their
populations and coercing compliance when that support was no longer
volunteered – teetered in 1916. Total war was an unsustainable condition.
State violence against ‘disloyal’ groups and communities increased as their
enthusiasm for the war weakened and as the personal and societal costs of
sustaining the war effort heightened. Neutral governments too faced serious
political opposition to their wartime policies, especially when shortages and
rationing hit hard.
Throughout 1916, the recognition that the pre-war political order
was under threat of collapse and that a post-war future would require
new foundations and governance structures heightened.29 This sense of
the inevitability of change fed on both the popular and almost universal
exasperation at the unending nature of the global war and grasped at
the hope of enforcing a peace. The recognition that the war could lead
to permanent changes within communities and empires opened up space
for political activism to grow. It also intensified social unrest and political
unpredictability. In 1917, the dam broke, collapsing firstly the Russian
Romanov empire, followed by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires
and the German Kaiserreich. But it is all too simplistic to describe 1916
as a precursor to the revolutionary disruptions of 1917 and 1918, as if
this year of ‘impasse’ and collective strain necessitated the revolutionary
period to follow. Rather, what the experiences of total war through 1916
highlight most of all is how contemporaries considered their options for the
future as being more fluid than the rigid loyalties expected of them by their
governments. They were also more tired of the war (and desirous for peace)
than their governments were willing to allow them to be.
This chapter focuses on three themes to bring out the transformative
impact of sustaining a ‘world at total war’ throughout 1916. It begins with
the impact of labour shortages, military conscription and forced labour
on the political management of belligerent and neutral communities. Then
it turns to the rising tide of anti-imperial protests and uprisings. Finally,
it explains how neutral states and communities navigated this year of
‘endless war’, and their recognition of the risks, threats and opportunities it
engendered for their own futures.
The heart of any war effort is human endeavour. While the belligerent
armed forces sought an endless supply of soldiers – particularly to recoup
their enormous military losses – their war economies also had to find new
sources of labour to replace the men and women in military service. This non-
military labour was especially important in essential industries like farming,
mining and armaments production. Inevitably, larger numbers of women
came to work in jobs previously reserved for men, including at the war fronts
in logistics, medical and technical-support roles. These gendered labour shifts
had an enormous impact on the functioning of families and communities,
and offered many women new sources of economic and political agency.30
The industrial needs of the war economies also caused substantial
demographic shifts. In the neutral United States, for example, the rapid
expansion of industrial production (to supply the belligerents’ war needs)
helped to inspire the beginnings of what American historians call the ‘great
migration’. From 1916 to 1918, more than 400,000 African American
workers (5 per cent of the entire African American population) moved
from their homes in the southern United States to the country’s northern
industrial cities. The unprecedented influx of new workers augmented the
size of these northern cities and heightened social and racial tensions in
increasingly violent ways.31 Similarly, Japanese cities also grew in size and
industrial capacity during the war. Here too the expansion of slums and
the influx of low-wage labourers caused social tensions to spill over into
political activism and popular unrest.32
In Europe, the labour needs of the belligerent countries were met both
by mobilizing citizens and by acquiring labour from ‘elsewhere’, including
from imperial outposts, neutral neighbours and occupied territories. France
not only mobilized considerable numbers of women (40 per cent of its
armaments jobs were staffed by women in 1917), its war economy also
attracted 230,000 labourers from neutral Spain and procured 135,000
workers from northern Africa, China, Vietnam and Malaga.33 Along with an
influx of Belgian refugees, the social and demographic contours of France’s
work landscape changed substantially. In an attempt to expand the size of its
armed forces, the French government promised to extend citizenship rights
to Africans who served for France on the European war fronts. This promise
helped to persuade some African leaders to actively recruit their men for
the war. What often looked like voluntary service, however, increasingly
turned into coercion. An extraordinary amount of violence was exacted in
obtaining enough African military labourers and soldiers for France.34 More
often than not, such recruitment efforts were met with passive and active
defiance, including by men who fled their communities, went into hiding or
joined anti-imperial resistance groups.35
Similarly, Great Britain mobilized 1.2 million non-Europeans into its
armed forces during the war, including hundreds of thousands of military
labourers.36 Many, but by no means all, of the men who served in the
Indian Labour Corps, the South African Labour Corps, the Canadian No.
2 Construction Battalion, the Maori Battalion, the Egyptian Labour Corps,
the British West Indies Regiment, the Macedonian Mule Corps and the
Maltese Labour Corps volunteered. India’s Jailed Labour and Porter Corps,
for example, was composed of inmates from India’s prisons who were
forced onto ships to undertake the worst cleaning and sanitation jobs for the
British armies stationed in the Middle East.37 The authorities in Egypt, for
their part, never formalized conscription. To meet their labour quotas, they
nevertheless kidnapped peasants from their homes and villages. By 1918,
more than 230,000 Egyptians served in the Egyptian Labour Corps, aiding
the British invasion of Palestine and the Middle East.38 Many of the men in
the British East African Carrier Corps were also forced into service by local
authorities, which included night-time raids on their homes.39 Altogether, this
empire-wide marshalling of military labour not only set in motion notable
demographic and socio-economic shifts (particularly when there was not
enough domestic labour to bring in the harvest), it also inspired many to
resist these measures. Wartime labour offered a potent reason for subject
communities to demand greater political recognition within an empire and,
when that was not on offer, to resist the empire more vociferously than ever
before. As information about the horrors of the war fronts filtered ‘back
home’, fewer men volunteered to serve.
By 1916, finding adequate numbers of volunteers had become harder in
the metropoles and white settler colonies as well. War weariness and the
massive casualty lists did not inspire confidence. While military service and
soldiers’ heroism were celebrated in all belligerent communities, often fed
by a vocal pro-conscription movement, these communities also debated the
communal and social costs of sending so many millions of people off to war.
From 1916 on, priests and pastors in Germany preached about the moral
dangers of creating a generation of delinquent children who had to cope
with absent fathers (serving on a war front), absent mothers (working for
the war effort) and a lack of food.40 Evelyn Blücher, the British wife of a
German who lived in Berlin, described the social costs of the war in equally
stark terms in her war diary:
Women are realising the enormous burden imposed upon them. They
have to do the men’s work as well as their own, and when they have
earned their pay it all goes into the pockets of others who sell them food
at enormous prices. Naturally they begin more than ever to say: ‘Why
should we work, starve, send our men out to fight? What is it all going to
bring us? More work, more poverty, our men cripples, our homes ruined.
What is it all for? What do we care whether we have a bit more land
added to our big Germany? We have enough land. We’d rather fight for
a more just division of the goods of this earth. For whether we obtain
land or money for the ‘Fatherland’ after this war, we shall not see any
change in our lives; the wealth will not come our way. The State which
called upon us to fight cannot even give us decent food, does not treat
our men as human beings, but as so many screws in the great machine of
the German army.41
It is in no way surprising then to see a substantial increase in soldier protests

and acts of resistance through 1916 as well. When soldiers protested the
conditions of their service, they often did so in response to a particular
issue (e.g. when they were not given enough leave or their rations were
inadequate). Others deserted, favouring a life in hiding over the possibility
of death or major injury on a battlefront. Despite the fact that desertion
could result in a military court-martial and the death penalty, between 1916
and 1918, 250,000 soldiers deserted from the Austro-Hungarian army. The
Ottoman empire counted 500,000 such lawless individuals,42 while the
Netherlands witnessed the arrival of tens of thousands of German deserters
at its borders, all of whom refused to return to Germany. What to do with
these ‘alien Others’, who could not be repatriated for fear they might be
executed as traitors yet who ate up their host’s scarce supplies, became a
serious political issue for the neutral Dutch.43
Other soldier protests evolved out of a wider dissatisfaction with the
war effort and its impact on society. These protests often fed on pre-existing
social and political inequities. In 1914 in France, socialists had abandoned
their anti-militarism when their leader, Jean Jaurès, was assassinated on the
eve of war. French socialists, including a large working-class population,
accepted their government’s call to arms as a collective duty in defence
of their nation, their homes and their livelihoods. By the middle of 1916,
however, this political equilibrium was fraying fast. A year later, after another
disastrous French assault at Chemin des Dames, more than half of France’s
army mutinied, demanding better conditions for their families on the home
front and better food provisioning and leave conditions for themselves.44
Eventually, France’s soldiers returned to the trenches but they did so only to
defend against a German attack. No French assault occurred on the western
front until the first signs of a German general retreat in 1918. France might
be at total war, as Daudet explained, but its citizens and colonial subjects
were not willing to sustain that war effort needlessly with their own lives.
The British government also faced serious political resistance to its
attempts to conscript men into military service during 1916. Unlike the
other European armies, Britain did not have a tradition of compulsory
military training or conscription. The early months of war did see a massive
wave of British volunteers. By late 1915, however, those numbers declined.
After the disastrous Somme offensive of 1916, they declined even further.
The government recognized that it could only sustain its military efforts if
it forced its citizens to serve. While it readily compelled its imperial subjects
into working for the state, conscription sat uncomfortably within the British
metropole. The introduction of conscription in 1916 caused a political
crisis pitting liberals (who claimed Britain was no better than authoritarian
Germany if it enacted conscription) against conservatives (who argued that
the war must be won and every British man, woman and child needed to
be made to do ‘their bit’ and play ‘their part’).45 The Military Service Act,
nevertheless, came into effect on 2 March 1916. Importantly, by the end
of the year, more than a million British men had refused their conscription
orders, preferring to apply for ‘certificates of exemption’, which allowed
them to work in essential civilian industries instead.46 Such high numbers of
refusals presented a clear signal that many Britons considered the military
cost of fighting the war as too high.47
Attempts to introduce conscription in Britain’s white Dominions of
Australia, New Zealand and Canada did not entirely go to plan either. In
Australia, the 1916 referendum on the subject resulted in heated public
debates and returned a ‘no’ vote. On the one hand, a growing number of
Australians were unwilling to fight in a war for an empire that seemed
to have abandoned them. The brutal repression of Ireland’s Easter
Rising (see below), the lack of British support for the economic needs of
Australia’s farming community as it coped with shipping shortages and
the notion that any support for the war should be voluntarily given and
not coerced, influenced these Australian debates.48 In New Zealand, where
conscription was introduced on 1 August 1916, the public debate around
its implementation was equally prolific.49 Canada too faced political crises
throughout 1916 and 1917 when attempts to introduce conscription met
with a decisive backlash from its Irish and Francophone populations.50
At the same time, indigenous communities across the three Dominions
navigated the empire’s demands for their military labour in a variety of
ways. Invariably, resistance was as likely as cooperation.
These subject communities were certainly in tune with the war’s
international developments.51 They could read the news and were alert to
moments of imperial weakness. As the organizers of the Easter Rising had
it: ‘England’s troubles offer Ireland’s opportunity’.52 Across the British and
French empires, overt acts of anti-imperial rebellion only increased during
the war. They were particularly prolific during 1916. Such acts made the
possibility of winning the war at the cost of losing an empire all too obvious
to the great power governments. Of course, Germany lost much of its colonial
empire in 1914. Its government thus felt fully justified in maximizing any
and all opportunities to destabilize its enemies’ empires as well. Germany
funded anti-imperial propaganda, jihadi uprisings and offered armaments
and monetary support for anti-French, anti-British and even anti-Japanese
resistance groups. It often operated out of neutral territories to do so.53
The Singapore Mutiny that erupted during the celebrations of the
Chinese New Year on 15 February 1915 was an early example of how
the deterioration of soldier morale could merge with a set of pre-existing
political ideas and lead to an outright rebellion.54 The mutiny broke out
when 400 Muslim troops in the Indian Fifth Light Infantry division were
convinced that they would be shipped from Singapore to the Middle East
to fight their co-religionists in the Ottoman empire. In protest, they rioted,
attacked a munitions truck, set free a number of German prisoners of war
and killed eighty-two people, before fleeing into the Malay peninsula.
The uprising caught the British authorities by surprise. They scrambled to
contain the situation, calling on the Singapore Volunteer Corps (a civilian

militia composed of Malay and Chinese men) and arming 200 special
constables from out the city’s European population. Ultimately, the mutiny
failed and the rioters were captured: of the 203 soldiers who were court-
martialled, all but one was convicted. Of these, forty-one were executed
(twenty-three in full public view) and sixty-three received life sentences.
Along with the fifty-two soldiers who died during the mutiny, a quarter of
the regiment was either dead or removed from service by year’s end.55 While
the British authorities presented the mutiny as a unique case of misplaced
soldier grievances, the global press read the situation more thoughtfully as
an act of anti-imperial resistance in a long line of south and south-east Asian
activism against the British crown stretching well back into the pre-war
era.56 Importantly, the mutiny was not only supported by Germany from out
of neutral Siam, the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and China,
but also mobilized anti-imperial activists across the British empire.57
If the Singapore mutiny cracked the veneer of the idea of a ‘happy British
empire at war’, the Easter Rising of 1916 broke it apart.58 The armed
rebellion centred in Dublin was planned as a distinct ‘propaganda by the
deed’ by the followers of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Funded
in part by Irish Americans in the neutral United States and supported by
German armaments suppliers, the IRB declared an Irish Republic on Easter
Monday and besieged government offices and municipal buildings. They
hoped that other Irish would rise up with them, but even if they did not,
that the revolt would destabilize British control over the island and offer
a decisive step towards Irish self-determination and independence.59 The
British authorities suppressed the uprising by sending 20,000 troops into
Dublin, killing 260 civilians and arresting more than 3,500 people. Ninety
of them were sentenced to death for treason. The most prominent among the
leaders were executed in public. The extremes of violence used to suppress
the rebellion highlighted just how frightened the British government was of
the dissolution of its empire ‘from within’. Violent repression was a distinct
feature of British responses to anti-imperial protests before 1914. After
1916 it defined them. Surveillance operations against subject communities
increased as well, including in India where the Defence of India Act enabled
the authorities to detain hundreds of ‘terrorists’.60
After the Easter Rising, imperial authorities across the world understood
that their empires were at risk. The Easter Rising may not have succeeded
in establishing an independent Ireland in 1916 (Ireland would gain its
independence in 1921), but it encouraged anti-imperialists and ethnic
nationalists globally.61 In the Catalan region of Spain, for example, the
Catalan independence movement was inspired by the Easter Rising to use
a new level of violence to achieve its goals.62 In Turkestan (present-day
Kazakhstan), news of the Easter Rising encouraged a number of Kazakh
and Kirgiz groups, who were themselves increasingly frustrated at the
Romanov empire’s rule over their people and lands. In August 1916, armed
rebellions broke out in the region, bringing various anti-imperial agents

together. Some were protesting the empire’s new conscription laws, others
baulked at the rising cost of food, the profiteering and corruption of local
authorities and the seizure of steppe lands by a new generation of Russian
settlers. A prominent sub-group of well-educated socialists also found their
voice in these rebellions, and ‘drew implicit and explicit parallels between
the plight of Russia’s minorities and that of colonized groups around the
world [including the Irish]’.63 The Russian empire repressed these rebellions
with extreme force, much as they had done other ‘suspicious’ communities
during the war.64
With hindsight, 1916 presented as a distinctly global anti-imperial
moment, one which pitched imperial authorities against its rebels in decidedly
violent ways, but also one which saw the belligerent powers mobilize anti-
imperial sentiments to their advantage. At the same time, the global war
offered subject communities an opportunity to fight back.65 The Ottoman
sultan’s declaration of jihad in 1914 certainly helped to bolster a number
of anti-British and anti-French uprisings in northern Africa including the
Anglo-Sanussi war that was fought between 1915 and 1917, the Aulihan
uprising between 1915–18 and the ongoing upheavals in British-controlled
Nigeria.66 In response, the British used their own anti-Turkish networks to
fund and inspire anti-Ottoman opposition in the Middle East. The Arab
revolt of 1916, which saw Arab communities across the Middle East rise up
against the Ottoman state seeking independence, was as much an indigenous
movement in opposition to Turkish rule as it was a political act that hoped
to capitalize on an eventual Allied victory (and the promise of Arabian self-
rule – a promise that would be broken).67 In the moment, the revolt was
brutally suppressed by the Ottoman authorities, who also publicly executed
its leaders.68 In the horn of Africa, however, Haile Selassie’s armed rebellion
removed the Italians from Abyssinia in one of the most successful military
campaigns of the year.
These social and economic instabilities affected neutral countries and
empires too. The Inter-Allied Conference of March 1916, for example,
expanded Allied blockade tactics to drastically ration supplies from reaching
the neutrals. From this point on, key neutrals were asked to either prioritize
the supply of the Allies and to further restrict their trade with the Central
Powers, or to risk all their trade being seized at sea.69 Britain imposed harsh
blacklisting rules, which resulted in companies across the neutral world being
investigated and struck off if they traded with a German- or Austrian-owned
firm, regardless of where that firm was located.70 Britain sent its diplomats,
other agents and spies into neutral territories to monitor compliance, with
extraordinary results:
A cargo of apples from America was denied landing in Norway because

it was addressed to a blacklisted firm; a Norwegian woman was refused
needles for her sewing machine because her husband was on the ‘black
list’; and even public utilities, on demand of the British …, were compelled
to refuse service to Norwegian firms known to be in business relations
with Germany.71
As one Norwegian pamphleteer decried on the subject: ‘By the black list,
England has penetrated most perniciously into our economic life’.72
Through the course of 1916, all the neutral governments faced serious
challenges to their ability to negotiate the economic demands of the
belligerents. Where Britain blacklisted companies, intercepted neutral
shipping, seized blacklisted goods and forced export limits on neutrals,
Germany increased its U-boat campaigns (although they did warn the ships
before they were sunk). Through 1916, the loss of neutral lives at sea increased
exponentially, as did the loss of neutral ships. In one twelve-day period in
October 1916, thirty-three Norwegian merchant vessels succumbed to such
attacks, nearly three a day with a total loss of 40,185 tonnes of goods. Two
thousand Norwegians drowned thanks to the war at sea between 1914 and
1918.73 It would seem Germany, too, was perniciously infiltrating Norway’s
economic and social life. The success of Allied blockade and blacklisting
tactics made it easier for the German government to resume an unrestricted
U-boat campaign in 1917 (including sinking ships without warning).74 After
all, if the neutrals could not supply Germany with resources, then an all-
out economic war against the ships that supplied its enemies was a logical
counter strike. In such a stressed world, it was no wonder that the perceived
value of neutrality plummeted.
The politics of neutrality, sovereignty and wartime supply played out
in fascinating ways. In the United States, as the historian Michael Neiberg
describes it, the ‘guilt-inducing paradox of neutrality that was both profitable
and morally questionable’ became a defining feature of political discourse
in 1916.75 In the face of creeping inflation, some Americans demanded that
President Wilson’s government revert to complete isolationism and protect
domestic consumers against rampant war profiteering.76 Others pushed
the country to greater military readiness, fearing the cost of a German
victory on their profit margins and the United States’ place in a post-war
international order. The country’s financial interests were firmly tied to the
Allies’ war efforts, and the German war at sea targeted American shipping
with impunity. As a result, many anticipated (while others feared) the
possibility of an American war declaration on Germany. By the end of the
year, as Neiberg also explains, ‘the war in Europe was no longer just about
“them” but, increasingly, about “us”’ as well.77
The global war also informed Americans’ perceptions of the attack by
the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and his militia on the United States
border town of Columbus (New Mexico) on 9 March 1916. Villa’s raid was
part of a five-year-long revolutionary campaign in Mexico itself conducted
on, near or across the United States frontier. On 9 March, the Villistas looted
the town store, set fire to buildings and killed several residents. Villa had
ILLUSTRATION 6.1 This French cartoon from 1916, by the renowned cartoonist
Emile Dupuis, represented the United States as a greedy neutral, willingly trading in
the lives of innocent civilians and risking the growth of German militarism for its
own wealth and profit.
Source: Emile Dupuis, ‘In the Shadow of Liberty’ postcard, Visé, 1916, Library of
Congress, Call Number LOT 4856.
specific reasons to target Columbus, not least his need for money and goods
and his anger at President Wilson for supporting his political rivals in Mexico.
But he was also encouraged by his German agent, who lived in the United
States and hoped that it would distract Americans from the global war.78
The distraction worked, at least in part. The United States army retaliated
by attacking Villa’s militias in Mexico itself. These border skirmishes lasted
until January 1917 and resulted in a number of embarrassing military
defeats for the Americans. Yet ultimately, the Mexican situation played an
important role in bringing the United States to declare war on Germany in
April 1917.
More immediately in 1916, the Mexican war highlighted a series of
deficiencies in the United States armed forces, and caused numerous political
debates about the security of the country (including plans to increase the
manufacture of artificial fertilizers).79 These debates reached a zenith
after 30 July 1916 when another group of German agents operating out
of New York set the Black Tom docks ablaze causing a million pounds of
ammunition to explode, shattering windows across lower Manhattan, and
leaving a massive crater in its wake. Given that 75 per cent of American
ammunition exports left from Black Tom and ended up in Britain or France,
the New York target was deliberately chosen. The loss of six piers, thirteen
warehouses and dozens of rail carriages hampered American ammunition
exports for the foreseeable future. But above all, the attack was seen as a
clear act of German sabotage, a signal that the war between the other great
powers was very much a war in which the neutral United States played a
decisive role.80 As President Wilson acknowledged at the end of the year, the
country’s neutrality was paper thin. It would only take one more incident
like the Black Tom explosion or another passenger-liner sinking to force his
hand.81 As Wilson further warned, this might be the ‘last war’ in which the
United States could remain neutral. For the war of the world was America’s
war too.82
Neutrality politics dominated Spanish public life in 1916 as well.
Spaniards suffered from intense shortages and financial hardships that year,
which led them to question whether Spain should remain neutral, join the
war or offer peculiar benefits to a belligerent. These discussions became
increasingly polemical, exacerbating the marked socio-political and cultural
divides that already existed in Spanish society. As the historian Francisco
Romero Salvado explains, the issues were so divisive that they constituted
a veritable ‘civil war of words’. Across 1916, cinemas avoided screening
war news, in the hope of preventing fights from breaking out between
Francophile and Germanophile movie-goers.83 As many of these politically
alert Spaniards understood, the stakes in the war were such that the future
of Europe and of the international environment was in play. For them, the
war of the world was very much Spain’s war too.
Throughout 1916, then, questions about ‘the war’ and its impact on
communities became acute. War weariness was a global phenomenon, helping
to open up the consideration of new ‘power plays’ at a local and global

level.84 The world of war in 1916 was also becoming more unpredictable.
How would societies survive the war’s inherent ‘test of endurance’?85
Such questioning revolved as much around concepts of neutrality as it
did belligerency: What value did neutrality continue to have in a world of
heightened belligerent power? What value did loyalty to an empire have in
an environment of heightened economic and military crisis?
Because neutral countries were spaces of exile and refuge, they also
became spaces for political agitation against the war. Prominent political
figures, artists, thinkers and writers sought refuge in Switzerland during the
war to escape the political and artistic confines of their belligerent countries.
These included the Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the Austrian
pacifist Alfred Fried, the anarchist Henri Guilbeaux and authors Stefan
Zweig and Romain Rolland.86 Their critiques of the war only grew as the
war’s destruction expanded.
The year 1916 certainly maligned nineteenth-century conceptions of
neutrals as mitigating inter-state warfare. The number of countries that
managed to remain neutral also declined. Much like Italy had done in May
1915, Bulgaria joined the war rather opportunistically on the side of the
Central Powers in October 1915 (with an eye to expanding its territory
in the Balkans after the failed Allied attack on the Dardanelles).87 Its
neighbour, Romania, declared war on the Central Powers in August 1916,
hoping that the Russian, French and British would protect it from a likely
Austrian-German-Bulgarian invasion.88 By December 1916, none of the
Allied promises came through and Bucharest fell.89
Portugal too joined the war in Europe in March 1916, after it seized
German and Austrian merchant vessels in its territorial waters and reflagged
them (thereby relieving its shipping shortage and enabling it to resume
trading with the Allies).90 Germany declared war on Portugal in response,
citing the re-flagging as a major breach of neutrality, but also with an eye to
invading Portuguese holdings in eastern Africa (especially around Delagoa
Bay).91 The Portuguese government subsequently declared its own war
on Germany and sent troops to the western front, citing its actions as a
consequence of its desire to remain sovereign and neutral and, like Belgium,
protesting its status as a victim of the great power war. These formal war
declarations sent a sharp warning to the world’s remaining neutrals about
the ease with they could be forced to become belligerents. The guarantees of
neutrality with which they had entered the war in 1914 were disintegrating.
From 1916 on, ‘Portugalization’ became a trope by which neutrals read the
shifting sands of their status vis-à-vis the warring states.92
In response to these pressures, the remaining neutrals looked to accentuate
the advantages of their neutrality in the international environment. In
their capacity as intermediaries, they were particularly successful. The
International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), which operated out
of neutral Switzerland, grew into a massive organization which monitored
prisoner-of-war and civilian internment camps around the world, and

took responsibility for the well-being of their inmates. As such, the ICRC
functioned as a powerful voice for the ongoing importance of neutral states
and organizations to proffer ‘good offices’ and to protect the rights and
interests of belligerent citizens and subjects who were caught in enemy
territory. Other charitable organizations operating out of neutral countries,
like the American Commission for the Relief of Belgium (CRB), were equally
important. The CRB sent masses of American food through the Netherlands
to feed starving Belgians.93 It needed the neutrality of the United States and
the Netherlands not only to negotiate the North Sea blockades, but also to
get permission to pass through the Belgian-Dutch border, which was guarded
by German troops and a deadly electric fence.94 Many neutral governments
sent ambulance units to the war fronts, negotiated agreements to enable
prisoner-of-war exchanges and allowed their citizens to mobilize charitable
aid for the war’s many victims.95 These neutral acts were more than charity.
They helped to carve out a space for neutrals to operate and exist in a world
at total war.96
Legal scholars and neutral propagandists alike also promoted the
international value of neutrality, even if they despaired at the belligerents’
growing disregard for the laws of war.97 As an example, in Brazil, the
international jurist and politician Rui Barbosa argued that humanity had
regressed to its most primitive state during the war. As such, the world’s
governments – and especially its neutral governments – had a duty to return
the international system back to the law of nations and to the laws that had
been sanctified in Geneva in 1864 and 1906 and at The Hague in 1899 and
1907.98 Of course, as Annette Becker argues, since the legal conception of
neutrality presented the main source of legitimacy for neutral states and
the only source of legitimacy of international humanitarian organizations
like the ICRC, it is hardly surprising that they advocated so strongly for the
importance of international law.99 Their successes during the war ensured
that, after the conflict, international humanitarian law came into its own as
a foundational principle of twentieth-century international organization.100
Neutral states and neutral communities also looked to heighten their
value as potential mediators and peace-makers. All manner of forward-
looking internationalist endeavours evolved in neutral countries that aimed
to bring the war to a judicious end and to shape a post-war global order that
would protect both the principles of neutrality and international law more
generally. The League of Neutral Nations, for example, was established
by the Italian-Swiss internationalist E. Bignami in 1916. It aimed both to
protect the rights of neutral states and people in time of war and to advance
a non-aggressive cooperative policy for a post-war world order. Bignami’s
League drew inspiration from other transnational neutral organizations, like
the Central Organisation for Durable Peace (CODP), which was established
in 1915 in the Netherlands by a group of international jurists and peace
activists (from neutral and belligerent countries) to promote a feasible
post-war international order focussed on war avoidance, international law

and international cooperation. Its list of aims ranged from the expansion
of the principle of self-determination to ‘open door’ diplomacy, from the
creation of an international court of justice to the limitation of armaments
and the protection of the principle of the freedom of the seas. At the heart of
the CODP’s programme lay the notion that a post-war world order should
not be forged by the belligerents alone and that the principles of international
cooperation and law needed to be firmly embedded in that order.
Neutral communities supported these internationalist future-focused
endeavours with vigour. An international women’s congress, which was also
hosted in The Hague in 1915, included several women who attended and
helped to organise the earlier CODP event. It boldly advanced the same
internationalist principles as the CODP but added the need for universal
women’s suffrage as a foundational concept for a post-war order.101 The
Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation (involving members of the
CODP and the 1915 women’s congress) met in Stockholm in February 1916
to advance the CODP’s platform and promote the message of a mediated
peace around the world.102 Within the year, more than 1,074 Swedish groups
(110,000 individuals) signed up in support of the CODP’s programme. The
Norwegians were equally enthusiastic.103 Importantly, these calls for the
establishment of an international organization to oversee global politics and
avoid future war were advanced in neutral and belligerent countries. Well
before Wilson’s call for a League of Nations (which he made in January
1917), the American ‘League to Enforce Peace’ promoted the concept and
had done so since the middle of 1915.104 In Britain, the ‘Bryce Group’ of
academics and lawyers met regularly after November 1914, advocating for a
similar set of ideas.105 German internationalists would jump on the ‘League’
bandwagon from 1917 on as well, establishing the Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Völkerrecht (German International Law Society) in the process.106
In an environment of heightened nationalism, ‘Othering’ and fear-
mongering, and amidst intense economic and military distress, such peace-
seeking endeavours might look marginal and irrelevant.107 Yet out of these
internationalist activities grew the movement to establish the League of
Nations, which would eventually be set up in 1919. The activism also
highlights how contemporaries across 1916 imagined a post-war future
for themselves outside the parameters of a ‘one side wins all’ model.
Furthermore, the activism underscored the vital importance of neutral
spaces for internationalist cooperation, which were particularly significant
for lawyers, academics, scientists, journalists, revolutionaries and anti-
imperialists who relied on reliable cross-border interaction.108 Perhaps most
importantly, the extent of the internationalist posturing illustrates how many
contemporaries felt uneasy about the social, political and moral costs of the
war. After 1917, other political conceptions for the future organization of the
world vied for international attention, including communism, fascism and
ethnic nationalism. But during 1916, the rise in war weariness, anti-imperial
agitation and the expansion of internationalist activism brought to the fore

the wide array of ways in which contemporaries considered how they might
move beyond the war and achieve some kind of post-war resolution that
favoured them (and not the pre-existing imperial powers).
Importantly, all the belligerent governments were highly alert to the
social and political costs of the war as it affected their citizens and subjects
alike. By November 1916, they were also rethinking their own war aims.
Britain’s Prime Minister Herbert Asquith even asked his cabinet to design
a workable programme for victory. His colleague Lord Landsdowne – one
of the country’s most reputable and distinguished politicians – responded
with a lengthy document advocating for a negotiated peace. As Landsdowne
explained it, even if the Allies won the war, it might cost them the British
empire as well as their financial security, and the lives of an entire generation
of British men. As such, as Landsdowne saw it, civilization itself was at risk
of total collapse.109
Germany’s Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, also saw
an opportunity to sue for peace in December 1916. Since Germany now
controlled much of Belgium, northern France, Poland and Romania, it
was placed in an excellent position to negotiate.110 Bethmann-Hollweg
understood that since most Germans were tired of the war, a peace initiative
could lift morale. This was particularly important as the country’s largest
political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), was becoming more vocal in
opposition to the war.111 His ally, Austria-Hungary was certainly motivated
to end the war. With the death of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz-
Joseph in November, his successor, Charles, understood all too well that his
empire was on the brink of collapse from within. Regardless of whether the
Central Powers won the war, he needed to end the war. But he could not
achieve peace without Germany’s cooperation.112
Confronted with the German peace offer, President Wilson also faced a
dilemma in December 1916. While he could not reject the opportunity to act
as a neutral mediator, he could also not be seen to promote the premature
end to the war while Belgium and northern France remained occupied
and thereby alienate the Allies. Prevaricating, he called for the belligerents
to present their war aims to the world instead. By mid-January 1917,
however, he extended his call for peace as an opportunity to re-organize
the international environment, establish a League of Nations and promote
the principles of self-determination and democracy.113 He knew the appeal
would be popular. Internationalist organizations, like the Inter-Parliamentary
Union (a transnational body of parliamentarians), had agitated for such a
solution in parliamentary sessions in neutral and belligerent countries alike
since early 1916.114
The chance to achieve a negotiated peace in 1916 or early 1917 was
chimeric. The Allies judged the German peace note as insincere, and rejected
the offer forthright.115 The new British Prime Minister, Lloyd George (who
took office in December 1916) banished all allusions to the possibility of a
negotiated peace when he announced that Britain needed to work towards

total victory by a ‘knock-out blow’. Britain had hardened its resolve.116 Even
if he and many of their cabinet peers agreed with its sentiment, Lloyd George
rejected Landsdowne’s report, while The Times (London) refused to even
publish it.117 The Daily Telegraph would do so in November 1917, but the
world would be on a new path of global destruction by then.118 Although
they could not have known it at the time, these half-hearted overtures for
peace offered the last viable chance for the European belligerents to bring the
war to an end and keep their empires and nations intact. The ‘hunger winter’
of 1916–17 sent the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires into
a tailspin of societal collapse. None of these empires would survive the war.
7
Nothing stays the same:
Revolutionary transformations
in 1917
In 1913, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in
Literature. He was the first south Asian awarded this prestigious accolade.
His peers referred to him as biswakabi (global poet), a man who travelled
the world, cared deeply about peace and wrote astoundingly beautiful works
of art. Late in 1916, amidst the chaos of global war, Tagore embarked on
a trans-oceanic journey taking him from India to Japan and then across
the Pacific Ocean to the United States. Wherever he landed, he spoke to
large crowds on the evils of the nationalism, imperialism and materialism
that Europe had forced on the world and that had caused ‘this war of
retribution’.1 At about the same time, another poet, Yvon Goll, who hailed
from the troubled region of Alsace-Lorraine, published his own reflections
on the war. As a French-German immigrant hiding in neutral Switzerland,
Goll’s epic poem Requiem for the Dead of Europe lamented the ‘carnival
of death’ that originated in Europe and was now encircling the world
spreading nationalistic hatreds like a plague.2 Like Tagore, Goll despaired
at the costs. In early 1917, both Tagore and Goll hoped for a humanist
renewal, to end the destructive ‘old ways’ of the pre-war era and find ‘new
ways’ forward, propelling the world towards peaceful rejuvenation. Despite
their widely different backgrounds, Goll and Tagore proffered optimistic
visions for the future, visions that were they to be realized would require
fundamental changes to be made in the way states operated, empires ruled
and people related to each other.
Where Tagore and Goll looked for peaceful revolution as a path out of
the war, during 1917, an increasing number of communities turned to more
violent alternatives. The socio-political stability of most countries teetered
dangerously in 1917 and, in some places, failed completely. In response,
people’s loyalties to their state and obligations to their communities either
entrenched or shifted. At times they did so in service of a grand ideal (like

communism, nationalism, imperial glory, anti-imperial ambition, indigenous
autonomy or greater democracy), at others in aid of pre-existing or older
traditions and customs (including religious and indigenous ones). Even
more people took to the streets in 1917 than in 1916 protesting the war
and their government’s handling of it. Some of these protests were radical
endeavours that aimed at bringing the war to an immediate end. Some sought
revolutionary solutions, including the establishment of new countries or the
implementation of new social and political structures. At minimum, the
protestors demanded that changes be made to the way food was distributed,
conscription was enforced, laws were made or wages were set. What all these
developments had in common was a greater willingness by ordinary people
to insist that things change for the better. Across 1917, few communities
escaped fundamental questioning about the war, the structures of power
and governance that kept it going (and forced them to endure hardship and
loss), and their own roles in it. Even fewer communities escaped the global
momentum of social and political upheaval.
The historian Jay Winter describes 1917 as the ‘climacteric’ of the First
World War, as the year in which the war not only continued as a war fought
between states and empires but also transformed into a war whose violence
turned inwards. In turning inwards, it provoked local and regional conflicts
between competing groups about the future direction of their countries and,
for some, the entire international system.3 As a result, during 1917, the war
transformed into an even more insecure and chaotic global reality than
it already was in 1916. From this point on, the global conflagration had
fewer clearly demarcated front lines (although the western front remained
one), yet the war’s chaos of military violence nevertheless expanded. Across
Eurasia, east and south-east Europe and the Middle East these local and
regional conflicts provoked destructive civil wars and inspired intense social
and political unrest. Across much of the rest of the world, the year 1917
was experienced as equally destructive, as a time when political groups and
ordinary people became more assertive in demanding change. In response,
the governing elites attempted both to accommodate the least invasive of
these appeals and to repress the more radical ones. Altogether then, the year
1917 was a year of waxing and waning change and violence, chaos and
revolutionary uncertainty. By the end of 1917, there was no ‘going back’ to
the way things were in 1914.
One of the key reasons why 1917 was so transformative was due to the
two Russian revolutions, the first erupted in March, the second developed
in November.4 In combination these two events led to the abdication of
the Tsar and the collapse of his empire, the establishment of a democratic
republic and the take over of that republic by the radical socialist Bolshevik
party headed by Vladimir Lenin. For the subjects of the Russian empire,
the revolutions were all important. Their way of life would never be the
same again. But the Russian revolutions were also global events of immense
REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS IN 1917 117
significance, not least because they set an example of how a protest ‘by
the people’ against the authorities could force things to change. They also
seemed to prove, at least to those who needed convincing, that the war itself
was an unsustainable enterprise.
As such, the events in Russia in 1917 both inspired groups and
communities to coordinate their anti-war protests better and caused fear
among elites that their state would be the next to fall. If the revolutions did
anything, they made it clear to governments that their people (including
their soldiers) were dangerous, that their loyalties could not be guaranteed,
and that their demands may need to be listened to more carefully. As a
result, the Russian revolutions of 1917 provide a powerful lens through
which to view the multitude of crises of legitimacy facing belligerent and
neutral communities around the world through the course of the year.5
Socialists and working-class groups were certainly inspired by the events
in Russia to agitate for their own workers’ revolutions.6 The collapse of the
Russian empire further motivated indigenous communities, anti-imperial
activists and ethnic nationalists to use this moment of global imperial crisis
to agitate for their own independence.7 In this chapter we use examples
from Russia, Japan, Korea, China, France, Britain, India, Australia, New
Zealand, Latin America, Italy, Senegal, Spain, Volta Bani and the Dutch-
controlled Indonesian archipelago to show how the intense stress of an
unrelenting total war turned neutral and belligerent communities alike to
political unrest and revolution in the wake of the events in Russia and in the
context of the ongoing total war.
At an international level, the collapse of Tsarist Russia contributed to
bringing down the (already) crumpling multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman empires and to destabilizing the Kaiserreich to the point of its
dissolution in 1918. It also helped to seriously disrupt the French and British
‘blue water’ empires. Much like the French Revolution of 1789, the successes
of the Russian revolutions of 1917 preyed on the anxieties and fears of ruling
elites and those who professed their loyalties to these elites. In the longer
term, the establishment of a potentially powerful Bolshevik regime in Russia
hampered the chance of founding a well-functioning international system
and of returning to an ‘open seas’ system of global trade and capitalism
after the war. Most importantly, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 marked
a shift to a new era of revolutionary violence which ensured that, while the
First World War would formally end with the armistice of 11 November
1918, the expansion of civil strife and political unrest defined the post-war
period. The world beyond 1917 was a world of ‘anarchy, dying empires
and rising nation states’,8 a world where competing ideologies redefined
the distinctions many contemporaries made between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and
heightened political and cultural animosities everywhere.
This inflamed new world demanded that changes be made, at times in
radical directions. After 1917, as the historian Robert Gerwarth shows,
the First World War became ‘endless’, its repercussions reverberating
across the globe.9 When historians boldly assert that the First World War
brought the contours of the twentieth century into being, they do so by
giving primacy to the 1917 revolutions, the Russian Civil War that followed,
the establishment of the Soviet Comintern in 1919 and the creation of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) in 1922. For, after
1917, not only was there no going back to the great power ‘concert’ system
that dominated the nineteenth-century world, there was also little chance
that a new international system could be created that would meet the
polycentric and largely oppositional needs of these varying states, groups
and ideologies.10 In other words, by upending the stabilizing features of the
pre-war era, the 1914–17 war years awoke a range of powerful political
and emotional impulses that set many groups and communities against
the established authorities. It also set them in competition with each other
in creating new futures, new securities and new loyalties. In 1917, those
impulses came to the fore.
For those who lived through it, of course, none of these outcomes
were guaranteed or necessarily even imagined. They experienced 1917
as a year of profound crisis and change and, thus, also of opportunism
and unpredictability. In response to this spiral of competing interests and
identities, often only more violence, insecurity and dangers ensued. Or as
a Jewish Socialist leader in the city of Smolensk described his experiences
of 1917: ‘All around us madness and danger rules, … a thickening dark
cloud is gathering above us, and a great black abyss opens before us.’11 What
these experiences of war and revolution in 1917 highlighted, most of all, is
how in the midst of intense social upheaval profound transformations could
come about unlooked for and unplanned. They also show how violence and
upheaval opened up new space for opportunistic individuals and groups to
take advantage and vie for power. It is in this sense that the historian Jean-
Jacques Becker called 1917 l’année impossible (the impossible year), a year
in which the needs of the belligerent states at total war pulled in opposition
to the wishes of many of their people. In the process of balancing these
demands, the year 1917 provoked profound and lasting local and global
changes.12
The subjects of the Russian empire were certainly no strangers to
revolutionary turmoil. Widespread opposition to the Russo-Japanese
War in 1904–5 resulted in popular unrest and important constitutional
changes in Tsarist Russia, and left a legacy of oppositional politics.13 The
outbreak of the First World War was not universally welcomed in Russia
either. As the war lengthened, opposition to the mismanagement of the war
effort only grew in response to the conscription of subject communities,
heightened inflation and the distribution of foodstuffs and goods. The
highly decentralized nature of the empire did not help to inspire loyalty
to Russia’s war cause, nor did the rumours of the ‘German spy’, Rasputin,
cavorting with the German-born Tsarina help to alleviate people’s concerns
about the war’s impact on their lives.14 Why were they fighting the Germans
if the enemy already dined at the Tsar’s table and slept in his bed? With 7
million men serving in the Russian armies in 1917, 2 million reserves and
another 5.1 million casualties, 90 per cent of whom were peasants unable
to work their land, the war affected all parts of the vast Romanov empire.15
Alongside the displacement of another 6 million war refugees who needed
housing, food and support, it was no surprise that the Russian avant-garde
artist Nikolai Punin spoke of a looming revolution late in 1916: ‘The war
slowly turned to revolution. When the revolution began, we don’t know:
the war had no end’.16 The ‘starvation winter’ of 1916–17 certainly made
everything that much worse, especially in Russia’s industrial cities.
Ostensibly, the first 1917 revolution began early in March (or late in
February according to the Russian calendar) when in honour of International
Women’s Day the women of St Petersburg’s Vyborg district – workers,
soldiers’ wives, mothers, and home-makers alike – took to the streets to
protest rising prices, scarcity, the inequality in distribution, the drop in living
standards, and the endless nature of the war and their own suffering.17 They
were joined by a crowd so large that the local authorities could not force it
to disperse. Spontaneous violence spread over the ensuing days in the form
of demonstrations, strikes, reprisal shootings, killings and lootings. They
soon spread to some of Russia’s other industrial centres as well. Calling on
the 160,000 soldiers garrisoned in the city to help to suppress the unrest
only fed its flames as more troops joined the protestors and demanded the
Tsar’s abdication.18
The first 1917 revolution may have been brewing for years – some argue
ever since 1905 – but when it came, it still came as a surprise. None of the
Vyborg women who turned out to march on International Women’s Day
were there to create a revolution from below. Nor did the soldiers who shot
at protestors in the first few days of unrest recognize (at that time) that they
would be joining the protestors’ ranks all too soon. Nevertheless, the years
of soldier and civilian grievances against the Tsarist regime ensured that the
spark of revolution, once lit, spread swiftly and organically. As the leader
of the Menshevik political party in the Duma, Matvei Ivanovich, recalled
of his walk around St Petersburg on the eve of the regime’s fall: ‘Under
the influence of everything I had seen earlier, I cursed at some precinct
policemen: “Your brothers are executing your wives and children. Why are
you shooting?” “Just wait,” they replied, “tomorrow we’ll show them.” And,
at that moment, for the first time I realized that something might happen as
soon as tomorrow.’19 That ‘something’ was the establishment of a Petrograd
Soviet (a democratic body made up of soldiers and industrial workers in
the renamed city of St Petersburg) and the capture of the city’s municipal
and military buildings by crowds of ‘revolutionaries’. Within days, the Tsar
renounced his throne, opening up a political vacuum in the heart of Russia.
The power vacuum was filled in first instance by two competing but
not mutually exclusive entities: the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional
Government set up by the moderate members of the Russian parliament
ILLUSTRATION 7.1 Alexander Kerensky, as head of Russia’s provisional

government, standing in front of a giant map of Russia and the Caucasus in 1917.
Source: Wikipedia.org.
(Duma) led by Alexander Kerensky. Neither entity had any official power,
but they agreed to work together, as far as that was possible, until a
democratic election could be held and a new Constituent Assembly set up.20
That election was due to be held in November. In the meantime, Russia was
still at war.
The ensuing months witnessed many extraordinary developments, which
underscore the spontaneity and enthusiasm with which many individuals
across the empire (and even across the world) embraced the potential for
political rejuvenation. The first Russian revolution was so powerful because
it inspired so many to reimagine their futures. As an example, Russian
anarchist dissidents, who had fled the Romanov empire to escape its secret
police after 1905, returned to Russia in 1917 to turn their ambitions into
a reality. As the ‘Freedom for Art’ manifesto, signed by 1,500 Russian
anarchist artists, proclaimed at the time:
The great Russian Revolution calls us to act. Unite, fight for the freedom
of art. Fight for the right of self-determination and autonomy. The
Revolution creates freedom. … Only in a free democratic republic is
democratic art possible.21
Many Russian soldiers were equally inspired to advocate for their rights
as soldiers and veterans. They called for the implementation of universal
suffrage, monetary support for their fallen comrades’ widows and a peaceful
end to the war. Importantly, outside of Petrograd, Moscow and the Baltic
cities, most of these soldier soviets agreed not to abandon their frontline
posts. They would not fight in an aggressive capacity, but they would hold
their lines against any attack that might come from the Austrian, German
or Ottoman side. They had lost too many of their comrades to fail them
at this hurdle.22 This ongoing loyalty to the sacrifices made during the war
highlighted that the issues at play were far more complex than a mere desire to
change the government or to assert democratic rights. These soldiers wanted
their war service to continue to have meaning, whichever version of Russia
eventually appeared. The same can be said for Russia’s other multifarious
communities, many of which set up their own soviets, mobilizing industrial
workers, garrisoned troops and peasant communities alike, all seeking
representative democracy and recognition of their unique needs and wants.
In the ‘waiting space’ between the collapse of the Tsarist state in March and
the much-vaunted November election, the jostling for power in aid of a
particular vision for the future of a democratic Russia evolved in a variety
of oppositional ways. Yet almost all of these people considered their future
in terms of the ongoing war and in anticipation of peace.
For the Provisional Government, for example, the revolution was already
won. Kerensky fervently believed that the March revolution had achieved
what most Russians desired, namely the establishment of a democratic state
and their recognition as citizen-voters in it. Looking back to the French
Revolution of 1789 as a point of reference, Kerensky also expected Russia’s
new citizen-soldiers to willingly continue fighting for their new nation-
state.23 In so doing, Kerensky (and many of his liberal supporters) failed to
recognize that what brought the end of the Tsarist regime was not a universal
demand for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ but rather a universal demand
for ‘peace, bread and a return to the land’. The war dominated ordinary
Russians’ expectations for change. These liberals thus also misunderstood
that the stability of the European military front was a product of soldiers’
willingness to wait for a formal resolution of the conflict and not an
invitation to take up arms again against the enemy. When the Provisional
Government insisted that these soldiers launch a new attack in Galicia in
July (at the French and British governments’ request to alleviate their own
pressures on the western front), the uneasy equilibrium that existed between
the working-class soviets and the bourgeois Provisional Government broke
down.24 Pandemonium ensued, its maelstrom offering multiple opportunities
for even greater political radicalization to occur.
From July 1917 on, Russia descended into chaos. Hundreds of thousands
of soldiers deserted their front-line posts in protest. When the Galician
offensive failed, ‘[m]illions of brutalized, politically unmoored and armed
peasant-soldiers struggled to make sense of it all’.25 They travelled home
or joined brigand groups working for local warlords who set up their own
personal fiefdoms. The Russian state collapsed even further. Warlordism
returned to Russia’s hinterlands, including in the borderlands of Russia’s

fast collapsing European front, splintering the empire into a ‘mosaic of
under-governed statelets awash with violence and dominated by men in
uniform’.26 Popular protests against the Provisional Government reinflamed
unrest in Russia’s industrial cities as well, where demands that ‘all power’ be
transferred to the soviets sounded louder and louder. Many of these protests
were unorganized, opportunistic and abusive. As the writer Maxime Gorki
reflected in October:
What is going on now is not a social revolution, but a pogrom of greed,

hatred and vengeance …. An unorganized crowd, hardly understanding
what it wants, is crawling out into the street, and, using this crowd as
cover, adventurers, thieves and professional murderers will soon ‘write
the history of the Russian Revolution’.27
The optimism and collaborations of March were replaced by fear, chaos and
suffering.
Not only had Kerensky’s government underestimated the soldiers’ (and
many civilians’) desire for peace, they had overestimated the loyalties of
Russia’s numerous subjects to the state. Kerensky expected that the Tsar’s
many subjects would be excited to become the willing citizens of a new
democratic Russian empire, a state that would, in the words of the historian
Joshua Sanborn, ‘retain its sites of power in central Russia, would use Russian
as its language of state, and would remain within its current boundaries’.28
The collapse of Russian armies in July 1917, however, inspired a number
of ethnic and indigenous groups – in Finland, the Ukraine, the steppes and
the Caucasus – to declare their independence from Russia. Meanwhile,
other groups strived to take over central power of the Russian state. The
first of these attempted coups, orchestrated by a group of Russian generals,
failed when the Petrograd Soviet mobilized in support of the Provisional
Government and formed into a militia to defend the city. The second – an
attempted coup by Lenin’s Bolshevik party – succeeded.
Like many other European dissidents, Lenin lived in neutral Switzerland
at the start of 1917. As a well-known Marxist, Lenin advocated that the war
offered an ideal opportunity for its worker-soldiers to reject the terms of the
‘imperial conflict’ and incite a worker revolution from below. It was Lenin’s
renown as a radical that inspired Germany’s military leadership to use
him to their advantage. In the wake of the March revolution, the Germans
offered Lenin free passage to Russia and a train to travel in, hoping that
his radical agenda might destabilize Russia and take the country out of
the war completely.29 In this ambition, they eventually succeeded. At first,
however, Lenin’s chances seemed bleak. He arrived in Petrograd in April,
spoke fervently against the moderate aims of the Petrograd Soviet, fomented
unrest and proclaimed the need for a working-class revolution that would
inspire the entire world to communism.
Lenin’s ideas were initially so unpopular (even among other socialists) that
he fled Petrograd soon after his arrival. He only returned in November after
a loyal band of Bolsheviks had gained power in the Petrograd and Moscow
Soviets. Lenin’s initial inability to inspire his fellow socialists to embrace
a radical communist future was telling. It illustrated how many Russians
hoped that a democratically elected government would both recognize the
collective sacrifices they made in the war and call the Tsar and his ‘old order’
to account for continuing the war. It also underscored their deep desire for
peace. But Lenin’s lack of success also spoke to the ambiguous realities of
the March–November period. Other than getting rid of the Tsar (a decidedly
radical outcome), few Russians in March 1917 wished for the Russian state
itself to fail. It was largely due to Kerensky’s insistence that Russia continue
fighting the First World War that the collapse of the Russian state became
more likely. And it was only in the wake of the chaos of the July 1917 days
that a political coup orchestrated by the Bolsheviks was made possible.
In the end, the Bolshevik take over in November 1917 was relatively
peaceful. It did not involve large crowds clamouring for change, nor did
it hinge on the emotive power of the moment. The second revolution was
not a revolution ‘of the people’ like the first. Where after March 1917,
many ordinary Russians accepted and applauded the Tsar’s fall, whom
they roundly renounced and denigrated,30 the November 1917 take over
was less obviously necessary. Its legitimacy rested on the soviets’ claim to
represent the people better than the liberal politicians of the Duma.31 As a
result, Lenin’s declaration of an immediate demobilization was immensely
popular, as was the formal armistice his government signed with Germany
and Austria-Hungary on 15 December. What was far less clear, however,
was what giving ‘all power to the soviets’ would entail going forward.
Most importantly, while the Bolsheviks’ promises of ‘peace, land and bread’
were persuasive, they did not persuade Russia’s peasants, including many
of its soldiers, to vote for the Bolshevik revolutionaries in the November
constitutional elections (which were still held).32 These voters preferred
their own radical (but non-Bolshevik) peasant representatives in the Social
Revolutionary Party of Russia. In many ways, then, the Bolshevik revolution
of 1917 was considered transitory and opportunistic by many who watched
it unfold.
The Bolshevik revolution became decisive when the Social Revolutionary
Party won the majority of the November vote and Lenin declared the
result invalid. Now all bets were off. The Bolsheviks mobilized the soldier-
controlled soviets to their cause and declared that Russia had become a one-
party workers’ state.33 But ‘what was Russia?’ now was harder to discern
and whether this new state could rule its people was even less clear. Across
the collapsed Romanov empire, groups and communities challenged these
developments. Various warlord generals rallied their own loyal soldiers in
the name of ‘White Russia’ to counter the Bolshevik revolutionaries and
soldier soviets, some in the name of the Tsar, many in the name of liberal
democracy. Other groups and communities mobilized their own loyalties,

including ethnic and religious ones, to break free from Russian and Bolshevik
control completely and establish their own independent states.
Everywhere, the chaos deepened. For not only had the Russian state
failed (and collapsed the functioning of every-day amenities, from postal
services to healthcare, food distribution and schools) but in the fight to
establish a new social-political order, be it Bolshevik or something else,
all sense of security disappeared. Neighbours feared each other and all
strangers. Corruption, tyranny, pogroms and death were the order of the
day. Ultimately, while Russia was not a belligerent in the First World War any
longer, its people became embroiled in a civil war that was more destructive
than anything they had witnessed between 1914 and 1917. This new civil
war pitted ‘White Russians’ (loyal to pre-Bolshevik Russia) against ‘Red
Russians’ (loyal to the Bolshevik and soviets’ causes). It involved various
communities across eastern Europe and Eurasia demanding statehood,
autonomy and independence. By late 1918, it brought in the armies of a
number of foreign countries (including Japan, Britain, France and the United
States) all seeking the collapse of the Bolshevik state – a deeply suspicious
political organization in their eyes – and the possible expansion of their
own imperial interests.
In all, the Russian Civil War that waged until 1923 was a powerful by-
product of the revolutionary turn taken by the Russian people in 1917. That
turn came in direct response to their suffering in the First World War, even
if its revolutionary dynamics were determined more by local than global
developments. Just as importantly, however, the Russian revolutions of 1917
were also experienced globally. They deeply affected neutral and belligerent
perceptions of the war. The ‘message of worker and peasant power’ inspired
political groups around the world to foment change.34 The revolutions also
forced governments to think carefully about how they should respond to the
acts of protest and anti-war resistance that were carried out by their subjects
and citizens.
That the army-wide French mutiny in May 1917 occurred in the wake
of the first Russian revolution is particularly significant. For not only did
France’s soldiers declare – much like their Russian counterparts had done
a few weeks’ earlier – that they ‘were France’ and that only with them
could France hope to come out of the war intact, they also exacted real
accommodations of these demands from their government. As representatives
of democratic country, the French military leadership could not suppress
this revolt as they might have done at an earlier time, for they needed to be
seen to be working for their people and not against them.35
In Britain, too, the recognition that soldiers’ declining morale and
industrial workers’ increasing demands might lead to dangerous results led
the government to increase police surveillance and censorship measures. It
also looked for opportunities to alleviate legitimate grievances.36 To this end,
the government took the briefing by the country’s Chief Censor in November
1917 (at the time of the second Russian revolution) very seriously:
A year ago, men seemed to be sublimely unconscious of political

considerations. They were out simply to ‘do their bit’. They rarely
mentioned and never discussed political questions …. Now, they are
ceasing to some extent to possess their corporate personality and to
reassert individuality of opinion.37
These ‘opinions’ could, as Britain’s ruling elite saw it, lead the country
down dangerous paths. The outbreak of a three-week long industrial
strike involving 200,000 workers in forty-five towns and cities in May
1917 heightened these fears.38 Their response, much like in France, was to
monitor public opinions more closely, and to expand their own propaganda
messages of inclusivity and sacrifice for the greater good.
Thus, even though the repression of labour movements, trade unions and
socialist organizations increased in Britain and elsewhere, governments also
asserted the legitimacy of their own democratic foundations to promote
loyalty to the state and the enduring war.39 Lessons in civics became part of
soldier training in Britain and Germany alike.40 More widely, many neutral
and belligerent countries extended their suffrage through constitutional
changes implemented in 1917 or by promising that after the war more men
and women would be given the vote in recognition of their wartime service.41
For similar reasons, subject communities were enticed with promises of greater
self-rule or the extension of citizenship once the war finished. In August 1917,
for example, the British government promised the gradual expansion of self-
governance in India.42 It also suspended the practice of indentured migration
from India to the plantation economies of places like Fiji and Trinidad, in
order to placate many Indians’ demands for the practice to stop.43 These
attempts to court the people aimed at sustaining their loyalties to the state
at a time when the impact of the war heightened their suffering and opened
up opportunities to challenge its power. In other words, they were promised
that their wartime sacrifices would not be futile and that their futures would
be better within the empire rather than in opposition to it.
Yet these promises of post-war rewards were hard to reconcile in the
face of escalating socio-economic deprivations and military sacrifices.
Throughout 1917, the number of strikes, demonstrations and political
uprisings against governments and local authorities only expanded, affecting
belligerent and neutral countries and empires alike. Some of these protests
took direct inspiration from the Russian revolutions. Some protestors even
reinterpreted Bolshevism as a powerful example of taking maximum power
for the people (as opposed to agitating for a global workers’ revolution,
to which Lenin aspired).44 In neutral Argentina and Brazil, for example,
‘maximalist’ anarchists demanded that their governments accept their ‘local’
versions of a ‘maximal’ (Bolshevik) programme and established their own

soviets to parry for the cause.45 In the city of Sao Paulo, where real wages
had dropped by as much as 70 per cent since 1914, a general strike erupted
in July 1917 in which participants ‘explicitly associated their claims with the
war and called for peace’.46
In neutral Spain, the political ruptures of 1917 were almost as confronting
as they were in Russia. The various political factions – be it socialist labourers,
militarists, nationalists, liberals or monarchists – mobilized in oppositional
ways. Food shortages resulted in intense distress across the agricultural
regions, leading to a flood of unemployed workers looking for work in
the booming industrial cities, like Barcelona and Madrid, where bankers
and industrialists were growing vastly wealthy selling their manufactured
wares to the belligerents. Much like in Japan and the United States, the
working-class suburbs of these cities exploded in size and misery. When
the inflationary pressures could not be abated, and food supplies remained
perilously low, food riots, strikes and political agitation followed. These
became particularly intense in the wake of the first Russian revolution,
which inspired many industrial workers to take more radical action. In
Barcelona, seventy people died when soldiers loyal to the government shot
at striking workers who had barricaded city streets.47
What had been a ‘civil war of words’ in 1916 (see Chapter 6) now
threatened to become a real civil war. It caused enduring schisms between
the various factions. The rich industrialists favoured a ‘do-nothing’ policy of
neutrality, but ‘doing nothing’ had life-and-death consequences for Spain’s
industrial and agricultural communities. After the Spanish government fell in
April 1917 (when it threatened to join the war in support of the Allies), the
oppositional pull between the policies of a pro-neutrality government (who
favoured the profits that could be made from the war) and the demands for
change by radicalizing socialist and peasant communities would keep Spain in
turmoil for years to come.48 For Spaniards, then, 1917 marked a turning point.
It was one of so many ‘regional versions of the general crisis’ that affected the
world in the context of the Russian revolutions and First World War.49
In Australia’s eastern cities, mines and ports, 1917 also witnessed a series
of crippling industrial strikes, which locals still refer to as the ‘Great Strike of
1917’. These strikes and protests involved more than 100,000 workers who
protested the rising cost of living and the industrial demands placed on them
by their government at war. Inspired in part by the success of the Russian
revolution, this Australian strike action merged social distress with other
wartime issues – including the second conscription referendum – to polarize
Australian politics. The strikes and the second ‘no’ vote in the referendum
exposed how the First World War helped to radicalize labour politics. It
also brought out how the experience of the war made many Australians less
willing to accept their government’s or their empire’s requests for service
and sacrifice.50 Australia showed that professing loyalty to an empire at war
was not unconditional.
In New Zealand, the formation of the country’s Second Division in January

1917, made up of its first cohort of military conscripts, led to a more subtle –
yet equally powerful – demand for political accommodation. In setting up
the Second Division League, which quickly grew into the country’s most
subscribed patriotic organization, the organization’s leaders both asserted
the importance of all New Zealanders supporting the men who were forced
to fight for King and empire, and created a political forum to make sure that
their sacrifice was recognized and duly compensated in the political arena.
The League became an important voice wading into debates on ‘equality of
sacrifice’ issues including who should be made to work for the war or who
should receive dispensation. In so doing, the League was much more than a
patriotic association blindly supportive of the empire at war. Rather, it used
the state’s desperate need for soldiers and war workers as a way to achieve
short- and long-term gains. As the historian Steven Loveridge argues, this
‘conditional commitment’ to the war defined New Zealand politics in the
years 1917 and 1918.51 Significantly, veteran organizations would continue
to have a disproportionately powerful voice on post-war politics in societies
that mobilized troops during the war, including neutral and imperial ones.52
As the ‘July troubles’ hit Russia in 1917, the largest political party in
Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had clear socialist and
anti-war leanings, also called for an immediate suspension of the war. In the
midst of serious food shortages, demonstrations and anti-war protests,
the conservative Catholic politician, Matthias Erzberger, passed a motion in
the Reichstag asking for all the belligerents to agree to a peace treaty ‘without
victors or vanquished’ (echoing the demands of Russia’s soldier soviets in the
process).53 The motion passed with a majority of parliamentarians voting in
its favour. Many of Germany’s politicians were tired of war and recognized
that their voters were equally exhausted.54 They looked for a legitimate way
out for their country, an ‘out’ that would sustain the political system. In
the face of what was happening in Russia, many of these politicians feared
what might happen if the people took to the streets demanding more drastic
solutions. The people, in turn, were ready for something to change.
In contrast, Germany’s military leadership was euphoric that July. As
they witnessed the complete collapse of the Russian front and their own
occupation of Poland and the Ukraine, they considered that victory was
within their grasp. As a result, they dismissed the Reichstag’s motion as
pacifist pessimism and defeatism orchestrated by a swathe of internal and
‘unpatriotic’ enemies of the German nation. They used the parliamentary
crisis as a reason to take full control of the powers of state and assured
all Germans that they need not worry, that they only needed to hold on
just a little bit longer. Victory was in sight. In support of these measures, in
September 1917, a new political party established itself in Germany – the
Fatherland Party. Its membership grew at a phenomenal rate to 300,000 in
February and 800,000 by July 1918. Its policies resisted ‘democratization’
and socialism and bound its supporters to the promotion of a ‘strong
peace’ led by a victorious Germany.55 From this point on, Germans divided
themselves more rigidly between those who swore unwavering allegiance
to a militarily strong and belligerent ‘fatherland’ and those who sought
alternate futures for Germany, including distinctly socialist and social-
democratic ones.
In Italy, the news of the second Russian revolution came in the wake
of the rout of the Italian armies at Carporetto, which resulted in more
than 300,000 Italian casualties, including 265,000 prisoners of war. The
immense losses experienced on the Italian side heightened already intense
social and political tensions across the country. The political divides that
existed between the ‘neutralists’ and the ‘interventionists’ in 1914 and
1915 (which the ‘interventionists’ at the time won) turned into protests,
demonstrations, strikes and calls for governmental change. The Russian
revolutions inspired many here too. Italy’s women were particularly active
protestors. In September 1917, as Simonetta Ortaggi’s history shows, women
in one village took to the streets shouting ‘Down with the war, we want
our husbands back, otherwise we will make a revolution!’ In the Po valley,
other women refused to work the harvest, while in Polesine and Milan they
attacked factories so that the armies would go without supplies and end the
fight.56 Police repression of these protests only accentuated the bitter rivalries
between the various camps. Yet Italy’s leaders also attempted to improve
morale and buy-in by extending promises for reform and advocating for
Italian patriotism and an ongoing involvement in the war.57
The 1917 war year cleft the Italian political arena apart into bitter
rivalries pitting nationalists against socialists. The battlefield experiences of
one Italian soldier-cum-journalist named Benito Mussolini helped to birth
a new era of Italian ultra-nationalism, which he named ‘fascism’. In his
newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), Mussolini fought against
the Italian Socialist Party and the Bolshevik revolution, which he feared
would lead to a global communist take over. In his words:
It is not a time for angels, it is a time for devils. It requires ferocity, not
humility …. It requires a long sword and a great deal of fire …. Either
that or defeat. Either that or Russia.58
The future of Italy, according to Mussolini, lay in a soldier technocracy.

Those who had fought the war ought to run the state, and all Italians should
be grateful.59
What all these 1917 crises highlight is just how polemic and extreme the
political stakes around the war had become. Whether as subjects or citizens
of a neutral or belligerent country or empire, the war invoked potent and
increasingly antagonistic responses for and against a government’s wartime
policies, and for and against the war itself.60 In the process, those who were
‘for’ maintaining the status-quo and keeping their country or empire at (or
neutral in) the war starkly differentiated themselves from those who sought
an immediate end to the conflict. These inclinations inspired new political
schisms to appear, and provoked polemical allegiances to ideas, identities

and political visions for the future, which would have a decisive impact on
the post-war era.
Perhaps the most significant impact of the Russian revolutions of
1917, then, was the inspiration they also offered to anti-imperial resistors,
indigenous groups seeking autonomy and ethnic nationalists everywhere.
In many ways, while Lenin did not manage to arouse the workers of the
world to unite against the capitalist empires that kept them all at war, his
Bolshevik revolution nevertheless encouraged many anti-imperial groups to
agitate even more vociferously against their own empires. It was not that
these communities did not seek autonomy earlier, or that they needed Lenin
as a point of inspiration, but rather that the weaknesses that the Russian
revolutions exposed in the Russian empire offered a powerful example that
might be replicated. If an end to empire was not possible in 1917, then
when?
As we have seen in the previous chapters, the First World War was
experienced as highly transgressive by most indigenous and subject
communities, not least because it further exposed the radicalizing and
repressive nature of industrial and colonial imperialism. So, while the war
offered plenty of opportunities for subjects to profess their loyalty to the
state (usually with an eye to achieving greater political representation and
racial equality within the empire), it also presented fresh opportunities to
challenge and resist. Across 1916 and 1917, especially, the experiences of the
war and of wartime imperial rule inspired some indigenous communities to
agitate for more autonomy and others to break free completely. Consider, for
example, the impact of the French government’s demands that its colonized
African subjects ‘volunteer’ for military service. To make the offer more
persuasive, the French government offered incentives for chiefs to persuade
their people to ‘go to war’. If some chiefs were persuaded, many of their
people were not and saw these demands as a reimposition of slavery. As one
Senegalese veteran, Kande Kamara, recalled of his embarkation to Europe:
A lot of people spread the rumour that we would never come back, that
we are going to be sold as slaves …. So some people were trying their
charms to take them back … and some were saying, if the ships sinks,
who gives a damn we’re going to die anyway …. So people were beating
their hands against the ship and screaming and yelling and screaming.61
Resistance to France’s mobilization demands existed from the outset

of the war. During 1917, however, the resistance to empire and the
concomitant demands for independence grew in intensity across the French
colonial empire. In response, the French state became more controlling
and repressive of its colonial subjects. For example, the authorities in
Volta Bani (present-day Burkina Faso and Mali) finally ended two years
of armed resistance waged by the local people by resorting to ‘scorched
earth’ methods: sacking villages, destroying farmlands, killing civilians and
forcing their displacement. The military occupation of the region resulted

in severe population loss, population displacement, a decline in agricultural
production and widespread starvation.62 Much like the Wagogo people
in east Africa, the Volta Bani region and its people would never be the
same. In 1919, the colonial authorities divided the region into two (Mali
and Burkina Faso), aiming at a ‘divide and conquer’ policy to prevent any
future unrest. As Michelle Moyd argues, ‘the multilayered consequences of
the anticolonial war reverberated well past the war, transforming regional
politics, though not in the ways the Volta-Bani peoples had hoped when they
went to war against the French empire [in 1915].’63 This severe turn to state
violence mirrored colonial regimes in the pre-war era. In this sense, France’s
suppression of Volta Bani was more than a product of the global war, yet
its extremes also recognized the immense fears that the French authorities
had of losing control over the empire, its people and resources. In turn,
the 1914–17 war years proved a powerful fertilizer for anti-imperial forces,
ethnic nationalist campaigning and anti-colonial politics in Volta Bani and
many other colonial spaces.64
The French government understood all too well that its belligerency in the
First World War endangered its tenuous hold on the empire. That realization
both legitimated the use of more violence and repression and necessitated
that the French government find ways of persuading local African authorities
and autochthonous social organizations to see the value of supporting the
empire and supplying France’s war needs.65 Here the contours of Becker’s
l’année impossible idea offer a useful lens to explain the tensions: for where
the future stability of the French empire might have been better served by
keeping its subject communities out of the war, its total war effort could not
keep the state from forcing its imperial subjects to fight and supply the war.
Some of the persuasion worked. As the Senegalese-French politician
and newly appointed Commissioner to Senegal, Blaise Diagne, promised
his people: ‘Those who fall under [German] fire, fall neither as whites nor
as blacks; they fall as Frenchmen and for the same flag.’66 This promise of
citizenship enabled France to raise 60,000 new recruits in Senegal in 1917
and 1918.67 The rhetoric of imperial loyalty may have persuaded some
Senegalese elites (especially those who were profiting from their relationship
with the French authorities in other ways). But, as Kande Kamara’s quote
(above) highlights, what the local chiefs and authorities looked for in this
colonial exchange was rarely what their people freely gave. Their service to
the empire at war was highly conditional and often not a service to empire
at all, but rather to themselves, their communities and families. Importantly,
these Senegalese veterans (much like veterans across the world) would
become a powerful force for political advocacy against the empire and for
local autonomy in the post-war years.68
The politics of conditional loyalty to an empire during the First World
War played out in equally powerful ways across the neutral Dutch-controlled
Indonesian archipelago. The Dutch East Indies consisted of an array of islands
and various ethnic and religious communities, including a very large Muslim
population. The people who lived on these islands played an important role
in fostering anti-imperial sentiment in the belligerent empires during the war,
including during the Singapore Mutiny of 1915. Yet across the archipelago,
the politics of wartime neutrality mixed uncomfortably with Dutch colonial
rule. While many colonial leaders proclaimed that Dutch rule was better
than that of any other imperial power (rather ironically given the extremes
of violence that sustained the Dutch empire in the decades leading up to
1914), many Indonesian communities and intellectuals mobilized themselves
in response to the tumult of the global war to advance their own local anti-
imperial agendas.69 In response, the Dutch government both mobilized the
politics of inclusion and political rights and imposed repressive measures ‘to
keep order’.
In the aftermath of the first Russian revolution, for example, the Dutch
revolutionary socialist, Henk Sneevliet, wrote a jubilant and supportive
editorial for the Dutch-language newspaper in Java: De Indiër (which
roughly translates as ‘The Indonesian’). Translated into Malay by a Javanese
journalist, Darnakoesoemo, so it would reach a wide audience, the article
did not call for a revolution against the Dutch colonial authorities per se, but
did link what was happening in Russia to the Dutch East Indies. Sneevliet
was arrested by the colonial authorities, but was eventually acquitted (which
in itself raised the ire of the local population, whose non-white resisters had
never received lenient sentences). After the Bolshevik revolution, however,
Sneevliet became a rallying point for anti-imperial resistance across the
islands, including by locals serving in the Dutch colonial army. Sneevliet
was forcibly returned to the Netherlands, and his party repressed.70
Because 1917 witnessed greater social distress across the Dutch East
Indies, due to food shortages and sky-rocketing inflation, the willingness
of locals to protest against the colonial authorities increased. Some were
drawn to the rapidly growing Sarekat Islam movement, others to nationalist,
traditionalist or socialist groups, all of which opposed the Dutch colonial
regime in some vital way. As strikes and demonstrations erupted in towns and
cities, these groups demanded equal pay and an end to the labour practice of
favouring certain ethnicities over others. Crowds attacked sugar plantations
and racial tensions between Javanese and Chinese workers spilled over into
violence. In various places, soldiers’ and workers’ soviets were established
proclaiming democratic rights. In response, the newly appointed Governor-
General, Johan van Limburg Stirum, both looked to accommodate some
of these local grievances, and stepped up repression measures.71 Much like
in French-controlled Volta Bani, the Dutch colonial elite scrambled madly
to keep control over a rapidly expanding social movement that demanded
serious change.
Altogether, the various Indonesian communities’ responses to the
First World War, their neutrality in that war, the example of the Russian
revolutions, the anti-imperial opportunism offered by Marxism and Islam
and the colonial measures imposed by the Dutch state, offered powerful
examples to internalize and re-mobilize at a later date. These experiences
proved vitally significant for shaping the future of Indonesian resistance to
the Dutch empire, not least because it mobilized individuals and groups in
ideologically powerful ways.72
The twenty-year-old Sumatran student Tan Malaka, who happened to
reside in the Netherlands in 1917, offers a telling example. Malaka witnessed
the war as a subject of a neutral empire, far away from his home. During
1917 his responses to the war, to the actions of the colonial authorities
in the Dutch East Indies and to the question ‘what should the future look
like?’ altered drastically. Malaka understood all too well the vulnerabilities
of ‘subjecthood’ in a repressive empire and how those vulnerabilities were
heightened by the relative weakness of the Netherlands as a neutral empire
caught in a web of a total global war. Malaka’s perspectives on what the
future could hold for the world, for the Dutch empire and for colonial
communities like his own Minangkabau people shifted repeatedly. In
searching for meaningful solutions, he moved from working for options
within empire (he liked the French imperial model of offering the possibility
of citizenship to imperial subjects), to embracing revolutionary socialism
(inspired by Lenin), to seeking and asserting indigenous autonomy and
ending the repressive capitalist and nationalist structures that sustained
international society.73 While none of Malaka’s shifting ideas affected the
harsh realities of Dutch imperial rule in Sumatra in 1917, they would have
a powerful impact on the evolution of anti-colonial resistance across the
Indonesian archipelago in the years to come. While the Dutch colonial elite
may have thought they were ‘educating’ a loyal subject of empire, Malaka’s
war experiences in the Netherlands only radicalized his anti-imperialism.
The Russian revolutions also had a powerful impact on the politics of
empire across the belligerent Japanese empire. In Japan, the first Russian
revolution was welcomed as a positive step, one that was taking Russia
away from autocratic ‘old world’ ways and towards modernization, much
like the Meiji restoration had done in 1868.74 Most Japanese, however, did
not respond well to the Bolshevik revolution which they described as an
accidental product of power-hungry militant opportunists. The Bolsheviks’
cancellation of the Romanov’s war debts in December 1917 only worsened
these assessments (this was also true in other neutral and belligerent countries
that had lent money to the Tsarist regime). But the most troubling element
of the Russian revolutions for the Japanese was their impact on Japanese-
controlled Korea and China, where the Bolsheviks’ support for anti-
imperial revolution helped to bolster protest actions against the Japanese.
Chinese labourers returning from Russia brought revolutionary thoughts
and structures with them, as did the 4,000 Korean expats who fought
for the Russian armies and returned home in 1917 and 1918. Altogether,
the Russian revolutions inspired the Japanese government to entrench its
conservatism and heighten its own imperial ambitions. It used the context
of the collapse of the Russian empire to extend its control over Manchuria
and the east Asian mainland and suppressed rising anti-imperial resistance
movements in Korea and China.75 As Tatiana Linkhoeva argues, it was not
the American President Wilson’s support for global self-determination that
worried the Japanese in the wake of 1917, but rather Lenin’s powerful anti-
imperial example.76 Still, Wilsonian promises for a post-war international
order focused on the concept of national self-determination also helped to
augment anti-colonial activism in profound ways.77
Ultimately, the experiences of war and political change through 1917
altered contemporary expectations for the future. In the interplay between
the demands of states for the loyalty of their people in an age of total war
and the demands of their people for greater recognition and the alleviation
of their suffering, the fabric of most societies stretched to breaking point.
The 1914–18 war years also unmasked many of the claims made by the
imperial elites to moral superiority, which they used to legitimate their
colonial rule over subject communities.78 Above all, the year 1917 exposed
how individuals could reimagine the frameworks of legitimacy and power
that framed their lives when those lives and the power structures that
underpinned them became more precarious and insecure. As such, 1917 is
so important as a transformative and ‘climacteric’ year because it inspired
such deep questioning and searches for new solutions. What the Russian
revolutions helped to unveil was the power of communities, when duly
motivated, to take collective action and force change. Yet at the same
time, the revolutionary developments in Russia also underlined the intense
unpredictability that comes with unleashing the power of the people in
the context of a total war. Altogether then, the revolutionary dimensions
of 1917 exposed the intense unpredictability of what the world and one’s
own community after the war might look like. Paraphrasing Jörn Leonhard,
Pandora’s box had truly been opened.79
134
8
The end of neutrality? The global
importance of the United States’
declaration of war
The revolutionary transformations that rocked the world in 1917 were

global and transnational phenomena. They did not stop at state borders
or military frontlines. They disentangled the social and political cohesion
of neutral and belligerent states and empires alike. This chapter focuses on
neutral states and communities as they navigated the turbulence of total war
during 1917. It argues that neutrals offer an excellent case study to illustrate
the revolutionary consequences of total war, not least because so many of
these states rejected their own neutrality and turned to belligerency in the
wake of the United States’ declaration of war in April 1917. Much like
Britain’s declaration of war in 1914 served as a vital tipping point globalizing
the war, the United States’ declaration of war served as a vital tipping
point altering the global contours of the war and recalibrating people’s
expectations of what a post-war peace might entail. After April 1917, there
was no ‘going back’ to the norms and principles that had dominated the
pre-1914 international system. In the wake of President Wilson’s ‘fourteen
points of peace’ and promise to establish a League of Nations, neutrality
itself had become suspect as an outdated principle. As result, no neutral
country in 1917 could escape fundamental levels of questioning about its
neutrality and how it might navigate a post-war world dominated by the
expectations of the world’s belligerent powers.
In neutral Argentina, like much of Latin America, these questions were
particularly urgent. From the war’s very beginnings, Argentina was fully
entangled as a neutral state. News about the war dominated Argentina’s
public media landscape. Until the social and political convulsions of 1917,
the war was almost always presented as a ‘cataclysmic’ event in which
Argentina did well to uphold its neutrality.1 Even as neutrals, however, the
diverse migrant and expat communities in Argentina advocated for and
against the various belligerents’ causes, having internalized the war as part
of their own political and national identities.2 Their newspapers mobilized
these biases in oppositional ways, while the tensions between the groups
sometimes spilled over into the public sphere.3 Others lamented the intense
violence of the war and worried about the end of what they called ‘European
civilization’.4 Many underlined their neutral identity by supporting charitable
enterprises that provided aid to the war’s many victims, particularly those in
Belgium. For Argentina, the 1914–17 war years were fraught with political
and economic insecurity.
It is highly significant then, as María Inés Tato shows, that most
Argentinians experienced the year 1917 as a decisive turning point.5 In
combination with the intense economic distress they experienced that
year, the Russian revolutions of March and November, the resumption of
Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaigns in February and the American
declaration of war on Germany in April, fundamentally altered how
Argentina’s many communities considered their neutrality and the course
of the war. Like so many other groups and communities around the world,
Argentinians became more assertive in taking public political action during
this year. They demanded that their government lead the country in a
specific direction, either in favour of joining the war against Germany, or for
adopting an equally anti-German but pro-Argentine course of neutrality.6
The ‘rupturists’ demanded war. The ‘neutralists’ mobilized themselves against
joining this ‘foreign war’ that offered few advantages for the country, even
if they also acknowledged that a policy of strict neutrality was untenable
given Germany’s military attacks on their neutral ships.7 So, while public
opinion in general galvanized against Germany and Germans – resulting in
public protests and physical attacks on German legations, clubs, shops and
the boycott of German goods and businesses – most Argentinians disagreed
on what should happen next to the country’s neutrality and its roles in the
war. In response to these local and global pressures, their government had
to make some stark choices.
The rupturists and neutralists clashed in parliament, in newspaper
editorials and in everyday life. These clashes were only augmented by the
expanding socio-economic crises they faced in 1917. In large crowds, some
counting as many as 60,000 people at a time, Argentinians repeatedly
took to the streets demanding one course of action over the other. After
April 1917, the government adapted Argentina’s neutrality policies to
accommodate the demands of the newly belligerent United States and to
punish Germany for its U-boat campaigns. In contrast to a number of
other neutral Latin American countries including Brazil, Guatemala, Costa
Rica, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, however, Argentina did
not declare war on Germany in 1917 or 1918. It also did not sever its
diplomatic relations with Germany, unlike Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and
Peru, which did.8 Argentina remained one of only a few Latin American
states that held on to its formal neutrality through the course of 1917 and
UNITED STATES’ DECLARATION OF WAR 1917 137
1918. Yet it did so under immense political, economic and diplomatic strain.
Like the other states that remained formally neutral – a group that steadily
decreased in number through 1917 and 1918 – Argentina walked an even
more precarious tightrope of diplomatic negotiation and socio-economic
and political instability in the last two years of the global war.9
The year 1917 was a year of intense political and revolutionary unrest,
a year in which ordinary people around the world took to the streets to
force something to change or, as Jörn Leonhard phrases it, in search of
‘alternative models’.10 While their political activism developed out of fear
or anger, they also aimed at post-war reconstruction or rejuvenation. Many
of them understood that if the ‘old ways’ of the pre-war era were gone
or fading, then the ‘new way’ forward might favour one’s own hopes and
ambitions. For neutral countries like Argentina, it seemed that neutrality,
as an international principle steeped in nineteenth-century legal rights and
obligations, was fast becoming one of these outdated norms. This realization
was highly unsettling. How could their security be protected if it was not
embedded in an international system that recognized and valued neutrality?
This chapter analyses the ways in which the shifting sands of global war
and revolution in 1917 affected how contemporaries reconsidered their
neutrality. It uses examples from a range of countries that were still neutral at
the start of this year, including in the United States, China, Siam (Thailand),
the Latin American states, Liberia and the Netherlands, to argue that 1917
not only transformed socio-political realities across the world but also
transformed how neutral communities and their governments considered
their immediate futures in the war and their intermediate futures in an
imagined post-war world. It argues that the transformations experienced
by neutrals of their neutrality were as much signals of the ‘climacteric’ of
1917 as the violent revolutions that shocked the world. It also shows that
these (former) neutrals were as focused on developing a sense of security
for themselves in the rapidly expanding global war as they were on looking
beyond it to a post-war international system in which they hoped to take
part.
The relevance of neutrality shifted radically after Germany unleashed
its unrestricted U-boat campaign on 1 February and the United States
responded two days later by suspending its diplomatic relations with the
belligerent. Both these acts doomed neutrality as a viable foreign policy
choice. For while Germany did not declare war on the United States or
any other neutrals, its U-boats effectively went to war with their neutral
ships. And while the United States also did not declare war on Germany in
February – although it would do so on 2 April – as of 3 February, it was no
longer conducting itself as a neutral state according to the rights and duties
expected of neutrals by international law.11 The end of its neutrality was
further signalled when President Wilson issued a directive on 26 February
allowing merchant vessels flying the United States flag to arm themselves in
defence against the U-boats. Wilson framed the necessity of the directive not
in terms of protecting neutrality, economic security or even sovereignty, but

rather as an act of humanitarianism, in defence of:
those great principles of compassion and of protection … [of] human

lives, the lives of non-combatants, the lives of men who are peacefully at
work keeping the industrial processes of the world quick and vital, the
lives of women and children and of those who supply the labor which
ministers to their sustenance. We are not speaking of selfish material
rights but of rights which our hearts support and whose foundation is
that of righteous passion for justice upon which all law, all structures
alike of family, of state, and of mankind must rest.12
According to this rendering, Germany’s U-boats were conducting a barbaric

war against the whole world. As such, the United States should do all it
could to defend the lives of ordinary people, even if it meant taking military
action against a belligerent and, with it, potentially dragging the country
into a full-blown war.
After 3 February 1917, the United States government pressured other
neutrals to follow its lead. After it declared war on Germany on 2 April,
the foreign policy choices of the remaining neutral states became even more
extreme: either join the war as a belligerent or lose the chance to have a say
in how the belligerents reshaped the international system at conflict’s end.
As the president of Panama, Ramón Maximiliano Valdés, explained it:
If any other nation of the world was concerned, it would be the duty of
the Republic of Panama to observe a strict neutrality, but in a conflict
where the vital interests of the United States are involved … neutrality
is impossible. Our duty then, in this important moment in the history of
the world, is clear and unmistakable; our duty is that of an ally whose
interests and whose existence is perpetually interwoven with the United
States of America, and this is the only dignified attitude that we can and
must adopt.13
For some of these neutrals, especially those in Europe, the choice was less
difficult, but the implications no less sharp. They could not go to war for
it would in all likelihood mean the end of their sovereign existence (they
almost certainly would have been invaded by one of the belligerents). Yet
they also understood that their ongoing adherence to neutrality offered no
guarantees for their short- or long-term security.
Across 1917 and 1918, more neutrals joined the inter-state war as
belligerents than had done so in any year since 1914. Many others suspended
their neutrality by terminating their diplomatic and economic relationships
with Germany. After the United States declared war, there were no great
power neutrals left. The countries that stayed formally neutral from this
point on had to recalibrate their domestic and foreign policies in response.
Unsurprisingly, many contemporaries argued that the ‘death of neutrality’

itself was nigh and that neutrality no longer served any useful purpose in
international affairs.14 Across the neutral and belligerent world, individuals,
communities and states alike altered and reconsidered their expectations in
the wake of this realization.
In many ways, the political responses that the war evoked in Russia,
Argentina and around much of the world in 1917 reflected the desperation
of so many in the face of the enduring deprivations caused by the seemingly
unending condition of total global war. That desperation also explains, in
part, why the German High Command resumed its unrestricted U-boat
campaigns on 1 February 1917. It well understood that this extreme act of
belligerency risked the entry into the war of the world’s remaining neutrals,
including the United States. For a chance at victory – and in the face of the
German people’s desperate suffering – it was nevertheless willing to hazard
the gamble.
The German government’s willingness to risk going to war with the
world’s remaining neutrals in early 1917 was based on three precarious
assumptions.15 Firstly, the German High Command accepted the premise
that since Germany was not receiving enough material advantage from the
neutrals, it could afford to provoke their anger. From this perspective, if
neutrals could not offer a decisive advantage to a belligerent’s war effort,
then there was no point in adhering to any laws that protected neutrality.
At any rate, Germany’s military advisors also argued that even if the United
States and some of the other neutrals declared war, it would take many
months before enough American troops were adequately trained to make
a difference on the western front.16 And finally, they assured the German
government that Germany’s sizeable fleet of U-boats could weaken Britain’s
supply routes so fully that it would force that country out of the war by
starving it into submission before a newly belligerent United States could
come to its assistance.17 Might made right.
These assumptions ultimately proved misguided, but in the weeks that
followed the 1 February 1917 U-boat declaration, Germany’s gamble seemed
to pay off. Its U-boats sunk an unprecedented 534,478 tonnes of shipping in
and around the British Isles during March alone, and a staggering 881,207
tonnes globally, which was 500,000 tonnes more than were sunk in January
1917.18 At this rate, Britain and France’s war effort could be crippled within
months.
It really was no wonder that when the news of the first Russian
revolution broke in March 1917, the German leadership was euphoric. It
now anticipated that within a few months, all its enemies might be forced
to capitulate: Russia by dint of popular uprising and France and Britain as
a result of Germany’s resurgent economic warfare. In contrast, the Allied
governments were despondent. Their chances of surviving the year, let alone
winning the war, looked particularly bleak.19 To have any chance at victory,
they needed the Americans to join the war as belligerents and to do so as
soon as possible. In the end, it was the combination of the United States’ war
declaration (which immediately brought more ships into Allied service), the
use of military convoys (which protected ships from being ‘picked off’ by
the U-boats) and the laying of gigantic minefields in the North Sea (which
sank U-boats) that kept Germany from victory and the Allies in the war long
enough to win it in 1918.20 The idea that the Allies might actually win the
war, however, was not evident to anyone in 1917.
So much of the United States’ declaration of war on 2 April 1917 turned
on the waning value of neutrality in a world of total war, for what value
did a country’s neutrality have if it could not even protect its people from
militant acts like the sinking of neutral passenger ships? As Wilson explained
in a public speech given on 14 June 1917: ‘It is plain enough how we were
forced into the war. … The military masters of Germany denied us the right
to be neutral.’21 For other Americans, the choice for war was even more
obvious given that the United States’ economic involvement in the conflict
as a neutral had advantaged the Allies most of all. If the Central Powers
stood a chance of victory – which seemed more likely in March 1917 than
at any earlier time – then these American investors would not only lose a
guaranteed return, but they might also have to accept a new world order in
which Germany called the shots. In this sense, as Adam Tooze argues, the
United States’ support of the Allied war effort made it ‘too big to fail’. The
Allies had to win, even if it took the United States declaring war to make
that happen.22
The vision of a German-dominated world order frightened many
Americans. By late 1916, most Americans considered Germany a direct
threat.23 In the wake of the attacks by German agents on the Black Tom docks,
Germany’s encouragement of the Pancho Villa raids and the resumption of
U-boat warfare on merchant and passenger ships, the United States media
was rife with anti-German sentiment.24 Barring a few steadfastly pro-
German publications, the idea that Germany was undermining the United
States as a sovereign nation had become obvious.25 When late in February
1917, the British released an intercepted telegram sent by the German
Foreign Office to its embassy in Mexico City, offering full German support
for a Mexican declaration of war on the United States (including the future
annexation of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona), the outrage was swift and
widespread throughout the United States.26 As the country had already
broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, going to war seemed the
only real choice left.27
It was quite easy then for the United States government to portray the
country’s entry into the war as a righteous choice in defence of its territorial
borders and American values more generally.28 The first Russian revolution
helped that message along, for its people’s revolutionary turn to democracy
in March 1917 played well in the United States (a republic with its own
‘glorious revolution’ to hark back to).29 As a war fought for democracy,
President Wilson could now also portray his new enemies – the German
Kaiserreich, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans – as autocratic ‘old world’

empires in desperate need of renewal and overhaul. Wilson thus presented
the United States’ declaration of war as a necessary step towards achieving
peace and as a way to reform the international arena. In so doing, the United
States proclaimed it was going to war to ‘save the world’ for a better future.
Of course, at another level, the United States’ war declaration came
out of a fear that whichever side won, neither would heed the United
States as a neutral power in their peace negotiations. Where before 1914,
neutrals were thought of as mediators and intermediaries in time of war
and crisis, by 1917 that perspective had shifted. Neutrals might continue
to have their uses, particularly for providing humanitarian aid, but neutral
intermediaries were rarely welcomed in belligerent communities. As a result,
while many Americans recognized that their non-belligerency continued to
be economically advantageous, they also recognized that their neutrality
might prove untenable if it was interpreted as isolationism and, thus, kept
the United States out of a post-war negotiation process. So much had shifted
in terms of neutral-belligerent relations since 1914 that in order to protect
its global and regional interests after the war, the United States government
not only felt warranted to end its own neutrality but also pressured other
neutrals to do the same. As Wilson explained: ‘neutrality is no longer feasible
or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its
people.’30
To this end, it is vitally significant that President Wilson’s war declaration
included several provisos. Firstly, Wilson proclaimed that the United States
joined the war not as an ally of Britain and France, but rather as a co-
belligerent or ‘associate’ power.31 While the United States went to war to rid
the world of the German menace in allegiance with the Allies, its government
was not interested in achieving a military victory at any cost. Rather, Wilson
asserted that his war was fought to bring about peace as quickly as possible.
As such, he was open to any overture made by any belligerent to negotiate
an armistice. In this way, Wilson presented the United States’ belligerency as
a radical new form of diplomacy, one that closed its doors on the principles
that defined great power relations in the nineteenth-century world order
and, instead, embraced a ‘new’ form of internationalism. The catch phrases
of Wilson’s fourteen points of peace, which he released in January 1918,
were ‘collective security’, the ‘League of Nations’ and ‘self-determination’.32
According to Wilson’s post-war vision, inter-state warfare would only be
allowed by agreement of the whole community of ‘civilized’ states, who
could be held collectively responsible for determining the contours of
international security and affairs. The stability of the world order would
not be determined by individual states declaring their neutrality when others
went to war. Rather, they would agree in concert whether or not the wars of
others were acceptable.
In setting up the United States’ shift from neutrality to belligerency in this
way, Wilson gave credence and legitimacy to an explosive set of ideas. Much
as the Russian revolutions of 1917 inspired communities and groups around

the world to agitate for their own versions of political change, Wilson’s ideals
proved an equally powerful catalyst for political activism. Between February
and April 1917, many understood that the principles that sustained the
pre-war world order were fast disintegrating. In the maelstrom of changes
wrought at a domestic and international level during 1917, these men and
women felt confident that their actions to re-shape the future (or to defend
the status quo against these attacks) were appropriate and warranted. After
all, if Lenin and Wilson could assert radically new visions for the future and
mobilize the power of their countries to achieve them, there was real hope
that their own aspirations for change might be achieved.
For the liberal internationalists discussed in Chapter 6, who had advocated
for years for the adoption of many of the concepts Wilson embedded in his
fourteen points of peace, the United States’ entry into the war was both
inspirational and concerning.33 At one level, Wilson’s proclamations confirmed
their own ambitions for improving the international environment. After April
1917, then, their lobbying of neutral and belligerent governments to adopt
a range of cooperative concepts expanded. These proposals included calls to
extend the reach of international law (including the creation of a Permanent
Court of Justice), the maximization of arbitration and mediation practices,
the establishment of a League of Nations, the promotion of democratic
controls over foreign policy, universal disarmament and freedom of the seas
(but not anti-imperialism).34 At another level, however, Wilson’s willingness
to use a declaration of war to advance a new vision for post-war relations
and peace troubled these internationalists. Many of them resided in neutral
countries or represented neutral or pacifist organizations. They recognized
all too well that if the value of neutrality had shifted in international
relations, then their positions as internationalist visionaries representing a
long tradition of peace-making, mediation and humanitarianism embedded
in neutral rights and duties had shifted too.
In some ways then, the internationalist scramble to create a new set
of norms for the post-war world order was also a scramble by neutral
governments and groups to remain diplomatically relevant. In Norway
and Sweden, two countries that sustained their formal neutrality across
the 1914–18 war years, the declining value of neutrality complicated their
internationalist advocacy, particularly in the sciences.35 For many years, these
two Scandinavian countries considered their long-term neutrality as a potent
force to promote transnational cooperation, cooperative internationalism
and peace. As signals of their value as neutral states, Alfred Nobel asked for
his Nobel Prizes to be awarded by committees residing in these two countries
in 1895.36 The war years complicated these international and transnational
relationships, yet it did not stop a wide range of scientific organizations and
internationalist groups housed in these two countries from promoting all
manner of internationalist ‘solutions’ for the future. While they applauded
many of Wilson’s ideas, they were fearful of the shift to collective security
and the implication that their future neutrality might not be respected or
protected. Above all, they feared that their internationalist role as sites for
transnational cooperation would end.37 Through the course of 1917, the
government of the neutral Netherlands recognized the dangers of its potential
exclusion from a post-war global order as well. In response, it reinstituted
the planning committee for the third Hague Peace Conference, which had
dissolved at the outbreak of war in August 1914. In reminding the belligerent
powers of its pre-war importance to international organization and law, the
Dutch government hoped to promote its own post-war importance and to
ensure that the existing Hague institutions and laws were not overlooked
or, worse, annulled.
The United States’ shift from neutrality to belligerency in 1917 also had a
fundamental impact on the manner in which American internationalist groups
reconceptualized their activism. Like the other neutral countries discussed
above, until April 1917, the United States was a key site of internationalist
and peace advocacy. Members of the League to Enforce Peace, for example,
were ardent advocates of collective security (a point on which they differed
from the Scandinavians).38 Even at the inception of the League in 1915, they
were extremely careful not to present their post-war ambitions as a call for
peace at any cost, understanding that this message would be rejected by the
belligerents as unpatriotic. Yet they also understood that American neutrality
enabled them to present these ideas as an appeal to the world for peace.
When Wilson adopted several of the League’s key principles yet also took the
United States into the war in 1917, the League readjusted its ambitions in
line with the country’s new-found belligerency. The war remained a war ‘for
peace’, but one in which they were now fighting to advance a vision of ‘right’
backed by collective ‘might’. Armed power (as opposed to non-belligerency
or neutrality) would protect this general peace.39
For other American internationalists, however, the shift to belligerency
was harder to accommodate. The former Secretary of State and international
lawyer, Elihu Root, prevaricated on the dangers in a 26 April 1917 address
to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, using the following
words:
In trying to estimate the future possibilities of International Law, and

to form any useful opinion as to the methods by which the law can be
made more binding upon international conduct, serious difficulties are
presented in the unknown quantities introduced by the great War, which
is steadily drawing into its circle the entire civilized world.40
The American School Peace League movement was equally confronted.

It had been established in the aftermath of The Hague Conferences to
teach American children about the value of peace and the importance of
international agreements like The Hague Conventions.41 By 1914, the School
Peace League was a powerful educational lobby group that inspired primary
and secondary schools across the United States to celebrate 18 May Peace
Day (the day the first Hague conference opened its doors in 1899) and to
teach the message of international cooperation and war avoidance. While
the United States remained neutral during the First World War, the School
Peace League continued to promote its ‘peace first’ programme. After April
1917, however, its message had to shift in the face of denunciations by
students and parents alike for what they described as an unpatriotic agenda.
In response, its members moved away from the message of peace for peace’s
sake to promoting moralized and ‘all-American’ ideals like international
cooperation, democracy and collective security.42
In many ways, the shift in the School Peace League’s messaging highlights
how fundamental the move to belligerency was for Americans. In declaring
war, the military fronts which they had read about as neutrals now became
their own war fronts on which they and their loved ones might now fight
and die. After April 1917, then, Americans reworked their narratives of
patriotism and duty to accommodate this new belligerent reality. Much like
other belligerent societies, they ‘Othered’ those who did not conform to
expected behaviours, be it volunteering for military service, accepting the
draft, buying war bonds or conserving essential supplies.43 They even set
up internment camps for German civilians.44 In so doing, these Americans
harked back to the ‘Othering’ they were already engaged in as neutrals
during the war as well and to the ‘rape’ of Belgium motif. Race, gender and
class norms affected these wartime assertions of belonging and war service.
As Jennifer Keene argues, the war years ‘radicalized’ Americans in various
political directions.45
For the United States’ many First Nations’ communities, the war
years were particularly invasive. Some Indigenous Americans took up the
call to serve the state at war as a way to achieve greater recognition of
their indigenous rights. As William Leon Wolfe of the Winnebago people
explained in 1917: ‘I am fighting for the rights of a country that had not
done right by my people.’46 Others were forced to serve, including as a result
of police raids on their reservations. The federal government mobilized their
police powers in aid of their war ambitions in a number of other ways as
well, including by enforcing leaseholds on indigenous land and compelling
First Nations’ people to ‘till the soil’ in an attempt to increase wartime
crop production and livestock raising.47 To this end, the United States as an
empire at war operated in much the same ways as its co-belligerents: it used
the needs of its belligerency as a cover both to promote a sense of patriotism
among its subject communities and to repress any opposition. As a result,
when the full integration of First Nations’ people as citizens (as opposed
to subjects) of the United States was legislated in 1924, it looked to some
as a fitting reward for the dutiful military service of 12,000 First Nations’
soldiers in 1917 and 1918. But the Indian Citizen Act also ensured that the
claims to sovereignty made by these First Nations’ communities – many of
which were guaranteed by treaties signed in the nineteenth century – were
now negated.48 In other words, they received citizenship rights but not their
own country. The coercive power of the United States was thus heightened
by the war.
The United States was a formidable belligerent. It went to war
proclaiming full belligerent rights and generally rejected the kinds of
neutrality agreements it had itself negotiated while it was a neutral.49 While
it did not sink neutral ships like the Germans continued to do, it refused
to acknowledge the agreements Germany’s border neutrals had previously
made with the belligerents.50 Instead, it forced neutral governments to
renegotiate these agreements, aiming to gain greater favour for the United
States.51
In the wake of these American demands and in the face of the German
U-boat campaigns and Britain’s blacklisting operations, almost all the
remaining neutrals reconsidered what their neutrality now meant for their
own interests and futures. For most of them, the stakes were acute.52 From
August 1914 on most of them suffered the economic consequences as
the global economy shifted to total war. In central and south America, as
European investments declined through 1915 and 1916, American investors
moved in.53 Across the 1914–17 period of pan-American neutrality (with
the notable exception of Canada in the north), the United States expanded
its formal and informal networks of influence, power and control over Latin
America, taking full advantage of its great power rivals’ pre-occupation
with the war to do so. The United States militarily occupied the Caribbean
territories of Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic and Guatemala in
1916, ostensibly to protect its own access to the Panama canal.54 It extended
its control over Cuba and Nicaragua through the course of 1917 for similar
reasons.55 For Haitians, Cubans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, these
occupation regimes did not formally end until many years after the First
World War.56 Yet in all these places, locals internalized their newly found
belligerency as a way to gain future rights and recognition from the United
States as well. As the historian Stefan Rinke explains, for some Panamanians,
going to war with Germany was an act of loyalty to their ‘great protector’, for
others it was a way to acquire ‘more room to maneuver’ in their relationship
with the United States.57
There is no question that the United States expanded the size of its formal
and informal empire throughout the course of the war.58 After April 1917, it
also mobilized its enormous diplomatic and economic power to pressure the
other American states (as well as the world’s other neutrals) to either join the
war or suspend their relationships with the Central Powers. It even set up
propaganda bureaus in various neutral countries to advance the message.59
In part, Wilson needed these neutrals to renege on their neutrality in order to
validate the power of his ‘collective security’ principle. After all, if a range of
previously neutral states acknowledged that Germany was an international
pariah, then ‘collective security’ would not only be de facto operational, it
would also be seen as effective.
That so many of the Latin American governments either agreed to join

the war or suspend their diplomatic relations with Germany is therefore
significant. Some did so to placate the United States or to obtain economic
advantages from this powerful state and, in so doing, extended the United
States’ networks of informal imperialism substantively. Others did so
because it helped to placate the political demands of many of their own
people to punish Germany for its U-boat campaigns. All of them mobilized
the concept of a post-war international order and the promise of equal
inclusion in a League of Nations as a compelling reason to either suspend
their relationship with the Central Powers or to formally go to war.60 In
Brazil, for example, the neutrality-belligerency debates were as divisive
as they were in Argentina. Here too the stakes revolved both around the
economic distress caused by the war years and the proclaimed advantages
for the country and its people of going to war in support of the Allies.61
Significantly, the Brazilian government broke off diplomatic relations with
the Central Powers on 5 April. Its pro-neutrality and pro-German Foreign
Minister resigned when a German U-boat sunk the Brazilian merchant ship,
the Tijuca, on 23 May.62 When Germany sunk the Macau on 23 October,
Brazil formally declared war. By this stage, its government also recognized
that a formal alliance with the United States would offer Brazil a chance to
have a voice in a post-war international arena.63
Importantly, to many contemporaries, these acts of war and pro-American
diplomacy were signals of the United States’ imperial expansionism. The
irony of these imperial power plays by a president who also proclaimed that
his country was at war to save the world from the yoke of imperialism and
to advance the principles of self-determination and democracy was not lost
on them. Wilson’s arch-rival, the former President Theodore Roosevelt, built
an entire political campaign around the hypocrisy.64 The hypocrisy was also
not lost on the United States’ various subject communities, particularly in
the Philippines, whose people were promised a degree of self-rule in 1916
but did not achieve independence until 1946.65
After April 1917, representatives of these various subjugated communities
joined up with anti-imperial activists from around the world to promote
their rights to autonomy and independence. They did so by lobbying the
United States government directly and, after the November 1918 armistice,
by travelling to Paris to promote their cause among the great power
peacemakers.66 They may not have believed that Wilson was sincere in
his proclaimed ideals of the right to self-rule, but they were nevertheless
determined to hold him and the rest of the great powers accountable to the
promises and allusions they had repeatedly made to those ideals. In this way,
they too saw 1917 as a significant turning point. The emotive power of the
‘Wilsonian moment’, as the historian Erez Manela describes it, was a global
phenomenon.67 But much like the emotive power of the Russian revolutions,
its importance lay first and foremost in opening up space for anti-imperial
ideas to be openly acknowledged as legitimate by the very governments
that equally quickly and violently suppressed anti-imperial activism when it

endangered the integrity of their own empires.
Outside the Americas, the United States’ turn to war resulted in equally
powerful challenges to neutral communities’ and states’ choices and
perceptions of their own futures. Would they remain neutral in a world
dominated by the great power belligerents? Could they remain neutral in
the face of the ever-expanding demands by these belligerents? Might their
futures be better served by choosing to join the war on one or other side?
How should they accommodate the principles of collective security and
potential membership in a League of Nations?
In neutral China, for example, these questions were pressing. Since the
middle of the nineteenth century, the Qing empire had suffered from invasive
incursions into its sovereign independence and economic development. By the
early twentieth century, the industrial great powers had come to an uneasy
agreement to neutralize China. According to the terms of this ‘open door’
policy, China could remain an independent state – a vast empire ruling an
array of peoples and communities – but it would do so at the cost of offering
up commercial, political and financial spaces and rights to the industrializing
powers. By 1914, all the great power empires, including Japan, had either
made substantial forays into China’s Siberian and Manchurian hinterlands
or obtained treaty port rights along the Chinese coastline.
At the outbreak of the First World War, these international treaty ports
faced serious issues, not least in managing the rival ambitions of enemy
companies, financial institutions and resident organizations situated in
these cities. As the war progressed, these rivalries became more entrenched
and divisive. At the same time, and much like what happened in Latin
America and across the Asia-Pacific region, these ports and the rest of
China witnessed a noticeable decline in European economic activity. In
turn, Japanese and American enterprises expanded.68 Through the course
of 1915, the Japanese government also used the European pre-occupation
with the war as a cover to expand its imperial power in China. The
‘twenty-one demands’, which the Chinese government felt compelled to
sign in March 1915, were a particularly invasive form of Japanese informal
imperial expansionism.
The Chinese government feared Japan’s rising power most of all and
sought out every opportunity to entice the Allied powers and the United
States to protect the ‘open door’ equilibrium that was in operation before
the war. In order to keep Britain, France, Russia and the United States on
side, and to offset Japan, China needed to be seen to be offering some kind
of advantage to the Allies. It also hoped that in doing so, its own status as a
fully independent state, free from ‘unequal’ treatment, could be guaranteed
after the war.69 As a result, it agreed to send labourers to the western front to
help the Allied war effort. From 1915 on, 140,000 Chinese men travelled to
Europe as members of an organized labour corps sponsored by the Chinese
state through a private company (so as not to breach China’s neutrality).70
China also opened up its borders to allow hundreds of thousands of its

subjects into Russia to work for the Russian war effort.
But by early 1917, the Chinese government was fearful that even these
pro-Allied contributions would not protect its position in a post-war
negotiation, especially if Japan demanded that its wartime gains in Tsingtao,
Manchuria and Siberia were recognized by the other Allied victors.71
Neutrality was no longer a guarantee of China’s international security
and might actually endanger its post-war status. As a result, Germany’s
resumption of unrestricted U-boat warfare in February offered the Chinese
government an opportunity to legitimately join the war on the side of the
Allies and demand a seat at a post-war peace conference.72 Thus, when
a U-boat sank the French passenger ship Athos, killing more than 540
Chinese men who were on their way to Europe as military labourers, China
suspended its diplomatic relationship with Germany. From 14 March 1917
on, China was no longer a formal neutral, but a benevolent non-belligerent.73
On 14 August, it declared war.74 The Chinese president, Duan Qirui, issued
the following statement to the world to justify its declaration, replete with
numerous allusions to Wilson’s post-war world order:
What we have desired is peace; what we have respected is international law;

what we have to protect are the lives and property of our own people. …
I cannot bear to think that through us the dignity of international law
should be impaired, or our position in the family of nations should be
undermined or the restoration of the peace and happiness of the world
should be retarded. Let the people of this entire nation do their utmost
in this hour of trial and hardship to safeguard and develop the national
existence of the Republic of China, so that we may establish ourselves
amidst the family of nations and share with all mankind the prosperity
and blessings drawn from our common association.75
As early as March 1917, China’s government doubled its efforts to entice its
subjects to volunteer for military labour service in Europe, built ships for the
Allies and flew military aeroplanes for France.76 It even toyed with sending
a full-fledged expeditionary force to Europe.77
For many Chinese, 1917 was a decisive and troubled year. For those
who volunteered for war work in Europe and Russia, the shift to Chinese
belligerency offered certain incentives. With an eye to making some steady
money, escaping the intense food shortages, experiencing an adventure and
‘seeing the world’, thousands did so, especially from the Shandong region.78
Their experiences on the western front were life-changing.79 Anywhere up
to 4,000 of these men also lost their lives to the war.80 The ones that came
home, as the historian Xu Guoqi reminds us, were particularly critical of
what they had learned of so-called ‘western civilization’. As one labourer
noted: ‘What do foreigners mean when they use such beautiful words as
liberty, justice, democracy, self-determination, permanent peace? … Now
ILLUSTRATION 8.1 This 1917 cartoon, published in the satirical magazine De

Notenkraker in the neutral Netherlands by the Dutch cartoonist Albert Hahn, was
titled ‘China in the war’. It reflected on China’s abrogation of its neutrality in March
1917 as an end to its ‘open door’ policy. In the cartoon, a type-cast Chinese figure
hangs an epidemic warning on China’s now firmly closed doors. The poster reads
‘Infectious disease: War plague’ and implies a warning of ‘do not enter’. Its caption
read, ‘Increasingly so, this terrible sickness expands itself’.
Source: International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, BG PM1/91-76.
that your honorable war is over, are the hearts of men at peace?’81 In this
sense, the war years offered Chinese people another space to challenge and
contest the notion that ‘the west’ should rule the world and, with the world,
the fate of China. In this way, the war and particularly the years after 1917,
presented China with a ‘great awakening’ of political consciousness.82 Those
who ended up in Russia as war labourers brought the rhetoric of revolution
and Bolshevism with them on their return to China as well.
For the millions of Chinese subjects who remained home during the war, the
end of China’s neutrality in 1917 also had serious repercussions. According
to the British embassy in Beijing, 80 per cent of Chinese newspapers were
in favour of China’s proactive belligerency. As the Republican newspaper
Chung-Yuan Pao explained: ‘This is the time for action. We must range
ourselves on the side of justice, humanity and international law.’83 Still
for a decisive number of Chinese, China’s declaration of war registered as
weakness, as a fearful act made by a subservient state in a world of great
industrial powers. In the context of the many revolutions and protests ‘from
below’ that developed across the world in 1917, it is highly significant
that China witnessed the collapse of its central government, the growth
of civil unrest and a return to ‘warlordism’ as numerous regional leaders
took charge of their own regions.84 Sun Yat-Sen, the politician and political
philosopher who had been instrumental in advancing a Chinese-centric
government movement in the pre-war years, even accepted German money
to set up a rival central government late in 1917.85 Founded on the ‘Three
Principles of the People’, which Sun Yat-Sen had first published in 1907, this
new government proclaimed that only by advancing the principles of Mínzú
(‘independence’ from foreign domination), Mínquán (‘rights of the people’
to political representation) and Mínshēng (‘people’s livelihood’ or rights
to social welfare) could China move effectively into the future. Altogether,
then, 1917 caused enormous destabilization in China. That destabilization
was only exacerbated by its shift to belligerency.
The government of neutral Siam (Thailand) faced equally challenging
choices in 1917. As an independent monarchy, yet one subjected to a range
of ‘unequal treaties’ with the world’s industrial powers, Siam’s neutrality
in August 1914 was all but assured. It could not afford to alienate its
relationship with either set of belligerents when they all had substantial
imperial and economic interests at play in Siam.86 After 1914, neutral Siam
became a key space to organize and fund anti-imperial agitation in nearby
belligerent regions, including in French-controlled Indo-China and British-
controlled south and south-east Asia. But in the aftermath of the United
States’ war declaration in 1917, Siam’s position on neutrality also changed.
From this point on, King Vajiradvudh saw only opportunities in joining the
war on the side of the Allies. Such an act of war would present the country
as a mature state fully capable of functioning in a post-war global order
as an equal to all other states. It also offered the potential for the country
to break free from the constraints of the various ‘unequal treaties’ that
provided the European powers and the United States peculiar commercial
privileges.87 To confirm its belligerency, Siam sent an ambulance unit and a
small expeditionary force to France in 1918, both of which arrived too late
to actually engage in any fighting. Yet these acts nevertheless left a powerful
symbolic impression.88
Of course, King Vajiradvudh understood that this unprecedented shift
to war needed domestic approval, not least because it would be the first
time in modern memory that Siamese soldiers would fight in a ‘foreign’

war. To persuade the Siamese public that he had their interests at heart,
Vajiradvudh penned various (anonymous) newspaper editorials presenting
Siam’s position in the war as a precarious reality. In them, he made clear
that Germany threatened the world and Siam directly, not only by sinking
neutral ships carrying Siamese subjects and trade, but also because Germany
flouted the international laws of war, the same laws that dictated how
‘civilized’ societies (like Siam) should conduct themselves in the world. Even
the August 1914 violation of neutral Belgium featured prominently in these
editorials.89 Whether they wished it or not, Siam’s security, at least as its king
presented it, no longer lay in neutrality but in the act of taking a righteous
side and standing up for a particular war cause.
For Liberians – the only African country that managed to proclaim and
sustain a policy of neutrality between 1914 and 1917 – the war years were
also extremely difficult. The onset of the global war upset Liberia’s already
precarious economy. Because the Allies favoured their own African ports
over Liberia’s neutral ones, Liberia never recovered any trade advantages.
It failed to attract merchants to its ports during the war and, with the onset
of Britain’s blacklisting campaigns, stood on the verge of complete financial
collapse. Its people suffered intensely, and popular protests against the
Liberian government heightened when it imposed a Hut Tax to offset some
of these losses. The war years, then, were years of intense hardship and
suffering for most Liberians.
Only the neutral United States – a country with which Liberia had a
long and complicated history – offered some reprieve from the economic
hardship the country endured between 1914 and 1917. Once the Americans
joined the war, however, there was nowhere for the Liberian government to
turn for much-needed cash.90 Its government had as good as no choice but
to join the Allied war effort. It did so on 4 August 1917 and was offered a
sizeable British bank loan in compensation. But it also did so proclaiming
disgust at Germany’s ‘violation of the rights of small neutral States’, which
‘if allowed to, can only result in the complete subjugation … of all small
and weak states’.91 Two hundred Liberian men subsequently served with
the French army on the western front. All German residents of Liberia were
arrested, put on ships and interned in camps in France. All German-owned
assets were liquidated, most of them handed over to the Allies. In retaliation,
a German warship shelled the Liberian port of Monrovia in April 1918,
causing significant damage and killing several civilians.92 The United States
subsequently sent a warship to Monrovia to defend its waters from future
German attacks. As a result of these developments, Liberia pivoted closer
to Britain, France and the United States, while Germany was made to sign
away any remaining economic assets in Liberia in the Treaty of Versailles.
In response, Liberia was the only independent country in Africa allowed to
join the League of Nations as a founding member in 1919.93 It declared war
in 1917 to protect its post-war autonomy.94
The Balkan state of Greece was equally confronted by the global

developments of 1917. Greece’s position in the war was complicated
from the moment the Ottoman empire went to war in November 1914.
From this point on, Greece’s political elite split themselves in two: some
supporting the pro-Allied and anti-Ottoman agenda of the government, the
other in favour of the pro-independence neutrality stance of the country’s
pro-German monarch. Without agreeing to join the war as a belligerent,
Greece’s government nevertheless allowed the Allies to establish a military
front in and around the port of Thessaloniki (Salonika) in 1915. From this
point on, Greece became embroiled in a de facto civil war of words, pitting
monarchists against pro-government supporters.
After various domestic crises, including an armed siege of Athens by a
royalist paramilitary organization, the Allies blockaded southern Greece
late in 1916, while the Venizelos government established a separate state
in northern Greece. In the wake of widespread starvation across southern
Greece in the winter of 1916–17, almost certainly due to the blockade,
Constantine I abdicated in June 1917. His son, Alexander I, agreed to let his
newly reunified country join the war against the Central Powers. In bringing
his supporters together to support the country’s new-found belligerency,
Constantine I explained that Greece only stood to gain from the deal:
By taking part in this world war alongside democracies impelled to unite

in a truly holy alliance … we shall regain the national territories we have
lost; we shall reassert our national honour; we shall effectively defend
our national interests at the Peace Congress and secure our national
future. We will be a worthy member of the family of free nations that the
Congress will organise, and hand on to our children the Greece that past
generations could only dream of.95
While Greece’s formal turn to belligerency in 1917 masked a deeply strained

political environment (and one that would see Greece tumble in and out of
political crises, civil warfare and coups for decades), it was sold to the Greek
people as a way to ‘win’ in a war that cost so many so much. Much like the
Liberian government, the Greek political elite felt compelled to embrace
the internationalist principles of Wilson’s peace plan in order to safeguard
the country’s long-term security. Almost by necessity, and in aid of future
ambition, neutrality fell by the wayside.
Unlike China, Siam, Liberia and Greece, the neutral Netherlands did not
go to war in 1917 or 1918. Its government doggedly maintained a position
of formal neutrality, often by negotiating on the most desperate of terms
with the two sets of belligerents.96 Caught between the blockading might
of the Allies and the military might of their immediate neighbour Germany,
the Dutch were in the unenviable position that a choice for war would
have guaranteed an invasion by the Germans and an end to their sovereign
existence. Occupied Belgium – on the Netherlands’ southern border – offered
ILLUSTRATION 8.2 This cartoon entitled ‘Greece and the war’ was pub-
lished in the Dutch satirical magazine De Notenkraker in July 1917. The
Dutch cartoonist Albert Hahn depicted death getting his hands on a type-
cast Greek maiden, sighing ‘Finally’. Typical of Hahn’s many cartoons was his
despondency at the expansion of the global war. His 1917 depictions were particu-
larly critical.
Source: International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, BG C6/616.
an abject example of what a turn to belligerency might look like.97 For most
Netherlanders, then, neutrality was the country’s only option.
Still, their collective experiences of 1917 also changed their perspectives
on what it meant to remain neutral. They understood all too well that
neutrality as an international principle protected by international law was
under attack and might not survive the war. They watched with anxious
eyes as other neutrals succumbed to the pressure to abrogate their neutrality
(Illustrations 8.1 and 8.2 highlight how attuned Dutch newspaper readers
were to the global shifts in the war). They met the news of the United States’
entry into the war with equally fearful eyes. Most Netherlanders worried
about their own security first: could they keep out of the war and avoid a
military invasion by either side? Could they survive the economic impact of an
American blockade? In the face of the two Russian revolutions and growing
political crisis across the continent, they also worried about the impact of
a complete collapse of social order across central and eastern Europe, so
much so that they feared revolution might spread to the Netherlands itself.
Lastly, they feared that the belligerents had passed the point of no return
and would not be able to reign in the revolutionary developments and civil
wars that were erupting in so many places, including in the Dutch East
Indies.98 Staying out of the war continued to be the Netherlands’ prime
objective. But what the country and its empire might look like by war’s end
unsettled them all.
Altogether, during 1917, the value of neutrality as a valid and viable
foreign policy choice that protected neutral rights to trade and economic
security was besieged by the belligerent powers. The Germans rejected
neutral trade rights by sinking neutral ships caught in its warzones. The
Allies rejected neutral sovereignty and trade rights by blacklisting enemy
endeavours in neutral countries and blockading neutral ships that did not
adhere to their own trade requirements. The newly belligerent United States
upended neutrality by advocating for a post-war global order built around
collective security. While neutral charitable and humanitarian activities
continued to matter (and were recognized as significant by all the belligerent
states), the notion that neutrality would function as it did before August
1914 faded away through the course of 1917.
Perhaps the Chilean Ambassador to the United States, Benath Mathieu,
described the shift best when he carefully explained in 1920 that Chile
‘complied with her duties as a neutral’ both in the ‘first phase’ of pan-
American neutrality that stretched from August 1914 to April 1917 and
during the beleaguered ‘second phase’ of Chilean neutrality from April 1917
to November 1918. Even though Chile (like Argentina) did not declare war
on Germany and while it dutifully upheld the laws of neutrality throughout
the conflict, Mathieu also stressed that Chileans were not ‘indifferent’
neutrals. They worried incessantly about Germany’s military barbarism and
sympathized with the war’s (and by implication Germany’s) many victims.
As such, Mathieu argued, ‘it is not germane to speak of our material aid
given to the sufferings of Europe; it is sufficient to know that Chile is the
Latin-American country that contributed most to the Red Cross and other
beneficent institutions.’99 By having to advocate so strongly for neutrality as
a right, Mathieu was also having to defend his country’s unwillingness to
abandon its neutrality in 1917 and 1918. Like the Dutch, the Scandinavians
and Argentinians, Chileans too were punished by the victorious Allies
for their refusal to join their side in what they continued to describe as a
‘righteous’ war. From this Allied perspective, any neutrals that remained
neutral in 1917 and 1918 were, in effect, pro-German and could not be seen
to champion ‘law and justice’.100
As such, neutrality had become a suspect international condition.
Neutrals could not be seen as the moral arbiters of war as they had been
in the pre-1914 world, nor could they be trusted to take part in any peace
negotiations.101 As the German jurist, Alex Lifschütz advocated early in
1918, in future wars neutrality could only exist when neutrals behaved as
truly passive observers who kept to themselves and refrained from interfering
in the business or supply of the belligerents.102 For Lifschütz and so many

others, by choosing not to partake in a war, neutrals forsook any rights to
have a say in international affairs. They might offer humanitarian aid but
were otherwise extraneous to the future shape of international relations.
The Italian expat living in the American city of Chicago, Luigi Carnovale,
framed his rejection of neutrality even more harshly: ‘[T]he only means by
which war can be prevented [in future] is by abolishing the neutrality of
nations, that neutrality corresponds exactly to selfishness.’103 In so doing, he
effectively blamed neutral countries (including the United States) for keeping
the war going after 1914 and for transforming it into a total global reality.
The British government was more subtle in its approaches to the
international shift away from neutrality in 1917 and 1918. Nevertheless,
in August 1918, its Political Intelligence Department approved a new
propaganda document aimed at persuading the remaining neutrals to
consider joining the war. The pamphlet entitled Why War? advocated
for the necessity of defeating Prussian militarism, protecting the rights of
small nations, international law and democracy. Above all, the war fought
by Britain and France, according to the pamphlet, was a ‘titanic’ struggle
to defend international good faith. Neutrality as an essential principle for
guaranteeing a post-war peace was not mentioned.104
Of course, neutrality did not disappear from the international arena
with the end of the First World War. It remained particularly important for
the development of international humanitarian law, various international
organizations and transnational scientific cooperation.105 Some countries –
like Switzerland – embraced a new form and style of neutrality after 1918 as
well. But with the collapse of neutrality in the war, so too did the nineteenth-
century international system disappear.106
156
9
Exit … 1918–19
There is something profoundly unsettling in the statistic that after China

declared war on Germany in August 1917, more than 1.4 billion people
(out of a total world population of 1.8 billion) were formally at war with
each other. Perhaps an even more unsettling realization is that during 1917
and 1918, most neutral countries also experienced a profound unravelling
of social norms, political order and economic stability.1 By the time of the
signing of an armistice that brought the war between the Allies and Central
Powers to an end on 11 November 1918, few people could claim that they
felt safe and secure or even ‘at peace’ in their current situation. The war
years had unbounded so many of their pre-war assumptions, norms and
expectations about the communities in which they lived, the elites who ruled
their lives and the socio-economic environments in which they interacted.
Civil wars, social unrest, in some places complete social and political
disintegration, alongside anarchy, hunger, starvation, inflation, a profound
sense of grief and a global influenza pandemic, ensured that their lives and
livelihoods remained unsettled well after November 1918.2
This chapter analyses the final global transformation of the First World
War period, namely the shift from total global war to a condition that
can loosely be defined as ‘peace’ in the aftermath of the November 1918
armistice. The chapter argues that while contemporaries recognized that
the ‘Great War’ ended when the guns fell silent on Europe’s western front,
they also understood that the war had transformed the world. For some,
understanding there was a future beyond the war was all-important. As one
British officer recalled of his demobilization:
While we were going through the formalities of disembarking a strange

and unreal thought was running through my mind. I had a future. It took
some getting used to, this knowledge. There was a future ahead of me,
something I had not imagined for some years. I said so much to Captain
Brown. He smiled at me; he was a man about forty. ‘Yes’, he agreed.
‘You’ve got a future now, Dickie. And so have I. I wonder what we’ll do
with it, and what it will be like. Because, you know, things are not going
to be the same as they were before.’3
What that future might bring was unclear: too much had happened, too
many horizons had shifted, too many people had died and too many
expectations had been ignited in the course of this ‘total global tragedy’.4
Perhaps even more fundamentally, the war had awakened so much change
and instability that finding shared paths forward that could reconcile
these contested expectations let alone remedy and restore the destruction
wreaked between 1914 and 1918 was a nigh-on impossible task. At any
rate, too many communities remained in political flux for a workable
international order to be established. They recognized the post-war world
as a broken world, a world in which their search for peace and stability
proved interminable.5
For the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Armistice Day came
as a great relief. Yet he could not rejoice.6 While France came out of the war
‘victorious’, very few French felt like winners. They, like Clemenceau, well
understood the immense debt those who survived collectively owed to those
who did not.7 As a result, and like so much of the Allied world, France’s
‘culture of victory’ was not built around celebratory ideals but rather around
the recognition of this collective grief and understanding that France and
its empire faced enormous political, social and economic challenges going
forward. On 11 November 1918, Clemenceau turned to Rabindranath
Tagore’s Song Offerings, which he asked his friend, the Romanian-French
feminist writer Anna the Comtesse de Noailles, to read out loud to him for
inspiration.8 Tagore’s message of hope and renewal, of building a global
peace by bringing humanity together was the message Clemenceau most
needed on this day of mourning, reflection and anxiety.
In seeking out something hopeful in the midst of his despair, Clemenceau
was not alone. When Tagore visited France in 1920 and Germany in 1921,
he was widely fêted. Of these visits, he later recalled:
Following the end of the War, I went to Europe where I was received with
a warmth of welcome which overwhelmed me. I could not believe that it
was because of my books or my work. Then I decided that it must be that
the nations of the West were looking for some new ideal from the East
which would reconstruct their civilization on a better basis.9
In the wake of the Armistice, more Europeans than ever before acknowledged
that Europe might need to change from within, in line with Tagore’s ideas
and Wilson’s fourteen points of peace. Many of them also hailed the prospect
of a more open and equitable world order and a future that embraced the
motto ‘never again war!’. For if the war proved that ‘European civilization’
had failed, that civilization needed to be rebuilt on sounder and more
equitable foundations.
EXIT … 1918–19 159
ILLUSTRATION 9.1 This cartoon by the American artist Sidney Greene was

published in the New York Evening Telegram in 1919. It depicted the ‘world unrest’
as a product of the many crises set off by the world war, including strikes, riots,
German Reds, Bolshevism, the League of Nations, murders and Hunism (a reference
to German militarism). Its caption read ‘turn on the hose’, implying that the signing
of the peace treaties at the end of the war might douse the flames of unrest. The hose
had not yet been turned on, however. By implication, the flames might just keep on
spreading.
Source: Evening Telegram, 1919, reprinted in Literary Digest 30 August 1919, np.
While some felt the urge to make the world a better place, to move away
from the past and the suffering endured during the war, others could only
imagine the continuation of horror going forward. They feared the future
and fixated on the improbability that the governments who survived the
war – let alone those that established new states in its wake – could satisfy
the various competing demands at play within their societies or within the
wider international system. The Brazilian journalist and politician Otto
Prazeres, for example, reflected on the armistice in terms of the insuperable
obstacles the war had created:
Besides a loss of illusions, the war will have many additional implications.
… The mental revolutions, which result in new ways of thinking and
acting, are already perceptible. Many moral, social, and political values
will lose the basis upon which they were formed and be fundamentally
changed. … [T]he threatened masses will march in search of new
principles.10
In reflecting on the meaning of the First World War for Latin America, the
historian Stefan Rinke concurs, arguing that the 1914–18 war years were
a decisive ‘transformer that brought change from the realm of ideas to the
social realities of the streets. … It would be a legacy of the First World War
that people sought answers to the question of the future … in increasingly
violent conflict.’11 In Ireland, eastern and central Europe, Germany, Russia
and much of the Middle East these violent conflicts already waged.12 In
many other places they threatened to erupt.
As we saw in Chapter 1, at the outbreak of war in July 1914, most
politically alert contemporaries had clear expectations of what a European
inter-state conflict should look like. By the time that inter-state war came
to a formal close in November 1918, however, those expectations had
been uprooted and largely surpassed. ‘The war’ had spawned a monster
beyond anyone’s prior reckoning, an insatiable leviathan that devoured with
reckless abandon. This book has shown how the war transformed from a
potentially manageable diplomatic crisis to a total global monstrosity.
Beginning with the initial transgression of the international norms of war
and neutrality by Germany in its invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and
France, the war quickly evolved from a European conflict into a global crisis
when the British empire went to war in early August 1914. By December of
that year, hope for a short war had evaporated leaving the fearful prospect
of a long-war scenario in its wake. This ‘long war’ engendered a spate of
new transgressions against neutrals, non-belligerents and civilians alike. By
1916, it did not matter where you lived, the war penetrated your life in some
(usually significant) way. The physical, psychological and emotional toll of
what seemed like an endless reality through the course of 1916, 1917 and
1918 was so intense that the bonds of social cohesion of many societies
strained, breaking some of them completely. In these processes of grave
EXIT … 1918–19 161
unravelling that affected neutrals and belligerents alike, all manner of new
expectations, ambitions, hopes and fears were unleashed.
All of these societal strains were only made so much worse when a
global influenza pandemic developed through the course of 1918. The virus
killed anywhere between 50 to 100 million people over an eighteen-month
period.13 Around 90 per cent of the pandemic’s casualties occurred between
August and November 1918, coinciding with the final months of the official
fighting in the First World War.14 As the Swiss-born French writer Blaise
Cendrars evocatively recalled of a visit to his friend, the poet Guillaume
Apollinaire, early in November 1918:
We spoke of the topic of the day, the epidemic of Spanish flu which
was creating more victims than the war. I have just travelled halfway
across France by car, and in a Lyon suburb I watched the incineration
of plague-ridden bodies piled up in the fields and sprinkled with petrol,
since the city had run out of coffins. … The trauma of the flu was all the
more vivid because it happened against the backdrop of the slaughter in
the last months of the war, and when there was still a ban on families
recovering their dead relatives and returning them to their villages and
towns for reburial. Some saw this time as one of the loss of rituals of
separation and bereavement, a kind of ‘decivilisation’, as a result of mass
death.15
In these immediate ways that affected almost every family in the world, the
Spanish flu not only further eroded social and cultural norms and rituals,
but also reminded contemporaries of ‘what and who had passed’ in the
war itself. There was no going back to a ‘simpler’ pre-war pre-flu era; their
loved ones were simply gone. The mass of deaths on the war fronts were
now intertwined with a mass of deaths in civil society. As a result, the flu
accentuated an almost universal feeling that all who survived the war and
the flu were somehow experiencing a ‘rupture in time’, from which they
could not return unharmed or unchanged.16 Only days after Cendrars’ visit,
Apollinaire also died of the flu.
Despite the commonly used identifier – the ‘Spanish flu’ – it was quite
clear to contemporaries that the pandemic did not originate in Spain.17 The
influenza only became a subject of global public discussion, however, after
it hit Spain in the European summer of 1918. As a neutral country, Spain
did not have the same censorship rules in place regarding public health as
the belligerents. And like all war-related news at the time, news from neutral
countries spread particularly fast. Still, by the time Spain was infected with
the virus and reporting it, the pandemic had already raised alarm bells in
the United States, France, Britain and Germany. None of these belligerent
governments were initially willing to take any serious measures to contain
its spread because the war was still on and their military priorities came
first.18 As a result, the flu became part of the fabric of total war.
ILLUSTRATION 9.2 A group of women in Brisbane, Australia, wearing mouth

coverings to prevent the spread of the ‘Spanish flu’ in 1919.
Source: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, 104332.
The official secrecy around the pandemic certainly left ample space for
belligerent communities to invent their own stories about the disease’s
origins and meaning. They viewed the virus as a concomitant of the war.
Across Europe, for instance, many experienced the disease as treacherous:
as an invisible enemy attacking their war-weakened society from within,
even as a punishment sent by their god for the sins of the war. Even neutrals
explained the flu in this way (see Illustration 9.3). Others suspected that
their enemies had released the virus as an alarmingly effective new weapon
of mass destruction. Many of them distrusted their own governments’ roles
in the flu’s management, not least as they also understood that fighting ‘the
war’ remained a primary priority (as opposed to combating the flu). In
France, rumours abounded that the medical catastrophe facing them could
not be caused by something as ‘innocent’ as a flu bug and that the authorities
were actually trying to keep the secret that deadly cholera had returned.19
The virus also spread thanks to the global sinews of the war. It was
carried on troop ships from home front to war front and back again. The
contagion haunted soldiers as they demobilized and when they remobilized
to fight new wars at home and abroad (as occurred with Japanese, American,
British and French troops supporting the ‘White’ cause in the Russian Civil
War, for example). In New Zealand, the influenza was dubbed ‘the Armistice
epidemic’ since it arrived with the first wave of demobilized troop ships
coming home.20 The virus moved as refugees moved, as prisoners of war and
internees were repatriated and as ships docked at global ports. It ravaged
the population of Samoa, after the New Zealand governor allowed a ship
with sick passengers to land in Apia. The loss of more than 22 per cent of
EXIT … 1918–19 163
ILLUSTRATION 9.3 This cartoon by L.J. Jordaan appeared on 26 October 1918

in the satirical Dutch magazine De Notenkraker (The Nutcracker). It depicted the
Spanish flu as death disguised as a Spanish flamenco dancer. Its caption read: ‘Now
the neutrals will also get their due’.
Source: Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG BG C6/825.
Western Samoa’s entire population to the flu (around 9,000 people in all)
took an enormous toll on Samoan families and these Pacific islands’ social
and political order.21 In the Middle East, the virus’ toll was equally horrific
not least because it came after years of famine. In Persia, famine and disease
accounted for the death of anywhere between 2 and 10 million people
by the end of 1919.22 In Asia, 36 million individuals lost their lives to the
pandemic, causing enormous social and emotional dislocation.23
In Africa, the demographic impact of the flu was similarly devastating,
spreading ‘inland rapidly, inserting its feverish presence into the numerous
arteries of transport and communication that had been laid down to ferry
supplies, soldiers and communications from the imperial metropole’, as Bill
Nasson explains.24 Here too, people linked the war with the flu. When for
example the East Africa campaigns came to an end on 25 November 1918 –
the news of the armistice took nearly a fortnight to arrive – the British
captured all 2,500 German soldiers, askari and porters and interned them
in a prisoner-of-war camp. Many of them contracted the flu in the process.25
The Wagogo’s Mtunya was also accentuated by the losses this community
suffered as a result of the flu.26
For Germans, the congruence of the Spanish flu with the military defeat
they experienced on the western front only spurred on a revolutionary
fervour. By the middle of 1918, the only geostrategic clarity that still seemed
to be on offer in the war was the fighting on Europe’s western front. After
Germany launched an ambitious ‘Spring Offensive’ there in March, its
troops exhausted themselves in June and July. Buoyed by the arrival of fresh
troops from the United States, an Allied counterattack succeeded in breaking
through the German frontlines on 8 August. From this point on, Germany
could not win the war by military means.27
All across Germany, people responded to the realization that they were
losing a war that their leaders had promised they would win by taking out
their frustrations in highly public and political ways. Soldiers deserted their
stations, sailors in the German Navy mutinied, workers went on strike
and Germans took to the streets demanding political change and an end
to their hunger and suffering. In the face of the collapse of his country and
the imminent defeat of his armed forces, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. A
cobbled together political agreement brought a German Republic into being
on 9 November 1918. On 11 November, Germany’s new leaders signed an
armistice agreement with the Allies. Europe’s Great War had ended.28
For some Germans, the end of the war and the promise of political
rejuvenation lifted the spirits. Lida Gustava Heymann, an active player in
the women’s movement and one of the driving forces behind the Women’s
Peace Conference in The Hague in 1915, described this feeling of expectation
as follows:
Now a new life began. Looking back the following months seemed like
a beautiful dream, so improbably splendid were they. The heavy burden
EXIT … 1918–19 165
of the war years had gone; one stepped forward elated, looking forward
to the future.29
Yet Heyman was in the minority. Many Germans feared that their fate
would mirror that of Bolshevik-ruled Russia, now engulfed in a destructive
civil war, or that of Austria-Hungary, whose empire no longer existed while
its former subjects engaged in all manner of violent upheavals aimed at
establishing a swathe of new nation-states. The violence in Germany’s
streets, the abdication of the Kaiser, the demobilization of Germany’s
soldiers, the food shortages, the occupation of the Ruhr by Allied soldiers
and the acknowledgement of their own deep grief left many Germans bereft
of a sense of belonging and identity.
Various groups of Germans responded to the general uncertainty by
establishing their own centres of governance, including soviets, bourgeois
Bürgerräte (people’s councils), paramilitary organizations like the Freikorps
(‘free corps’) and even house-wife councils.30 All of these groups aimed
at defining a new set of rules, norms and expectations for how peace and
stability might be returned to their lives and their country. Unsurprisingly,
very few of these groups could agree with each other on what those rules,
norms and expectations should be. Even their sense of what it was to be
‘German’ differed at a fundamental level. As a result, Weimar Germany’s
provisional government faced enormous obstacles in bringing all these
competing ambitions into line in support of the republic. Ultimately, this
ultra-democratic state, in which every adult citizen had the vote, would
not be able to settle the political rifts that were awakened during the First
World War. Germany’s 1918 revolution may not have caused an all-out civil
war, but the intensity of the political violence experienced in the 1918–23
period revealed the deep clefts that divided Germans and underscored the
weaknesses of the new Weimar state.
In so many ways, Germany’s post-war troubles also offer an excellent
example of how the internalization of wartime identities and loyalties
reverberated into ‘peacetime’. In the wake of the war, a member of the
Freikorps, Friederich Wilhelm Heinz, could even claim ‘the war’ as his
identity:
When they told us that the war was over, we laughed, because we
ourselves were the war. Its flame continued to burn in us, it lived on in
our deeds surrounded by a glowing and frightful aura of destruction. We
followed our inner calling and marched on the battlefields of the post-
war period just as we had marched toward the front: we were singing,
full of recklessness and adventurism while marching; we were grim, silent
and merciless in combat.31
Heinz’s ultra-militarism was emboldened in November 1918 by mythical

discourses that Germany had not lost at all. In the context of the country’s
political upheavals, he could easily blame a spate of internal enemies – people

who may have lived in Germany but whose loyalties were treacherous to him –
for Germany’s current condition. According to the myth that Heinz and so
many supporters of the Fatherland Party and other nationalist groups believed,
Germany was not defeated on the western front. As the main propagator of
the ‘stab in the back’ (Dolchstoß) myth, the former Commander-in-Chief
General Ludendorff proclaimed that Germany was defeated by an alliance of
internal enemies, among whom he counted socialists, communists, Jews and
all foreigners.32 For Germany to reclaim its honour and former glory and
status, these ‘Others’ would need to be defeated first.
In contrast, Heinz and Ludendorff’s imagined enemies held to their
own idealistic visions of a new Germany. Some, like the future members
of the German Communist Party (KPD), hoped for a rapid working-class
revolution. The socialist intellectual Rosa Luxemburg advocated for a more
gradual (and less destructive) revolution by the masses. Yet precisely because
Luxemburg was a woman, a socialist and an intellectual from a Polish and
Jewish background, she stood out as a supreme example of the ‘Other’
whom militarists, traditionalists and nationalists like Heinz so despised and
whom more moderate Germans feared might lead the country towards a
Bolshevik future.33 The Freikorps commander, Major Maercker, portrayed
her as ‘a female devil’, one who ‘can today destroy the German Empire
without punishment, since there is no powerful institution in the Empire
which can oppose her.’34
After a massive communist-inspired workers’ strike broke out across
Germany in January 1919, which the Weimar government only managed
to suppress by asking the Freikorps for assistance, both Luxemburg and her
KPD co-leader Karl Liebknecht were kidnapped, violently beaten and then
murdered at the Freikorps’ headquarters in Berlin. The Social Democratic
newspaper Vorwärts proclaimed that Liebknecht and Luxemburg ‘were
the victims of a civil war which they themselves’ had instigated.35 The
newspaper’s rhetoric underlined how easily the use of extra-legal and
paramilitary violence, even murder, was legitimated in the wake of the war
and in aid of stabilizing Germany’s republic. The report also highlighted
how easily groups and individuals could continue to demonize each other
as ‘enemies of the state’. The Spartacist uprising of January 1919 sparked a
spate of political murders, including of some of Weimar’s leading politicians
like Matthias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau. The regime’s instability led
to various attempted military coups and numerous working-class strikes.
These reactionary and highly violent acts made it impossible for Weimar’s
government to establish stable democratic foundations for their new state.
They also illustrate how well-ensconced the instinct to mobilize one’s identity
to advocate for a cause had become, particularly when it justified the use
of violence against a perceived alien ‘Other’. In this way, Germany offers a
particularly poignant example of how difficult it proved to demobilize the
cultures of belonging and ‘Othering’ that evolved during the war.
EXIT … 1918–19 167
The intense difficulties facing Germans in re-establishing order and

social stability in the aftermath of the First World War were mirrored
around the world, in large part because so much was unsettled and made
insecure but also because the war had unleashed a host of irreconcilable
expectations about the future. In some respects, the war years heightened
people’s expectations of what their governments ought to do for them once
peace returned. At the very least, many of them expected that they would be
compensated for the sacrifices they had made during the war.
As an example, the many colonial soldiers from the French empire, who
had fought for France in Europe, brought a new mentality of citizenship
and wartime sacrifice home with them. Their expectation, that their newly
confirmed status as French citizens would end the racial denigration they
had experienced in the past, carried some weight. Demba Mboup, a veteran
from Senegal who had served in the French army since 1915, demobilized
in 1919. He recounted that when a white man on board the troop ship
taunted the Senegalese veterans with racial slurs, they beat up the offender,
who ended up:
crying and said he would never do it again. … So what happened [then]?

Nothing! We were within our rights, because discrimination between
people [was no longer tolerated] at that time, [and] we were French
citizens like anybody else. … [But], if the same thing had happened before
the war, [we] would not have done the same thing. Because we had less
power then, and [we] were treated badly like this by the French all the
time.36
Mboup certainly believed that his wartime service could lead to an

improvement in French rule in Senegal. Many of his soldier colleagues
across Africa and in Indo-China soon realized there was very little evidence
of that. For them the war altered very little in the imperial imbalance of
power or in the treatment they received from white colonists.37 Yet what
Mboup’s demobilization recollections highlight above all is the expectation
that things ought to have changed had entrenched.
Mboup’s gritty hope highlights two important things about the
transformations evoked by the First World War in the racial dynamics of the
world’s industrial empires, including those of the United States and Japan.
Firstly, the war helped to solidify and legitimize anti-colonial, anti-western
and anti-imperial resistance movements and ideas. For many, 1914–18
registered as a great destabilizing moment for the world’s empires that also
helped to unsettle some of the racial norms which underpinned the industrial
imperial system. As such, the First World War helped to accentuate a global
‘shift away from empire’ as a defining feature of the twentieth-century
international era. The language of independence, autonomy, statehood,
self-determination, suffrage and racial equality pervaded global and local
politics after 1918. The establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922 and its
foundational anti-capitalist and anti-imperial rhetoric further helped to

undermine the legitimacy of imperialism as a valid means of governance.
The Soviet Union was, of course, also a product of the many revolutionary
transformations occasioned by the First World War. But so were the
expectations that veterans like Demba Mboup brought home with them.
Among Maori soldiers returning home, the expectation was encapsulated
by the concept of tina pakanga (ultimate encounter), which the historian
Monty Soutar defines as ‘the fight for survival as Maori in post-war New
Zealand’. Since Maori had faithfully served the state and empire at war,
they felt they deserved an equal share of the opportunities offered to New
Zealand’s non-Maori veterans.38
Yet, in response and all too importantly, the second major transformation
educed during the 1914–18 war years was directly oppositional to this ‘shift
away from empire’ and the recognition of civil rights. Across the western
world, there were plenty of people (and governing elites) who hoped for
a return to the familiarity of the pre-war social, racial and political order.
Their ambitions to ‘restore’ and celebrate the pre-war past offered a powerful
motivation to reimpose full imperial control and to stem the expectations
for change that so many of their subjects now demanded (and Wilson and
Lenin seemed to confirm). Their willingness to use state violence to exact
compliance was rarely restrained, as it had not been through (or for that
matter before) the war either. In this sense, the war years offered no reprieve
from empire or racial inequity. After 1918, most imperial authorities’
willingness to resort to state violence, including by maximizing new military
technologies like aerial bombardment and gas warfare, ensured that the
twentieth-century era of asymmetrical warfare (‘juxtaposing high-tech white
armies against low-tech non-white populations’)39 was only accentuated.
In India, for example, the ‘restoration of empire’ impulse led to
the imposition of the Rowlatt Act (also known as the Anarchical and
Revolutionary Crimes Act) of 1919, which allowed the imperial authorities
to arrest anyone on the mere suspicion of ‘terrorism’. It also led to the
massacre of a crowd of unarmed civilians in a small public square in
Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjabi city of Amritsar. The local commander feared
a violent uprising and banned the celebration of the festival of Baisakhi
and any congregation of individuals. Confronted with a crowd of peaceful
people on 3 April 1919, he ordered his troops to block off the exits to the
square before they opened fire on the crowd. According to British sources,
379 Indians were killed and another 1,200 seriously injured. Indian sources
cite anywhere up to 1,000 deaths. As news of the massacre slowly spread
around the world, it repulsed and shocked, but among imperial apologists
in Britain and the white Dominions it was applauded as an essential act of
imperial restoration.40
When Tagore heard the Amritsar news, he wrote to the British Viceroy
in India to disavow his knighthood: ‘I … wish to stand, shorn, of all special
distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called
EXIT … 1918–19 169
insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.’
According to Tagore, Amritsar ‘with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the
helplessness of our position as British subjects in India.’41 For Tagore, as for
so many in the colonized world, the belief that ‘if we [Indians] could sacrifice
our lives—so I thought—in the same cause with the English soldiers [during
the First World War], we should at once become real to them, and claim
fairness at their hands ever after’ was yet again shattered.42 The war had not
changed attitudes to empire or racial ‘Others’ all that much and had only
made certain kinds of Britons all the more willing to enforce their empire’s
power and to do so by any means at their command.
Ultimately, what the Amritsar massacre revealed is how quickly the
search for security in a deeply unsettled time could lead states and imperial
authorities to mobilize familiar wartime (and pre-war colonial) patterns of
governing, ‘Othering’, even killing and murdering. In so many ways, neither
the armistice nor the peace treaties that were signed between 1919 and
1923 ended the imperial fears and animosities that existed before the war,
or those that were awakened during the war. Reconciling these animosities
with the promises and plans for constructive change, restituting past harms
and building bridges proved extremely difficult.
As an example, the collapse of the Young Turk government in
November 1918 briefly brought back Ottoman rule to the Middle East.
For Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest living in the capitulated capital
of Constantinople (Istanbul), peace and a return to Ottomanism meant
he could come out of hiding. Peace also brought with it the hope that
the collective horrors of the Turkish-led Armenian genocide might be
recognized and punished by the new authorities. On 13 November 1918,
Balakian disguised himself in a top hat and gentleman’s jacket (to hide his
Armenian identity from his Muslim neighbours, whom he still feared), and
welcomed the Allied occupation forces to the city. In contrast to Balakian,
the Muslim boatman who ferried him across the Bosphorus Strait that day
was despondent and loudly lamented the ‘black days we have fallen upon!’
While Balakian and thousands of other non-Turkish residents cheered the
occupation troops who marched past their homes, bedecked in Greek,
French, British and Italian flags, Constantinople’s Turkish population hid
behind shuttered windows fearing retribution.43
The festivities in Constantinople on 13 November belied the enormous
turmoil facing the reinstituted Ottoman regime. After the Young Turk
government fled the country on 1 November, the many communities of the
Middle East only faced more uncertainty. Some hoped that the Sultan might
lead them out of the horrors of war, starvation and political violence to a
revived Ottoman empire based on cooperative interaction between its multi-
ethnic multi-religious populations. Others saw a welcome opportunity to
break away from all imperial webs and establish their own autonomous
countries and regimes. Many pinned their hopes to be awarded self-rule on
the peace negotiations in Paris, not least since the British and French had
made significant promises to the many Arab clans who had helped to defeat
the Turks during the war. In the weeks and months to come, almost all of
these expectations were dashed or left unrequited.
While the Ottoman regime made some attempt at reconciliation, including
by acknowledging the Armenian genocide and sentencing eighteen prominent
perpetrators to death, the wider task ahead was too difficult.44 There were
too many powerful forces at play, all of them quite willing to use violence
to assert their authority. Armenia’s leaders not only claimed statehood, but
also sent representatives across Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia to
assassinate those members of the Young Turk government who had fled the
country.45 Kurdish communities mobilized their own soldiers to establish
the state of Kurdistan. The Italians invaded Cicilia. The Greeks claimed
Izmir, murdering, raping and exterminating the city’s dominant Muslim
population in the process.46 During the Paris peace negotiations, the French
and British divided most of the Arab areas into ‘protectorates’ over which
they exercised exclusive administrative and economic control.
Between 1919 and 1923, then, the Middle East sunk back into a series
of devastating civil wars. Some of these were targeted campaigns fought
by nationalist Turkish forces led by Mustafa Kemal – the so-called ‘hero of
Gallipoli’ in 1915. Others were rebellions ‘from below’ that rallied against
the Allied occupying forces and their mandates.47 Many were assertions of
sovereignty and statehood against the Turks and the Allies alike. In Kurdistan,
Kemal faced the ‘worldly younger sons of tribal chieftains insisting that
Turkish-Kurdish relations be settled on the basis of’ Wilson’s fourteen
points of peace.48 Across Persia, the Assyrian people were slaughtered or
starved to death by both Kurdish and Turkish forces.49 A new treaty, finally
signed in 1923 between the Allies and the newly established state of Turkey,
only brought uneasy peace to the region. Its terms included a ‘population
exchange’ of Muslim Turks and Orthodox Greeks, so that neither state
would need to deal with these ‘enemies within’ in the future.50 Needless to
say, the organized displacement and dispossession of millions of people did
not bode well for the region’s internal cohesion. A similar reality applied
to the new nation-states established in central and eastern Europe as well.
Displacement became a permanent feature of the twentieth-century world
and another powerful legacy of the First World War.51
The 1923 treaty also marked the final end of the Ottoman empire, an
empire which had ruled the Middle East and much of southern Europe for
more than 600 years. In its wake, the Middle East remained destabilized
facing a litany of competing claims to sovereignty, ‘mandated’ imperial rights
(and claims to various oil installations), independence, religious autonomy
and self-rule. All in all, the First World War politically rewired the entire
region so that it remained at the forefront of international crises for decades
to come.52
For the representatives of the victorious Allies who met in Paris in 1919,
the scale of the global peacemaking task was also insurmountable. The sheer
EXIT … 1918–19 171
range of expectations and agendas that demanded accommodation was

unprecedented. It seemed like the whole world had come to Paris expecting
recognition and compensation.53 Meanwhile, the Allied governments could
barely agree on their own priorities, let alone on conceding rights and
privileges to external parties or their former enemies. On the one hand, the
peace process was publicly infused with the enthusiasm and expectation of
President Wilson’s fourteen points of peace, particularly his assertions of
the rights of ethnic communities to self-determination.54 On the other, the
text of the peace agreements gave very little credence to Wilsonian idealism,
non-European groups’ claims to statehood or even to the promise given to
Germany in November 1918 that its peace treaty would be one ‘without
victors or vanquished’. The negotiators in Paris could not do justice to all the
competing claims in play, in part, because their own populations demanded
that the enemy be ‘made to pay’ for the suffering they had endured during
the war and in part because their own agendas were oppositional.55 In the
end, the victors’ demands came first. The Allies claimed enormous sums
of money from their former enemies as reparations. They reclaimed land,
reimposed their own imperial power and asserted administrative control
over former German and Ottoman territories and people through an
international ‘mandate’ system supervised by the League of Nations. They
also looked to re-establish economic dominance over the seas and highways
of global trade. Unsurprisingly, the peace treaties left few fully satisfied.
Wilson’s other peace platform – the League of Nations – did come to
fruition during the peace negotiations of 1919. It seemed to provide the world
with an accessible set of internationalist principles and a solid institutional
structure so governments could discuss issues, negotiate agreements, mediate
conflicts and work collectively towards an elusive and lasting peace. In many
places, the League was very popular because it offered a new framework
to cling to.56 It was also remarkably successful in setting up an array of
transnational bureaucratic initiatives coordinating humanitarian aid,
scientific and medical exchanges and economic interaction.57 In so doing, the
League of Nations helped to bring a new era of internationalist interaction
into being, one in which greater numbers of individuals, communities and
non-government organizations played key roles.58 Importantly, its creation
reaffirmed a global commitment to a range of pre-war norms, including
adherence to western concepts of international law, statehood and even the
premise of internationalist cooperation. In this way the League hoped to
return the international arena back to a familiar and predictable order. Yet
the League’s establishment also recognized how fundamentally the 1914–18
war years had unmoored the nineteenth-century premise of ‘limited war’,
not least the use of neutrality as a functional tool to protect the world from
war.59 In place of neutrality, the League embraced the premise of ‘collective
security’.
The League was not a universally popular or even universally workable
organization. On the one hand, it excluded too many states and governments.
Neither the Soviet Union, which was not recognized as a state by most
countries, nor Germany was offered membership to begin with, the former
because it refused to accept Tsarist Russia’s debt and obligations, the latter
because it was held responsible for the First World War’s outbreak.60 Many
of the neutral states that had maintained their neutrality through the war
also had trouble reconciling their desire for neutrality with the League’s
demands that all decisions regarding the legality of an inter-state conflict
be made collectively.61 Japan and China – both victors in the war – were
incensed at the European powers’ unwillingness to include a ‘racial equality’
clause in the League’s mandate.62 Italy, though one of the victors, gained little
of what it had been promised in 1915 for its sacrifice. Once the United States
Congress refused to ratify the League’s covenant, even Wilson’s government
took no further formal part in the organization (although the United States
would cooperate with many of the internationalist endeavours organized
by the League in the 1920s and 1930s). Without the involvement of three
of the most potentially powerful states on the planet – the United States,
Germany and the Soviet Union – the League of Nations had to overcome
some sizeable obstacles and would never function as an effective ballast
to stabilize the crisis-torn post-war world in the way that the ‘concert of
Europe’ had helped to stabilize the nineteenth-century world order.
At another level, while the League opened up opportunities for a range of
new countries and communities to take full part in international relations,
including the former British dominions, it largely failed to satisfy the
demands of most colonized peoples to take part on equal terms. As such,
the League was criticized for the grave inequities it continued to allow, the
imperialism it continued to facilitate and the normative assumptions about
western exceptionalism (and western capitalism) it continued to justify. Tan
Malaka, the young Indonesian student discussed in Chapter 7, expressed his
own version of these contradictions when in 1919 he responded to a Dutch
commentator who proclaimed that the people subjected to Dutch colonial
rule were not ready for independence. According to the commentator,
colonized communities needed first to be properly educated as to what
a ‘nation-state’ was before they could join the ‘civilized world’ and the
League of Nations. With bitter sharpness, Malaka retorted that western
concepts of ‘states’, ‘borders’ and ‘property rights’ sat at the heart of all the
world’s problems. Europeans had brought industrial imperialism, racism,
the extermination of indigenous people and endless warfare and violence
into the world. These same Europeans had caused the world to succumb
to the tragedy that was the First World War. Instead of lecturing colonized
communities, Malaka suggested the Dutch author might be better served
learning about what colonialism and imperialism involved. Furthermore,
he might also like to reconsider the implications of his wish that subject
communities become as greedy, nationalistic and violent as their colonial
rulers already proved to be.63
EXIT … 1918–19 173
From the vantage point of November 1918, it was quite clear that the First
World War had opened Pandora’s box.64 Its many transformations unmoored
the principles of global and imperial governance that had enabled the world’s
industrial great powers to thrive in the nineteenth century. All too ironically,
these same great powers were clearly responsible for the destruction they
unleashed on the world. They collectively failed to prevent the war from
breaking out in 1914 and their wartime policies enabled its evolution from
a manageable inter-state conflict into an unrelenting monolith of total
global violence. In the process, these same powers also helped to unbound
the inherent inequalities embedded in the nineteenth-century world. In the
war’s aftermath, these inequalities were more visible and globally connected
than ever before. They were now also infused with the grief and anger that
the violence of the war had unleashed on the world. Sadly, many of these
unbounded issues continue to plague the world today, be it in the experience
of racial inequality, capitalist exploitation, the exercise of national and state
prerogatives over humanitarian need or even in coordinating communities
and governments to deal with a global pandemic so that as few people as
possible die. The total global tragedy that evolved between 1914 and 1918
created an international environment of unsettledness that reverberates to
our present. As such, the First World War is not ancient history but very
much part of our collective living past.65
NOTES
Introduction
1 Cf Dick Stegewerns, ‘The End of World War One as a Turning Point in Modern
Japanese History’ in Bert Edström, ed., Turning Points in Japanese History
Japan Library, 2002, pp. 138–40; Carl Strikwerda, ‘World War I in the History
of Globalization’ Historical Reflections 42, 3, 2016, p. 112; Kai Evers, David
Pan, ‘Introduction’ in Kai Evers, David Pan, eds, Europe and the World: World
War I as Crisis of Universalism Telos Press, 2018, pp. ix–xi; David Reynolds,
The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century Simon &
Shuster, 2013; Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century
1914–1991 Penguin, 1994.
2 Annette Becker, ‘The Great War: World War, Total War’ International Review
of the Red Cross 97, 900, 2015, p. 1029; Mustafa Aksakal, ‘The Ottoman
Empire’ in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First World War
Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 459.
3 Cf Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First
World War Oxford University Press, 2007.
4 Tim Stapleton, ‘The Impact of the First World War on African People’ in John
Laband, ed., Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Africa Greenwood, 2007,
p. 123.
5 Stapleton, ‘Impact’ pp. 123–4.
6 Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture Cambridge
University Press, 2018, pp. 6–8.
7 Stephen Broadberry, Mark Harrison, ‘The Economics of World War 1: An
Overview’ in Stephen Broadberry, Mark Harrison, eds, The Economics of
World War 1 Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 6–7, 10.
8 Aksakal, ‘Ottoman Empire’ p. 459.
9 L.T. Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War
Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 82.
10 Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form
Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 58.
11 Léon Daudet, La Guerre Totale Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1918, p. 8.
12 Daudet, Guerre Totale p. 12.
13 Cf Kramer, Dynamic.
14 With grateful thanks to Annalise Higgins.
15 Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War 1914–
1918 Faber & Faber, 1987.
16 Cf Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and
Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict Cambridge University Press, 2017,
NOTES 175
p. 5; Melvin E. Page, ‘Introduction: Black Men in a White Men’s War’ in Melvin
E. Page, ed., Africa and the First World War Palgrave MacMillan, 1987, p. 1.
17 David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War Penguin,
2004, p. 3.
18 Cf John Horne, ‘End of a Paradigm? The Cultural History of the Great War’
Past & Present 242, 1, 2019, pp. 155–92; Strikwerda, ‘World War I’ pp. 112–
32. Cf Maartje Abbenhuis, Gordon Morrell, The First Age of Industrial
Globalization: An International History 1815–1918 Bloomsbury, 2019.
19 Cf Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915: Stalemate’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge
History Volume 1, p. 87.
20 Peter Gatrell, ‘The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 1914–
1917’ in Gail Braybon, ed., Evidence, History and the Great War Berghahn,
2003, pp. 198–215.
21 Lawrence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution Cambridge
University Press, 2011, p. 2.
22 Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, Great War, Total War: Combat and
Mobilization on the Western Front Cambridge University Press, 2000; Hew
Strachan, ‘On Total War and Modern War’ International History Review 2,
22, 2000, pp. 253–504; Talbot Imlay, ‘Total War’ Journal of Strategic Studies
30, 3, 2007, pp. 547–70; William J. Philpott, ‘Total War’ in Matthew Hughes,
William J. Philpott, eds, Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History
Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, pp. 131–52.
23 Saint-Amour, Tense Future pp. 55–6; Imlay, ‘Total War’ p. 548; Bart Ziino,
‘Total War in Australia: Civilian Mobilisation and Commitment’ in Kate
Ariotti, James Bennett, eds, Australians and the First World War Palgrave
MacMillan, 2017, pp. 165–82.
24 As quoted in Imlay, ‘Total War’ p. 556.
25 Cf Jeremy Black, The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 Rowman & Littlefield,
2010, pp. 5–6.
26 William Mulligan, ‘Total War’ War in History 15, 2, 2008, pp. 211–21.
27 Georges Clemenceau declaration to the French Senate, 20 November 1917, in
Jean Garrigues, Le Monde Selon Clemenceau Tallandier, 2014, p. 237.
28 Saint-Amour, Tense Future.
29 Cf Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘On the Edge of the Storm? Situating Switzerland’s
Neutrality in the Context of the First World War’ in Michael M. Olsansky, ed.,
Am Rande des Sturms: das Schweizer Militär im Ersten Weltkrieg Hier und
Jetz, 2018, pp. 27–9.
30 Jennifer D. Keene, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and the Wounded World: Seeking Meaning
in the First World War for African-Americans’ Peace & Change 26, 2, 2001,
pp. 135–52; Xu Guoqi, ‘Asia’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 1,
p. 487.
31 Maartje Abbenhuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics 1815–1914
Cambridge University Press, 2014.
32 Abbenhuis, Morrell, First Age.
33 Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘A Most Useful Tool of Diplomacy and Statecraft:
Neutrality and Europe in the “Long” Nineteenth Century 1815–1914’
International History Review 35, 1, 2013, pp. 1–22.
34 Michael Geyer, ‘War and the Context of General History in an Age of Total
War’ and Michael Howard, ‘World War One: The Crisis in European History’
176 NOTES
both in Journal of Military History 57, 5, 1993, pp. 145–63; John Keegan,

Intelligence in War Pimlico, 2003, p. 369.
35 C. H. Stockton, ‘The Declaration of Paris’ American Journal of International
Law 14, 3, 1920, p. 357.
36 Abbenhuis, Morrell, First Age.
38 Derek Aldcroft, The European Economy 1914–1990 Routledge, 2001, p. 20.
39 Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 George
Allen & Unwin, 1985; Masato Kimura, ‘Securing Maritime Trade: Triangular
Frictions between the Merchant Marines of the US, UK and Japan’ in
T. Minohara, T. Hon, E. Dawley, eds, The Decade of the Great War: Japan
and the Wider World in the 1910s Brill, 2014, pp. 107–29.
40 Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War Belknap,
2018; Hew Strachan, The First World War Volume 1: To Arms Oxford
University Press, 2001. Also: Stevenson, 1914–1918.
41 Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First World War. Three volumes
Cambridge University Press, 2014; John Horne, ed., A Companion to World
War I Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
42 Cf Christian Gerlach, ‘Extremely Violent Societies: An Alternative to the
Concept of Genocide’ Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4, 2006, pp. 455–71.
43 Cf Christopher Barber, ‘Nineteenth-Century Statecraft and the Politics of
Moderation in the Franco-Prussian War’ European Review of History 21, 1,
2014, pp. 1–17.
44 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of
the Nineteenth Century Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 119.
45 Cf C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany
1915–1919 Ohio University Press, 1985.
46 John Horne in Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915’ p. 87; Becker, ‘Great War’.
47 Jay Winter, ‘War and Anxiety in 1917’ in Maartje Abbenhuis, Neill Atkinson,
Kingsley Baird, Gail Romano, eds, The Myriad Legacies of 1917: A Year of
War and Revolution Palgrave, 2018, p. 15.
48 Michael Neiberg, ‘1917: Global War’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History
Volume 1, p. 130.
Chapter 1
1 Abbenhuis, Morrell, First Age p. 127. Also: Niels Eichhorn, ‘A “Century of
Peace” That Was Not: War in the Nineteenth Century’ Journal of Military
History 84, 4, 2020, pp. 1051–77.
2 Cf Oona Hathaway, Scott Shapiro, ‘International Law and Its Transformation
through the Outlawry of War’ International Affairs 95, 1, 2019, pp. 45–8.
3 Abbenhuis, Age pp. 15–16.
4 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers Penguin, 1987, p. 150.
5 Abbenhuis, Age pp. 72–3.
6 Stockton, ‘Declaration’ p. 357.
7 For more: Jan Lemnitzer, Power, Law and the End of Privateering Palgrave
MacMillan, 2014.
NOTES 177
8 For more: Emily Crawford, ‘The Enduring Legacy of the St Petersburg

Declaration: Distinction, Military Necessity and the Prohibition of Causing
Unnecessary Suffering and Superfluous Injury in IHL’ Journal of the History of
International Law 20, 4, 2019, pp. 544–66.
9 For more: Maartje Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences in International
Politics, 1898–1915 Bloomsbury, 2019.
10 William Mulligan, ‘Justifying International Action: International Law, The
Hague and Diplomacy’ in Maartje Abbenhuis, Christopher Barber, Annalise
Higgins, eds, War, Peace and International Order: The Legacies of the
Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 Routledge, 2017, pp. 12–30; Daniel
Segesser, ‘“Unlawful Warfare Is Uncivilized”: The International Debate on the
Punishment of War Crimes, 1872–1918’ European Review of History 14, 2,
2007, pp. 215–34.
11 Cf James Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Houghton Mifflin,
2008, p. 41; Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular
Culture, 1850–2000 Reaktion, 2000.
12 Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire Oxford University Press, 2015.
13 Martin Van Bruinessen, ‘A Kurdish Warlord on the Turkish-Persian Frontier in
the Early Twentieth Century: Isma’il Aqa Simko’ in Touraj Atabaki, ed., Iran
and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers I.B. Tauris, 2006,
pp. 69–93.
14 With thanks to Charlotte MacDonald.
15 For more: Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line:
White Man’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality
16 G.W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society Clarendon
Press, 1984.
17 Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Context in the History of International Law’ Journal of
the History of International Law 20, 1, 2018, pp. 5–30.
18 John Pollock, Kitchener: The Road to Omdurman and Saviour of the Nation
Hachete, 2013.
19 Mataura Ensign 579, 4 May 1899, p. 5; ‘Impressions and Opinions’ Anglo-
Saxon Review 1, June 1899, pp. 244–55, quotes on p. 248.
20 For more: Abbenhuis, Hague Conferences esp. Chapter 1.
21 Marco Gerbig-Fabel, ‘Photographic Artefacts of War 1904–1905: The Russo-
Japanese War as Transnational Media Event’ European Review of History 15,
6, 2008, pp. 629–42. With thanks to Steven Sheldon, Hemi David and Leon
Ostick for sharing their research on this subject.
22 Douglas Howland, ‘Sovereignty and the Laws of War: International
Consequences of Japan’s 1905 Victory over Russia’ Law and History Review
29, 1, 2011, pp. 53–97.
23 Japan Times 5 July 1904, p. 3.
24 Howland, ‘Sovereignty’; Abbenhuis, Age pp. 209–10.
25 Chris Williams, ‘The Shadow in the East: Representations of the Russo-Japanese
War in Newspaper Cartoons’ Media History 23, 3–4, 2017, pp. 312–29.
26 Cf Simon Partner, ‘Peasants into Citizens? The Meiji Village in the Russo-
Japanese War’ Monumenta Nipponica 62, 2, 2007, pp. 178–206; Rotem
Kowner, ‘Becoming an Honorary Civilized Nation: Remaking Japan’s Military
Image during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905’ Historian 64, 1, 2001,
pp. 19–38.
178 NOTES
27 David Crowley, ‘Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland: Polish Art and the Russo-
Japanese War’ Russian Review 67, 1, January 2008, pp. 50–69, esp. pp. 53–5.
28 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘In the Storm’ 1904, quoted in Crowley, ‘Seeing Japan’ p. 55.
29 As exceptions see: Harold Z. Schiffring, ‘The Impact of the War on China’ and
Guy Podoler, Michael Robinson, ‘On the Confluence of History and Memory:
The Significance of the War for Korea’ in Rotem Kowner, ed., The Impact of
the Russo-Japanese War Routledge, 2007, pp. 169–98.
30 E. Suk Kwon, ‘An Unfulfilled Expectation: Britain’s Response to the Question
of Korean Independence’ International Journal of Korean History 23, 1, 2018,
p. 42.
31 Paul A. Roddell, ‘Southeast Asian Nationalism and the Russo-Japanese War:
Re-examining Assumptions’ Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29, 2007,
pp. 20–40.
32 With thanks to Norberto Barreto Velazquez.
33 Jon D. Carlson, ‘Postcards and Propaganda: Cartographic Postcards as Soft
News Images of the Russo-Japanese War’ Political Communication 26, 2,
2009, pp. 212–37.
34 Reginald Kearney, ‘The Pro-Japanese Utterances of W.E.B. Du Bois’
Contributions in Black Studies 13, 7, 1995, pp. 1–17; Steven G. Marks, ‘Bravo,
Brave Tiger of the East! The Russo-Japanese War and the Rise of Nationalism
in British Egypt and India’ in John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David
Schimelpenninck Van Der Oye, Shinji Yokote, eds, Russo-Japanese War in
Global Perspective: World War Zero Brill, 2005, pp. 609–28; Yitzhak Shichor,
‘Ironies of History: The War and the Origins of East Asian Radicalism’ in
Rotem Kowner, ed., The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War Routledge, 2007,
pp. 199–218.
35 As quoted in Marks, ‘Bravo’ p. 612.
36 As an example: H.F. Baldwin, A War Photographer in Thrace T.F. Unwin, 1913.
37 Kramer, Dynamic pp. 136–7.
38 Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass Violence against Civilians during the Balkan Wars’ in
Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, Andreas Rose, eds, The Wars before the
Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First
World War Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 76–91.
39 For example: Berliner Volkszeitung 22 October 1912, p. 1; Altonär
Nachrichten (Hamburg) 22 October 1912, p. 1.
40 George F. Kennan, ed., The Other Balkan Wars. A 1913 Carnegie Endowment
Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present
Conflict Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, 1993.
41 Sumatra Post 1 July 1914, p. 2.
42 Michael Neiberg, Dance of the Furies: European and the Outbreak of World
War I Harvard University Press, 2011. Also: Daniel Rouven Steinbach,
‘Defending the Heimat’ in Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien, Christian Schmidt-
Supprian, eds, Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies Brill,
2008, p. 188.
43 Pavlina Bobiç, War and Faith: The Catholic Church in Slovenia 1914–1918
Brill, 2012, p. 15.
44 F.R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan and the Great War
1914–1919 Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 33.
NOTES 179
45 For more: Michael Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global History
Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 2–4; Neiberg, Dance; Catriona Pennell, A
Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War
in Britain and Ireland Oxford University Press, 2013; David Welch, Germany,
Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918 Athlone Press, 2000, pp. 136–48;
Joshua Sandborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total
War and Mass Politics 1905–1925 Northern Illinois University Press, 2003,
pp. 29–30.
46 Neiberg, Dance pp. 4–5.
47 Thomas Munro, ‘The Hague as a Framework for British and American
Newspapers’ Public Presentations of the First World War’ in Abbenhuis et al.,
eds, War, Peace pp. 155–70.
48 Cf Welch, Germany p. 12.
49 Welch, Germany, pp. 12–14; Hans F. Peterson, Power and International Order
Skånska Centraltryckeriet, 1964, p. 3.
50 Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and
Citizenship in the First World War Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 15.
51 Ismee Tames, ‘Oorlog voor onze gedachten’: Oorlog, neutraliteit en identiteit in
het Nederlandse publieke debat, 1914–1918 Verloren, 2006, p. 34.
Chapter 2
1 For an accessible overview: ‘World War I: Declarations of War from around
the Globe’ Law Library, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/
digitized-books/world-war-i-declarations/foreign.php (accessed July 2020).
2 Holger H. Herwig, ‘Through the Looking Glass’ Historian 77, 2, 2015,
pp. 290–314.
3 Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics: 1763–1848
Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 564.
4 Cf Paul W. Schroeder, David Wetzel, Robert Jervis, Jack S. Levy, eds, Systems,
Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
5 John Horne, Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial Yale
University Press, 2001.
6 Stefan Rinke, Latin America and the First World War Cambridge University
Press, 2017, p. 90.
7 Cf Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of
War in Imperial Germany Cornell University Press, 2013.
8 Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law
during the Great War Cornell University Press, 2014, p. 43.
9 Hull, Scrap p. 43.
10 Emily Robertson, ‘Norman Lindsay and the “Asianisation” of the German
Soldier in Australia during the First World War’ The Round Table 103, 2,
2014, pp. 211–31.
11 Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Not Silent, nor Silenced: Neutrality and the First World
War’ in José-Leonardo Ruiz Sánchez, Immaculada Cordero Olivero, Carolina
García Sanz, eds, Shaping Neutrality Throughout the First World War Editorial
Universidad de Sevilla, 2016, pp. 17–36.
180 NOTES
12 De Telegraaf, 1 August 1914, np.

13 Bruno Cabanes, August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That
Changed the World Yale University Press, 2016, p. 67.
14 Cited in Cabanes, August 1914 p. 66.
15 Cited in Cabanes, August 1914 p. 69.
16 Horne, Kramer, Atrocities. Also: Kramer, Dynamic.
17 Sophie de Schaepdrijver, De Groote Oorlog: Het Koninkrijk België Tijdens
de Eerste Wereldoorlog Atlas, 1997, p. 87. Cf Alberto Tuscano, ‘“America’s
Belgium”: W.E.B. Du Bois on Race, Class, and the Origins of World War I’ in
Alexander Anievas, ed., Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making
of Modern World Politics Brill, 2015, pp. 236–57.
18 Horne, Kramer, Atrocities.
19 Schaepdrijver, Oorlog p. 69.
20 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 45. For more on the Schlieffen Plan: Hans Ehlert,
Michael Epkenhans, Gerhard Gross, David Zabecki, eds, The Schlieffen Plan:
International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I University
Press of Kentucky, 2014.
21 Cited in Horne, Kramer, Atrocities pp. 18–19.
22 Ewoud Kieft, Oorlogsenthousiasme: Europa 1900–1918 De Bezige Bij, 2015,
p. 357.
23 Kramer, Dynamic p. 21.
24 Cited in Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through
the German Dictatorships Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 33.
25 General Hans von Beseler, 23 August 1914, cited in Horne, Kramer, Atrocities
p. 156.
26 Cited in Horne, Kramer, Atrocities p. 156.
27 Cited in Horne, Kramer, Atrocities p. 156.
28 Quoted in Elisabeth Fairman, ed., Doomed Youth: The Poetry and the Pity
of the First World War Exhibition Catalog, Yale Center for British Art, 1999,
p. 3. Cf Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ‘Belgium’ in 1914–1918 Online https://
encyclopedia.1914–1918-online.net/article/belgium (accessed November 2020).
29 Jan P. Ramos as quoted in Rinke, Latin America p. 215.
30 Cf Daniel Segesser, ‘Dissolve or Punish? The International Debate among Jurists
and Publicists on the Consequences of the Armenian Genocide for the Ottoman
Empire, 1915–1923’ Journal of Genocide Research 10, 1, 2008, p. 99.
31 As an example: Alexander Watson, ‘Unheard-of Brutality: Russian Atrocities
against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914–1915’ Journal of Modern History 86, 4,
2014, pp. 780–825.
32 Robert Melson, ‘A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894–
1896’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, 3, 1982, pp. 481–509.
33 Michael Godby, ‘Confronting Horror: Emily Hobhouse and the Concentration
Camp Photographs of the South African War’ Kronos 32, 2006, pp. 34–8;
Nadine Akhund, ‘The Two Carnegie Reports: From the Balkan Expedition of
1913 to the Albanian Trip of 1921: A Comparative Approach’ Balkanologie
14, 1–2, 2012, pp. 1–17.
34 Ismee Tames, ‘“War on Our Minds”: War, Neutrality and Identity in Dutch
Public Debate during the First World War’ First World War Studies 3, 2, 2012,
pp. 201–16.
35 Abbenhuis, ‘Silent’ p. 28.
NOTES 181
36 Frank Trommler, ‘The Lusitania Effect: America’s Mobilization against

Germany in World War I’ German Studies Review 32, 2, 2009, pp. 241–66;
Michael S. Neiberg, The Path to War: How the First World War Created
Modern America Oxford University Press, 2016.
37 As examples: L. Mokveld, De Overweldiging van België: Ervaringen, als
Nederlandsch Journalist Opgedaan np, 1916; L.H. Grondijs, Een Nederlander
in Geteisterd België Amsterdam, 1914.
38 As an example: R. A. Reiss and Fanny S. Copeland, Report upon the Atrocities
Committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First Invasion of Serbia,
1916. Also: Sofi Qvarnström, ‘Recognizing the Other: The Armenian Genocide
in Scandinavian Literature’ in Claes Ahlund, ed., Scandinavia in the First World
War: Studies in the War Experience of the Northern Neutrals Nordic Academic
Press, 2012, pp. 177–98.
39 Abbenhuis, Hague pp. 113–14.
40 Chad R. Fulwider, German Propaganda and U.S. Neutrality in World War I
Missouri University Press, 2015.
41 Cf Fulwider, German Propaganda; David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and
Total War: The Sins of Omission Athlone Press, 2000.
42 For more: Tames, Oorlog.
43 Tames, ‘War’ p. 302.
44 A. A. H. Struycken, Oorlog en het Volkenrecht 1915, np.
45 Tames, ‘War’; Ahlund, ed., Scandinavia.
46 John Macdonell, ‘Silent Neutrals’ Contemporary Review 107, 1915, pp. 67–75;
Abbenhuis, ‘Silent’.
47 Tames, ‘War’.
48 Horne, Kramer, Atrocities p. 198.
50 Cited in Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British
Propaganda and International Law during the First World War’ American
Historical Review 102, 3, 1997, p. 714.
51 Gullace, ‘Violence’ p. 716.
53 Eugene W. Chiu, ‘The First World War and Its Impact on Chinese Concepts of
Modernity’ in Jan Schmidt, Katja Schmidtpott, eds, The East Asian Dimension
of the First World War Campus, 2020, pp. 93–4.
54 Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and
Politics in Britain and France during the First World War North Carolina
55 On the German occupations in Eastern Europe: Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius,
War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German
Occupation Cambridge University Press, 2004.
56 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, eds, 14–18: Understanding the
Great War Hill and Wang, 2004, p. 9; Lina Sturfelt, ‘The Call of the Blood:
Scandinavia and the First World War as a Clash of Races’ in Ahlund, ed.,
Scandinavia p. 199.
57 As quoted in Rinke, Latin America p. 89.
58 Maartje Abbenhuis, The Art of Staying Neutral: The Netherlands in the First
World War 1914–1918 Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
59 Abbenhuis, Art.
182 NOTES
60 Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ed., ‘We Who Are So Cosmopolitan’: The War Diary
of Constance Graeffe, 1914–1915 Archives Générales du Royaume, 2008.
61 Pierre Purseigle, ‘“A Wave on to Our Shores”: The Exile and Resettlement
of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918’ Contemporary European
History 16, 4, 2007, pp. 427–44.
62 See for example Branden Little, ‘An Explosion of New Endeavours. Global
Humanitarian Responses to Industrialized Warfare in the First World War Era’
First World War Studies 5, 1, 2014, pp. 1–16.
63 Elisabeth Piller, ‘American War Relief, Cultural Mobilization and the Myth
of Impartial Humanitarianism 1914–1917’ Journal of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era 17, 4, 2018, pp. 619–35.
64 Purseigle, ‘Wave’. For Russia: Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking:
Refugees in Russia during World War I Indiana University Press, 2005.
65 Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ‘The Long Shadow of the “German Atrocities”
of 1914’ The British Library 29, 2014 https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/
articles/historiography-atrocities-the-long-shadow (accessed November 2020);
Sandi Cooper, ‘The Guns of August and the Doves of Italy: Intervention and
Internationalism’ Peace & Change 7, 2, 1981, p. 34.
66 The Times, 10 September 1914, cited in Gullace, ‘Violence’ p. 743. For more on
the complex responses to the British mobilization for war in India: Das, India.
67 ‘Belgian Flag Honored’ Poverty Bay Herald 7 October 1914, p. 8. With thanks
to Pierre Purseigle.
68 ‘Belgian Flag Honored’ p. 8.
69 For more on the Maori war effort, see: Monty Soutar, Whitiki! Whiti! Whiti!
E! Maori in the First World War Bateman Books, 2019.
70 Jangkhomang Guite, Thongkholal Haokip, ‘Introduction’ in J. Guite, T.
Haokip, eds, The Anglo-Kuki War, 1917–1919 Routledge, 2019, p. 17.
71 Guite, Haokip, ‘Introduction’ p. 17.
72 D. van Galen Last, Black Shame. African Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1922
Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 36. For more on the racialization of non-European
soldiers in France and Britain, see: Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First
World War Writing Cambridge University Press, 2011.
73 B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination
from Sparta to Darfur Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 382–7.
74 Jeremy Silvester, Jan-Bart Gewald, eds, Words Cannot Be Found: German
Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book Brill,
2003, p. 100.
75 Cf Mads Bomholt Nielsen, ‘Delegitimating Empire: German and British
Representations of Colonial Violence, 1918–1919’ International History
Review 42, 4, 2020, pp. 833–50.
76 Silvester, Gewald, eds, Words p. xxxii.
Chapter 3
1 Both quotes in Jane M. Rausch, Colombia and World War I: The Experience
of a Neutral Latin American Nation during the Great War and Its Aftermath,
1914–1921 Lexington Books, 2014, p. 26.
NOTES 183
2 Hull, Scrap p. 37. Cf John W. Young, ‘Emotions and the British Government’s
Decision for War in 1914’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 29, 4, 2018, pp. 543–64.
3 Cf Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘Failing to Prepare for the Great War? The Absence
of Grand Strategy in British War Planning before 1914’ War in History 24, 4,
2017, pp. 414–37.
4 Holger Herwig, ‘Germany and the “Short-War” Illusion: Toward a New
Interpretation?’ Journal of Military History 66, 3, 2002, pp. 681–93; Jakob
Zollmann, Naulila 1914: World War I in Angola and International Law
Nomos, 2016, p. 163.
5 William Philpott, ‘Squaring the Circle: The Higher Coordination of the Entente
in the Winter of 1915–1916’ English Historical Review 114, 458, 1999,
pp. 875–7.
6 Cf Mark Bailey, ‘Supporting the Wartime Economy: Imperial Maritime Trade
and the Globalized Maritime Trade System 1914–1916’ Journal of Maritime
Research 19, 1, 2017, pp. 23–45; Virginia Haufler, Dangerous Commerce:
Insurance and the Management of International Risk Cornell University Press,
1997, p. 34.
7 Hartmut Pogge Von Strandmann, ‘The Mood in Britain in 1914’ in L.
Kettenacker, T. Riotte, eds, The Legacies of Two World Wars: European
Societies in the Twentieth Century Berghahn, 2011, pp. 68–9, 72.
8 Broadberry, Harrison, ‘Economics’ pp. 6–7.
9 Kathryn Meyer, ‘Trade and Nationality at Shanghai upon the Outbreak of
the First World War 1914–1915’ International History Review 10, 2, 1988,
pp. 238–60.
10 Meyer, ‘Trade’ p. 238.
11 Meyer, ‘Trade’.
12 Global banking systems were similarly affected: Strikwerda, ‘World War I’ p. 121.
13 Meyer, ‘Trade’; D.K. Lieu, The Growth and Industrialization of Shanghai
China Institute of Economic and Statistical Research, 1936, esp. pp. 11, 19, 23.
14 For an excellent overview of these global ramifications: Richard Roberts, ‘A
Tremendous Panic: The Global Financial Crisis of 1914’ in Andrew Smith,
Simon Mollan, Kevin D. Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First World War on
International Business Routledge, 2017, pp. 121–41.
15 Martin Horn, Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, p. 29; Bailey, ‘Supporting’ p. 28.
16 Bill Albert, South America and the First World War: The Impact of War on
Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 1. Also:
Abbenhuis, Morrell, First Age pp. 185–6.
17 Eric L. Jones, Revealed Biodiversity: An Economic History of the Human
Impact World Scientific Publication, 2014, pp. xxix–xxx.
18 Albert, South America.
19 Ushisaburo Kobayashi, The Basic Industries and Social History of Japan
1914–1918 Yale University Press, 1930.
20 Cf Roberts, ‘Tremendous’ p. 135.
21 ‘Cotton Mills in China’ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 9 July 1915,
p. 769.
22 Akinjide Osuntokun, ‘Disaffection and Revolts in Nigeria during the First
World War, 1914–1918’ Canadian Journal of African Studies 5, 2, 1971,
pp. 171–81.
184 NOTES
23 Peterson, Power p. 6.

24 Horn, Britain, France p. 26.
25 Bailey, ‘Supporting’ p. 29.
26 Horn, Britain, France p. 27. Also: Eric W. Osborne, Britain’s Economic
Blockade of Germany 1914–1918 Frank Cass, 2004, p. 58.
27 Albert, South America p. 43.
28 Osborne, Britain’s p. 61.
29 Marc Frey, ‘Trade, Ships and the Neutrality of the Netherlands in the First
World War’ International History Review 19, 3, 1997, p. 543.
30 M. L. Sanders, Philip Taylor, British Propaganda in the First World War
1914–1918 Macmillan, 1982, p. 19.
31 Nik Brandal, Ola Teige, ‘The Secret Battlefield: Intelligence and Counter-
Intelligence in Scandinavia during the First World War’ in Claes Ahlund, ed.,
Scandinavia in the First World War: Studies in the War Experience of the
Northern Neutrals Nordic Academic Press, 2012, p. 85.
32 Anne Samson, ‘East and Central Africa’ in 1914–1918 Online doi: 10.15463/
ie1418.10851; Ingeborg Vijgen, Tussen Mandaat En Kolonie: Rwanda,
Burundi En Het Belgische Bestuur in Opdracht van de Volkenbond (1916–
1932) Acco, 2005, p. 52.
33 Richard Hough, Falklands 1914: The Pursuit of Admiral von Spee Periscope,
2003, p. 47; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box pp. 173–4; Allen F. Roberts, ‘Insidious
Conquests: Wartime Politics along the South-Western Shore of Lake
Tanganyika’ in Melvin Page, ed., Africa and the First World War Palgrave
MacMillan, 1987, pp. 193–4.
34 Vijgen, Tussen Mandaat p. 51.
35 Charles Stephenson, Germany’s Asia-Pacific Empire Boydell Press, 2009,
p. 100.
36 Steinbach, ‘Defending the Heimat’ pp. 179–208.
37 P.H. Ritter as quoted in Abbenhuis, Art p. 61.
38 Ahmad Rida, diary entry 3 August 1914, as quoted in Eugene Rogan, The
Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East 1914–1920 Penguin,
2015, p. 55.
39 Michelle Moyd, ‘We Don’t Want to Die for Nothing’: Askari at War in German
East-Africa, 1914–1918’ in Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World
War Writing Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 90.
40 Bill Nasson, ‘Africa’, in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First World
War Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 445–6.
41 Alison Fletcher, ‘Recruitment and Service of Maori Soldiers in World War One’
Itinerario 38, 3, 2014, pp. 59–78.
42 Jennifer D. Keene, ‘North America’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume
1, p. 523; Guoqi, ‘Asia’ p. 487; Samuel Furphy, ‘Aboriginal Australians and
the Home Front’ in Kate Ariotti, James Bennett, eds, Australians and the First
World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts Palgrave MacMillan,
2017, pp. 143–64; Reena N. Goldthree, ‘A Greater Enterprise than the Panama
Canal: Migrant Labor and Military Recruitment in the World War I-Era
Circum-Caribbean’ Labor 13, 3–4, 2016, pp. 63–4.
43 Das, India p. 41.
NOTES 185
44 For example: Humayun Ansari, ‘“Tasting the King’s Salt”: Muslims

Contested Loyalties and the First World War’ in Hannah Ewence, Tim
Grady, eds, Minorities and the First World War Palgrave MacMillan, 2017,
pp. 33–61.
45 Streets-Salter, World War One.
47 Antonio Salandra, October 1914, in William A. Renzi, ‘Italy’s Neutrality and
Entrance into the Great War: A Re-Examination’ American Historical Review
73, 5, 1968, p. 1415, fn. 7.
48 Bobič, War p. 47.
50 Rik Verwast, Van Den Haag tot Geneve: België en het Internationale
Oorlogsrecht 1874–1950 Die Keure, pp. 80–4.
51 Vijgen, Tussen Mandaat p. 72.
52 Bruinessen, ‘A Kurdish Warlord’ pp. 69–93.
53 S. Cronin, ‘Iranian Nationalism and the Government Gendarmerie’ in Touraj,
ed., Iran pp. 43–67.
54 T. Atabaki, ‘The First World War, Great Power Rivalries and the Emergence of
a Political Community in Iran’ and M. Ettehadiyyeh, ‘The Iranian Provisional
Government’ both in Touraj, ed., Iran pp. 1–7, 9–27; Kristian Coates Ulrichsen,
‘The British Occupation of Mesopotamia 1914–1922’ Journal of Strategic
Studies 30, 2, 2007, pp. 349–77.
55 Kaveh Ehsani, ‘Oil, State and Society in Iran in the Aftermath of the First
World War’ in T. G. Fraser, ed., The First World War and Its Aftermath: The
Shaping of the Middle East Gingko Library, 2015, pp. 191–207.
56 Dickinson, War p. 36.
57 J. Charles Schenking, ‘The Imperial Japanese Navy and the First World War’
in T. Minohara, T. Hon, E. Dawley, eds, The Decade of the Great War: Japan
and the Wider World in the 1910s Brill, 2014, pp. 83–106; A. Morgan Young,
Japan under Taisho Tenno 1912–1926 George Allen, 1928, pp. 73–4; Wendy
Matsumura, ‘The Expansion of the Japanese Empire and the Rise of the
Global Agrarian Question after the First World War’ in Alexander Anievas,
ed., Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World
Politics Brill, 2015, p. 146.
58 John D. Meehan, ‘From Alliance to Conference: The British Empire, Japan
and Pacific Multilateralism 1911–1921’ in Minohara et al., eds, The Decade
p. 51.
59 Guoqi, ‘Asia’ p. 483.
62 Aksakal, ‘Ottoman Empire’ p. 473.
63 Bailey, ‘Supporting’ p. 29.
64 Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Introduction’ in Erik-Jan Zürcher, ed., Jihad and Islam
in World War 1: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck
Hurgronje’s ‘Holy War Made Germany’ Leiden University Press, 2016,
p. 14.
65 Zürcher, ‘Introduction’ p. 17. Becker, ‘Great War’.
66 Aksakal, ‘Ottoman Empire’ pp. 473–4.
186 NOTES
67 Streets-Salter, World War One pp. 80–2.

68 Stapleton, ‘Impact’ p. 122.
69 Zürcher, ‘Introduction’ p. 22.
70 Bruinessen, ‘A Kurdish’, p. 70.
72 Gerhard Senft, ‘Resistance against the War of 1914–1918’ in G. Bischof, F.
Karlhofer, S.R. Williamson, eds, 1914: Austria-Hungary, the Origins, and the
First Year of World War University of New Orleans Press, 2014, p. 187.
73 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 92.
74 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 96.
Chapter 4
1 Vincent, Politics p. 18.
2 Kennedy, Rise p. 262; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box p. 192.
3 Frank Trentmann, ‘Coping with Shortage: The Problem of Food Security
and Global Visions of Coordination, c. 1890s–1950’ in Frank Trentmann,
Flemming Just, eds, Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of Two World
Wars Palgrave, 2006, p. 16.
4 Leonhard, Pandora’s Box pp. 227–8; Keith Neilson, ‘The Maritime Way in
Munitions: The Entente and Supply in the First World War’ Journal of Military
and Strategic Studies 14, 3 & 4, 2012, p. 6.
5 Marjorie Milbank Farrar, Conflict and Compromise: The Strategy, Politics
and Diplomacy of the French Blockade 1914–1918 Martinus Nijhoff,
1974; Hew Strachan, ‘1915: The Search for Solutions’ in John Crawford,
David Littlewood, James Watson, eds, Experience of a Lifetime: People,
Personalities and Leaders in the First World War Massey University Press,
2016, pp. 14–15.
6 Stevenson, 1914–1918 pp. 107–8; Strachan, ‘1915’ p. 25.
7 Cf Eric Dorn Brose, A History of the Great War: World War One and the
International Crisis of the Early Twentieth Century Oxford University Press,
2010, pp. 80–3.
8 Kennedy, Rise p. 262.
9 Cf Andrew Dilley, ‘Trade after the Deluge: British Commerce, Armageddon and
the Political Economy of Globalisation 1914–1918’ in A. Smith, S. Mollan, K.
D. Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First World War on International Business
Routledge, 2017, pp. 31–2.
10 Welch, Germany p. 58.
11 Ulrichsen, ‘British’ p. 350.
12 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 115.
13 Strachan, ‘1915’ p. 25.
14 Cf Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 99.
15 Vincent, Politics p. 41. For a useful overview of the impact of economic
warfare measures on neutrality: Stephen C. Neff, ‘Disrupting a Delicate
Balance: The Allied Blockade Policy and the Law of Maritime Neutrality
during the Great War’ European Journal of International Law 29, 2, 2018,
pp. 459–75.
NOTES 187
16 Farrar, Conflict p. 17; John W. Coogan, ‘The Short-War Illusion Resurrected:

The Myth of Economic Warfare as the British Schlieffen Plan’ Journal of
Strategic Studies 38, 7, 2015, pp. 1048–60.
18 Cf Richard Dunley, Britain and the Mine, 1900–1915 Palgrave MacMillan,
2018, p. 232.
19 Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Protecting Neutrality at Sea in a Global Age, 1815–1914’
in David Morgan-Owen, Louis Halewood, eds, Economic Warfare and the Sea:
Grand Strategy for Maritime Powers, c. 1500–2000 Liverpool University Press,
2020, pp. 167–80.
20 Dunley, Mine p. 277.
21 Coogan, ‘Short-War’ p. 1056.
22 John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and
Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 196–7;
Dunley, Mine pp. 279–81; Vincent, Politics p. 40.
23 Dunley, Mine p. 284.
24 Farrar, Conflict p. 16.
26 Farrar, Conflict p. 18. Cf Clotilde Druelle, Feeding Occupied France during
World War I: Herbert Hoover and the Blockade Palgrave MacMillan, 2019,
p. 81.
27 T. Visser, ‘De “Zaanstroom” van de Hollansche Stoomboot Maatschappij,
naar Zeebrugge opgebracht 17 maart 1915’ in J.H. Hoogendijk, ed., De
Nederlandsche Koopvaardij in den Oorlogstijd (1914–1918) Van Holkema &
Warendorf, 1930, pp. 87–90.
28 Elinaza Mjerne, ‘World War I Shipwrecks of the Western Indian Ocean off
Tanzania: Neglected Underwater Heritage Resources’ in Lynn Harris, ed., Sea
Ports and Sea Power: African Maritime Cultural Landscapes Springer Link,
2017, p. 67.
29 Samuël Kruizinga, ‘Sailing in Uncharted Waters: Four Dutch Steamship
Companies during the First World War, 1914–1918’ International Journal of
Maritime History 27, 2 2015, pp. 227–49. Also: Haufler, Dangerous p. 56;
Bailey, ‘Supporting’ p. 33.
30 Cf Dilley, ‘Trade’ pp. 26, 30. For examples from the global meat industry:
Richard Perren, ‘Farmers and Consumers under Strain: Allied Meat Supplies in
the First World War’ Agricultural History Review 53, 2, 2005, pp. 212–28. For
examples from neutral Spain: Francisco J. Romero Salvado, Spain: Between
War and Revolution Routledge, 1999, pp. 23–6.
31 Cf Marcella Aglietti, ‘Patriotism and Neutrality: The Spanish Parliament and
the Great War, 1914–18’ Parliaments, Estates and Representation 36, 1, 2016,
pp. 54–70; Willem H. Van Boom, ‘The Great War and Dutch Contract Law:
Resistance, Responsiveness and Neutrality’ Comparative Legal History 2,
2, 2014, pp. 303–24; Wim Klinkert, Defending Neutrality: The Netherlands
Prepares for War 1900–1925 Brill, 2013, p. 6.
32 Cf Annie Deperchin, ‘The Laws of War’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History
Volume 1, p. 615.
33 For an example from the Netherlands: Thimo de Nijs, ‘Food Provision and
Food Retailing in The Hague, 1914–1930’, in Trentmann, Just, eds, Food
pp. 65–87; Herman De Jong, ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The
188 NOTES
Dutch Economy during World War I’ in S.N. Broadberry, Mark Harrison, eds,
The Economics of World War I Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 151,
157.
34 Rausch, Colombia p. 37.
35 Rinke, Latin America p. 81; Jane M. Rausch, ‘Colombia’s Neutrality during
1914–1918: An Overview’ Iberoamericana 14, 53, 2014, p. 107.
37 John Bassett Moore, ‘The Pan-American Conferences and the Inter-American
High Commission’ American Journal of International Law 14, 3, 1920,
pp. 343–55, quote on p. 343.
38 The Pan-American Union did not include the various American colonies, nor
the British Dominion of Canada.
42 Rinke, Latin America p. 59.
44 Rinke, Latin America p. 81; Carolina García Sanz, María Inés Tato, ‘Neutralist
Crossroads: Spain and Argentina Facing the Great War’ First World War
Studies 8, 2–3, 2017, pp. 6–7.
45 Cf Phillip Dehne, ‘Profiting Despite the Great War: Argentina’s Grain
Multinationals’ in Smith, Mollan, Tennent, eds, Impact pp. 67–81.
46 Cf J.M. Winter, Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and
Controversies, 1914 to the Present Cambridge University Press, 2005,
p. 119.
47 Brian Black, ‘Making Oil Essential: Emerging Patterns of Petroleum Culture
in the United States during the Era of the Great War’ in S. Daly, M. Salvante,
V. Wilcox, eds, Landscapes of the First World War Palgrave MacMillan, 2018,
p. 28.
48 Black, ‘Making’ p. 39.
49 Burk, Britain. Calculation made using the measuringworth.com’s conversion
tables and historic interest rates (accessed April 2019). Also: Horn, Britain,
France p. 80.
50 Black, ‘Making’ p. 24.
51 Marc Frey, ‘Anglo-Dutch Relations during the First World War’ in Nigel
Ashton, Duco Hellema, eds, Unspoken Allies Amsterdam University Press,
2001, pp. 59–65; Samuël Kruizinga, ‘NOT Neutrality: The Dutch Government,
the Netherlands Overseas Trust and the Entente Blockade of Germany 1914–
1918’ in Samuel Kruizinga, Johan Den Hertog, eds, Caught in the Middle:
Neutrals, Neutrality and the First World War Amsterdam University Press,
2011, pp. 68–104.
52 Samuël Kruizinga, ‘Government by Committee: Dutch Economic Policy during
the First World War’ in James Kitchen, Alisa Miller, Laura Rowe, eds, Other
Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War
Cambridge Scholars, 2011, p. 109.
53 D.D. Driscoll, ‘Anglo-Swiss Relations 1914–1918’ PhD, University of London,
1968.
54 Rinke, Latin America pp. 76–7; María Inés Tato, ‘An Overseas Trench: Social
Mobilization in Buenos Aires during the Great War’ in M. Lakitsch, S. Reitmar-
NOTES 189
Juárez, K. Seidel, eds, Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a

Global War LIT, 2015, p. 47.
55 Philip Dehne, On the Far Western Front: Britain’s First World War in South
America Manchester University Press, 2009, pp. 71–3.
56 Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhuri, Whitehall and the Black Republic: A Study of
Colonial Britain’s Attitude towards Liberia 1914–1939 Palgrave MacMillan,
2018, esp. Chapter 1.
57 Chaudhuri, Whitehall esp. Chapter 2.
58 Chaudhuri, Whitehall p. 58.
59 Ghassan Moazzin, ‘From Globalization to Liquidation: The Deutsche-
Asiastische Bank and the First World War in China’ Cross-Current: East Asian
History and Culture Review 16, 2015, p. 54.
60 Tobit Vandamme, ‘The Rise of Nationalism in a Cosmopolitan Port City: The
Foreign Communities of Shanghai during the First World War’ Journal of
World History 29, 1, 2018, pp. 37–64.
61 Josha A. Fogel, ‘Shanghai-Japan: The Japanese Residents’ Association of
Shanghai’ Journal of Asian Studies 59, 4, 2000, pp. 927–50.
62 C.W.R. Long, British Pro-Consuls in Egypt, 1914–1929: The Challenge of
Nationalism Routledge, 2004, p. 2.
63 Valeska Huber, ‘Connecting Colonial Seas: The “International Colonisation” of
Port Said and the Suez Canal during and after the First World War’ European
Review of History 19, 1, 2012, pp. 148–51.
64 Charles H. Armstrong, ‘Indian Trade and War’ Journal of the Royal Society of
Arts 63, 28 May 1915, pp. 650–1, 653–4.
65 Guoqi, ‘Asia’ p. 503; Kaushik Roy, Indian Army and the First World War
1914–1918 Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 35; Michael Clodfelter, Warfare
and Armed Conflict: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures,
1492–2015 McFarland, 2017, p. 374.
66 Radhika Singha, ‘India’s Silver Bullets: War Loans and War Propaganda
1917–1918’ in M. Abbenhuis, N. Atkinson, K. Baird, G. Romano, eds, Myriad
Legacies of 1917: A Year of War and Revolution Palgrave MacMillan, 2018,
pp. 77–102.
67 Armstrong, ‘Indian Trade’ p. 654.
68 Armstrong, ‘Indian Trade’ pp. 655–6.
69 Hidemasa Morikawa, ‘Japan’s Unstable Course during Its Remarkable
Economic Development’ in Alice Teichova, Herbert Matis, eds, Nation, State
and the Economy in History Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 335–6.
71 Susan C. Townsend, ‘The Great War and Urban Crisis: Conceptualizing the
Industrial Metropolis in Japan and Britain in the 1910s’ in T. Minohara, T.
Hon, E. Dawley, eds, The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider
World in the 1910s Brill, 2014 pp. 301–22.
72 Charles Shenking, ‘Imperial’ p. 96; Matsumura, ‘Expansion’ p. 147.
73 Young, Japan pp. 110–11.
74 Young, Japan p. 112.
75 Young, Japan pp. 93–4.
76 Young, Japan p. 114; Matsumura, ‘Expansion’ pp. 149–50.
77 Fawaz, Land p. 89.
78 Rogan, The Fall pp. 57–9.
190 NOTES

80 Jeffrey D. Reger, ‘Lamps, Never before Dim Are Being Extinguished from Lack
of Olive Oil: Deforestation and Famine in Palestine at War and in Peace under
the Late Ottoman Empire and Early British Empire, 1910–1920’ in Daly,
Salvante, Wilcox, eds, Landscapes pp. 37–56.
81 Fawaz, Land pp. 89–115.
82 Najwa al-Qattan, ‘Historicising Hunger: The Famine in Wartime Lebanon and
Syria’ in T. G. Fraser, ed., The First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping
of the Modern Middle East Gingko Library, 2015, pp. 111–26.
83 Brose, History p. 81.
84 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis
1914–1921 Harvard University Press, 2002.
85 Peter Gatrell, ‘Poor Russia, Poor Show: Mobilising a Backward Economy for
War, 1914–1917’ in Broadberry, Harrison, eds, Economics pp. 247, 249.
86 Cf Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and
the United States before World War I Cornell University Press, 2012, p. 150;
Coleman Phillipson, International Law and the Great War T. Fisher Unwin,
1915, p. xvii.
87 Salvado, Spain pp. 8–9.
88 Francis Taylor, ‘Neutral Merchants and the Rights of War’ Journal of the Royal
Society of Arts 64, 12 May 1916, pp. 467–79; Harold C. Syrett, ‘The Business
Press and American Neutrality 1914–1917’ Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 32, 2, 1945, p. 217.
89 Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, Sven Widmalm, ‘Introduction’ in Rebecka
Lettevall, Geert Somsen, Sven Widmalm, eds, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century
Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture and Politics after the First World War
Routledge, 2012, esp. pp. 2–3; Rinke, Latin America p. 88.
Chapter 5
2 Roy, Indian Army p. 258; Das, India p. 243.
3 See Nikolas Gardner, The Siege of Kut-al-Amara: At War in Mesopotamia,
1915–1916 Indiana University Press, 2014, p. 156; Rogan, The Fall p. 242.
5 Rogan, The Fall p. 249; Das, India p. 263; Roy, Indian Army p. 270.
6 Roy, Indian Army p. 270.
7 Mokkhada Devi, Kalyan-Pradeep: The Life of Captain Kumar Mukherji, I.M.S
Kolkata 1928, p. 442, cited in: Amitav Ghosh, ‘Iraq 1915–16: The Siege of Kut
al-Amara’ 3 August 2012 in At Home and the World in Mesopotamia, http://
amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=4356http://www.oiist.org/?q=de/node/33 (accessed
January 2020).
8 Rogan, The Fall p. 263.
9 As quoted in Rogan, The Fall p. 267.
NOTES 191
12 Devi, Kalyan-Pradeep.
13 Devi, Kalyan-Pradeep pp. 333–5, cited in: Amitav Ghosh, ‘I Spit in the Face of
Patriotism’ in At Home and the World in Mesopotamia 27 July 2012 http://
amitavghosh.com/blog/?cat=27#_edn3 (accessed November 2020). Please note:
a crore refers to millions.
15 John Horne, ‘Nineteen Fifteen and the Totalizing Logic of the First World War’
Thyssen Lectures IV The Great War beyond National Perspectives Max Weber
Stiftung 32 2017, http://www.oiist.org/?q=de/node/33. (accessed January
2020).
16 Gerald J. Fitzgerald, ‘Chemical Warfare and Medical Response during World
War I’ American Journal of Public Health 98, 4, 2008, pp. 611–25.
17 Thomas I. Faith, ‘Gas Warfare’ 1914–1918 Online https://encyclopedia.1914–
1918online.net/article/gas_warfare (accessed August 2020).
18 Hugh R. Slotten, ‘Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism? American
Responses to World War 1 Poison Gas, 1915–1930’ Journal of American
History 77, 2, 1990, pp. 476–98; R. Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo
Cornell University Press 1997, pp. 14–71.
19 As quoted by Willem Van Der Kloot, ‘April 1915: Five Future Noble Prize-
Winners Inaugurate Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Academic-
Industrial-Military Complex’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of
London 58, 2, 2004, p. 152.
20 Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915’ p. 70; Yigal Sheffy, ‘The Chemical Dimension of the
Gallipoli Campaign: Introducing Chemical Warfare to the Middle East’ War
in History 12, 3, 2005, pp. 278–317; Leo Van Bergen, Maartje Abbenhuis,
‘Man-Monkey, Monkey-Man: Neutrality and the Discussions about the
“Inhumanity” of Poison Gas in the Netherlands and International Committee
of the Red Cross’ First World War Studies 3, 1, 2012, pp. 1–23.
21 John H. Morrow Jr., ‘The Air War’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume
1, pp. 353–6.
22 John Horne in Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915’ p. 87.
23 Melvin Page, ‘Africa’s First “High Tech” War: The Technological Impact of
World War One on Africans’ Journal of African Military History 2, 1, 2018,
p. 28.
24 Audion-Rouzeau refers to the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Warnier who uses the
term ‘“sensori-affectivo-motor” conducts’. See, for instance, Warnier’s chapter
‘Inside and Outside. Surfaces and Containers’ in Christopher Tilley, Webb
Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, Patricia Spyer, eds, Handbook
of Material Culture Sage Publications, 2006, pp. 186–95. Also: Ross Wilson,
‘Strange Hells: A New Approach on the Western Front’ Historical Research 81,
211, 2008, esp. pp. 156–63.
25 Piet Chielens, ‘1917 in Flanders Fields: The Seeds for the Commemorative War
Landscape in Belgian Flanders’, in Maartje Abbenhuis, Neill Atkinson, Kingsley
Baird, Gail Romano, eds, The Myriad Legacies of 1917: A Year of War and
Revolution Palgrave, 2018, p. 224.
26 As quoted in Page, ‘Black Men’ p. 2.
27 Page, ‘Black Men’ p. 1.
192 NOTES
29 Ulrik Lehrmann, ‘An Album of War: The Visual Mediation of the First World
War in Danish Magazines and Daily Newspapers’ in Claes Ahlund, ed.,
Scandinavia in the First World War: Studies in the War Experience of the
Northern Neutrals Nordic Academic Press, 2012, pp. 57–84; Conny Kristel, De
Oorlog van Anderen: Nederlanders en Oorlogsgeweld, 1914–1918 Amsterdam,
2016.
30 Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915’ p. 74; John Horne, ‘Atrocities and War Crimes’ in
Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 1, p. 566.
31 As quoted in Page, ‘Black Men’ p. 4. Also: Soutar, Whitiki! p. 43.
32 Leonhard, Pandora’s Box p. 322.
33 ‘Look at that Man!’, recruitment poster, The Times Press (Bombay), 1918,
Imperial War Museum, Art. IWM PST 12576, https://www.iwm.org.uk/
collections/item/object/31125 (accessed August 2020).
34 ‘Your Chums are Fighting’, recruitment poster, Central Recruiting Committee,
Toronto, 1914, Art. IWM PST 12428, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/
item/object/31011; ‘If You are an Irishman, Your Place is with Your Chums
under the Flags’, recruitment poster, David Turner, Allen and Sons, 1914, Art.
IWM PST 13657.
35 As quoted by Page, ‘Black Men’ p. 5.
36 Melvin E. Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians in the First World War
Westview, 2000, p. 215.
38 Cited in Das, India p. 87.
39 As quoted in Guoqi, ‘Asia’ p. 109.
40 Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War
and Mass Politics 1905–25 Northern Illinois University Press, 2003, p. 4.
41 John Horne, ‘Nineteen Fifteen and the Totalizing Logic of the First World War’,
Thyssen Lectures IV The Great War Beyond National Perspectives, Pera Blätter
32 Max Weber Stiftung 2017, http://www.oiist.org/?q=de/node/33.
42 Claes Ahlund, ‘Rats and Anthills: The First World War in the Scandinavian Spy
Novel’ in Ahlund, ed., Scandinavia pp. 109–28.
43 Cf Douglas Pfeifer, ‘The Sinking of the Lusitania: Wilson’s Response and Paths
Not Taken: Historical Revisionism, the Nye Committee and the Ghost of
William Jennings Bryan’ Journal of Military History 79, 4, 2015, pp. 1025–7.
44 Armin Rappaport, The British Press and Wilsonian Neutrality Stanford
45 John Protasio, The Day the World was Shocked: The Lusitania Disaster and It
Influence on the Course of World War One Casemate, 2015, p. 130; Fulwider,
German Propaganda, esp. pp. 65–75.
46 M.L. Sanders, P. M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War,
1914–18 Macmillan Education UK, 1982, pp. 130–1.
47 Phil Dutton, ‘How a German Medallion became a British Propaganda Tool’
Imperial War Museum Review 1, 1986, also at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/
history/how-a-germanmedallion-became-a-british-propaganda-tool (accessed
August 2020).
48 As an example: Christian Meurer, Der Lusitania-fall: eine volkerrichtliche
Studie J.C.B. Mohr, 1915. Also: Fulwider, German Propaganda pp. 75–88.
49 Trommler, ‘The Lusitania’ pp. 241–66.
NOTES 193
50 Neiberg, Path to War pp. 66–77; Rappaport, British Press pp. 43–53.

51 For which, see Chapter 4.
52 Trommler, ‘The Lusitania’ p. 244.
53 Panikos Panayi, ‘Minorities’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 3,
p. 227; Stefan Goebel, ‘Cities’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 2,
p. 362.
54 Auckland Star 14 May 1915, p. 5.
55 Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy
Aliens during World War I Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 148.
56 Goebel, ‘Cities’ p. 362.
57 Nicoletta Gullace, ‘Friends, Aliens and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the
Lusitania Riots of 1915’ Journal of Social History 39, 2, 2005, pp. 345–67,
esp. p. 352 and p. 354.
58 Cited in Gullace, ‘Friends’ pp. 352–3.
59 Gullace, ‘Friends’ p. 352.
60 Paul Thompson, ‘The Lusitania Riots in Pietermaritzburg 13–14 May 1915’
War & Society 36, 1, 2017, pp. 1–30.
61 As quoted in Tilman Dedering, ‘Avenge the Lusitania: The Anti-German Riots
in South Africa in 1915’ Immigrants & Minorities 31, 3, 2013, p. 267.
62 As reported in the Manawatu Times 15 May 1915, p. 6.
63 Poverty Bay Herald 19 May 1915, p. 3.
64 Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi, ‘The Internment of Civilian “Enemy Aliens”
in the British Empire’ in Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi, Matthew Stibbe,
eds, Internment during the First World War: A Mass Global Phenomenon
Routledge, 2019, pp. 25–8.
65 Manz et al., eds, Internment.
66 Tames, ‘War’ pp. 201–16.
67 Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Where War Met Peace: The Borders of the Neutral
Netherlands with Belgium and Germany in the First World War’ Journal of
Borderland Studies 22, 1, 2007, pp. 53–77.
68 Panikos Panayi, Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant
Internees during the First World War Manchester University Press, 2012,
p. 303.
69 Alexandra Ludewig, ‘Visualising a Community in Incarceration: Images from
Civilian Internees on Rottnest Island and in Ruhleben during the First World
War’ War & Society 35, 1, 2016, pp. 54–74.
70 Gullace, ‘Friends’ p. 356.
71 As examples: Steven Hyland Jr., ‘The Syrian-Ottoman Home Front in Buenos
Aires and Rosario during the First World War’ Journal of Migration History
4, 1, 2018, pp. 211–35; Eirik Brazier, ‘The Stranger in Our Midst: Public
Discourses, Constructions and Representations of “Others” in Scandinavia,
1914–1918’ Neutrals at War Conference, KNHG Conference, November 2015,
available at: https://knhg.nl/wp/content/uploads/2015/08/Eirik-Brazier.pdf
(accessed September 2020).
72 Cf Brian K. Feltman, ‘Tolerance as a Crime? The British Treatment of German
Prisoners of War on the Western Front, 1914–1918’ War in History 17, 4,
pp. 435–58. Also: Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First
World War Cambridge University Press, 2014.
194 NOTES
73 Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ‘Populations under Occupation’ in Winter, ed.,

Cambridge History Volume 3, p. 243.
74 Liulevicius, War; Schaepdrijver, ‘Populations’ p. 251.
75 Annette Becker, ‘Captive Civilians’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History
Volume 3, p. 257.
76 Peter Gatrell, ‘Resettlement’ 1914–1918 Online https://doi.org/10.15463/
IE1418.10344 (accessed May 2020).
77 Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War
1914–1918 Penguin, 2014, p. 182.
78 Alexander Watson, The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyśl Penguin, 2019,
p. 52; Kramer, Dynamic pp. 140–4.
79 Cited in Watson, Fortress p. 51.
80 Watson, Fortress p. 70.
81 Watson, Ring p. 183.
82 Watson, Ring pp. 183–97; Watson, Fortress p. 138
83 Watson, Fortress p. 137.
85 Watson, Fortress p. 122.
86 Cf Kramer, Dynamic p. 139.
87 Kramer, Dynamic p. 151; Peter Gatrell, ‘The Epic and the Domestic’ in Gail
Braybon, ed., Evidence, History and the Great War Berghahn Books, 2003,
p. 203.
88 Cf John H. Morrow, ‘The Imperial Framework’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge
History Volume 1, pp. 417–23.
90 Ozan Arslan, ‘The “Bon Pour L’Orient” Front: Analysis of Russia’s
Anticipated Victory over the Ottoman Empire in World War I’ Middle East
Critique 23, 2, 2014, pp. 175–88; Bruinessen, ‘A Kurdish’ pp. 69–93.
91 Kramer, Dynamic pp. 139–40; Donald Bloxham, ‘The First World War and
the Development of the Armenian Genocide’ in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma
Múge Göçek, Norman A. Naimark, eds, A Question of Genocide: Armenians
and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire Oxford University Press, 2011,
pp. 260–75.
92 As quoted in Anna Aleksanyan, ‘Between Love, Pain and Identity: Armenian
Women after World War I’ in Ulrike Ziemer, ed., Women’s Everyday Lives
in War and Peace in the South Caucasus Palgrave MacMillan, 2020, p. 105.
See also: Katherine Derderian, ‘Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-
Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide 1915–1917’ Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 19, 1, 2005, pp. 1–25.
93 Fawaz, Land.
94 Fawaz, Land p. 3.
95 Cf Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ‘Introduction: Military Occupation, Political
Imaginations and the First World War’ First World War Studies 4, 1, 2013,
pp. 1–5.
96 With thanks to David Monger. David Monger, ‘Networking against Genocide
during the First World War: The International Network behind the British
Parliamentary Report on the Armenian Genocide’ Journal of Transatlantic
Studies 16, 3, 2018, pp. 295–316. See also: Segesser, ‘Dissolve’ pp. 95–110;
Qvarnström, ‘Recognizing’ pp. 177–98; Peter Balakian, ‘Photography, Visual
NOTES 195
Culture, and the Armenian Genocide’ in Heide Fehrenbach, Davide Rodogno,

eds, Humanitarian Photography: A History Cambridge University Press, 2015,
pp. 100–9.
97 Sanders, Taylor, British Propaganda p. 11; Heidi Tworek, News from
Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945
Harvard University Press, 2019.
98 Mark Hewitson, ‘A War of Words: The Cultural Meanings of the First World
War in Britain and Germany’ European Review of History 25, 5, 2018,
p. 749.
99 María Inés Tato, ‘A Discordant Voice from the Trenches: Juan José de Soiza
Reilly’s War Chronicles’ Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 41, 2,
2017, pp. 5–6.
100 Sanders, Taylor, British Propaganda pp. 120–1.
101 Xosé Núñez Seixas, ‘Catalonia and the “War of Nations”: Catalan
Nationalism and the First World War’ Journal of Modern European History
16, 3, 2018, p. 385.
102 Touraj Atabaki, ‘Going East: The Ottomans’ Secret Services in Iran’ in
Atabaki, ed., Iran, p. 32.
103 British propaganda poster intended for a Chinese Muslim audience, np,
[1918], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://loc.gov/
pictures/resource/cph.3g11304/(accessed September 2020).
104 Fulwider, German Propaganda.
105 Red Book Magazine (New York) 24, 2, December 1914, p. 207.
106 Richard Abel, ‘Charge and Countercharge: “Documentary” War Pictures in
the USA 1914–1916’ Film History 22, 4, 2010, pp. 366–88.
107 Hewitson, ‘A War’ pp. 749–50.
108 Tato, ‘Discordant Voice’ quotes on pp. 7, 9.
109 Anja Huber, ‘Restrictions against Swiss Nationals in England during the First
World War’, Neutrals at War Conference, KNHG, https://knhg.nl/wp/content/
uploads/2015/08/Abstracts-Neutrals-at-War.pdf (accessed September 2020).
110 Abbenhuis, ‘Where War’.
111 Olga V. Alexeeva, ‘Experiencing War: Chinese Workers in Russia during the
First World War’ Chinese Historical Review 25, 1, 2018, pp. 46–66.
112 Some examples: Carolyn Kay, ‘War Pedagogy in the German Primary School
during the First World War’ War & Society 33, 1, 2014, pp. 3–11; Mischa
Honeck, ‘Playing on Uncle Sam’s Team: American Childhood during World
War 1’ Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, 4, 2018, pp. 677–
90; María Inés Tato, ‘Recording the War Effort: Immigrant Communities in
Latin America and the Memory of the Great War’ Archives and Manuscripts
48, 2, pp. 200–15.
113 Sanders, Taylor, British Propaganda p. 157.
114 Glyn Harper, Christine Clement, Rebecca Johns, Fighting for King and
Other Countries Massey University Press, 2019; Andrea McKenzie, ‘Our
Common Colonial Voices: Canadian Nurses, Patient Relations and Nation on
Lemnos’ in Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger, Gunda Barth-Scalmani,
eds, Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the
Centennial Brill, 2014, pp. 92–123.
115 Mahon Murphy, ‘Brücken, Beethoven und Baumkuchen: German and
Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War and the Japanese Home Front’ in
196 NOTES
Bürgschwentner et al., eds, Other Fronts pp. 125–45; Yücel Yanikdag, Healing

the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey 1914–
1939 Edinburg University Press, 2014, p. 1.
117 Cited in Das, India p. 269.
118 Sanborn, Drafting p. 204.
Chapter 6
1 Saint-Amour, Tense Future p. 58. For more, please return to the Introduction of
this book.
2 ‘The War: Various Points of View’ Athaneum 4576, 10 July 1915, p. 2.
3 Cf David Bell, Annie Crépin, Hervé Drévillon, Olivier Forcade, Bernard
Gainot, ‘Autour de la Guerre Totale’ Annalles Historiques de la Révolution
Française 4, 2011, p. 153.
4 Saint-Amour, Tense Future p. 58.
5 Daudet, Guerre Totale p. 8.
6 Robin Prior, ‘Impasse’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 2,
102, 108.
7 Prior, ‘Impasse’ p. 98.
8 John Keegan, The First World War Random House, 1998, p. 306.
9 Keegan, First World War p. 328.
10 Stevenson, 1914–1918 pp. 123–4.
11 For the impact on meat supplies from the Red Sea region: Massimo Zaccaria,
‘Feeding the War: Canned Meat Production in the Horn of Africa and the
Italian Front’ in Shiferaw Bekele, Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, Alessandro Volterra,
Massimo Zaccaria, eds, The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa
Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes, 2018, np.
12 Tom G. Hall, ‘Wilson and the Food Crisis: Agricultural Price Control during
World War I’ Agricultural History 47, 1, 1973, p. 25.
13 Broadberry, Harrison, eds, Economics.
14 Max-Stephan Schulze, ‘Austria-Hungary’s Economy in World War I’ and
Sevket Pamuk, ‘The Ottoman Economy in World War I’ both in Broadberry
and Harrison, eds, Economics pp. 94, 127. Also: Melanie Tanielian, ‘Politics of
Wartime Relief in Ottoman Beirut (1914–1918)’ First World War Studies 5, 1,
2014, pp. 69–82.
15 Matthias Blum, ‘War, Food Rationing, and Socio-Economic Inequality in
Germany during the First World War’ Economic History Review 66, 4, 2013,
p. 1064.
17 Stapleton, ‘Impact’ pp. 113–37.
18 Salvado, Spain pp. 23–5.
19 Hall, ‘Wilson’ p. 29.
20 Beryl Nicolson, ‘On the Front Line in Someone Else’s War: Mallakastër,
Albania 1916–1918’ Region 4, 2, 2015, pp. 247–63.
22 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 179.
23 Prior, ‘Impasse’.
NOTES 197

25 Prior, ‘Impasse’; Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 179; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box
p. 547.
26 Iaroslav Golubinov, ‘Food and Nutrition (Russian Empire)’ and Maria
Fernanda Rollo, Ana Paula Pires, ‘Food and Nutrition (Portugal)’ both in
1914–1918 Online https://encyclopedia.1914–1918.net (accessed September
2020); Robert Blobaum, Donata Blobaum, ‘A Different Kind of Home Front:
War, Gender and Propaganda in Warsaw 1914–1918’ in Troy Paddock, ed.,
World War I Propaganda Brill, 2014, p. 264; Regula Pfeifer, ‘Frauen und
Protest: Marktdemonstrationen in der deutschen Schweiz im Kriegsjahr
1916’ Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 11,
1993, pp. 93–112; Giselle Nath, ‘Stad in de Storm: Arbeidersvrouwen en
het Hongerjaar 1916’ Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en
Oudheidkunde te Gent 65, 1–2, 2011, pp. 205–27; Antoinne Prost, ‘Workers’
in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 2, p. 350; Karen Hunt, ‘The Politics
of Food and Women’s Neighbourhood Activism in First World War Britain’
International Labour and Working-Class History 77, 1, 2010, pp. 8–26.
27 Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Agrarian Society’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History
Volume 2, p. 398.
28 As quoted in Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy, Gearóid Barry, ‘Globalising the
Easter Rising: 1916 and the Challenges to Empires’ in Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín
Healy, Gearóid Barry, eds, 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment
Routledge, 2019, p. 3.
29 García Sanz, Inés Tato, ‘Neutralist Crossroads’ p. 12.
30 Prost, ‘Workers’ pp. 333–5; Dirk Hoerder, ‘Migrations and Belongings’ in
Emily Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting 1870–1945 Belknap Press, 2012,
p. 555; Gatrell, ‘Epic’ pp. 198–215.
31 Carole Marks, ‘Lines of Communication, Recruitment Mechanisms and the
Great Migration of 1916–1918’ Social Problems 31, 1, 1983, pp. 73–83;
Cecelia Hartsell, ‘The Great American Protest: African Americans and the
Great Migration’ in Dal Lago, et al., eds, 1916 pp. 49–61.
32 Townsend, ‘The Great War’ pp. 301–22.
34 Joe Lunn, ‘Remembering the “Tirailleurs Sénégalais” and the Great War: Oral
History as a Methodology of Inclusion in French Colonial Studies’ French
Colonial History 10, 2009, p. 140.
35 Michelle Moyd, ‘Ordeal and Opportunity: Ending the First World War in
Africa’ Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 43, 1, 2019, p. 147; James E. Genova,
Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity and the Limitations of Mimicry in
French-Ruled West Africa 1914–1856 Peter Lang, 2004, p. 31.
36 Hoerder, ‘Migrations’ p. 555.
37 Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict,
1914–1921 Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 97, 106–7.
38 Kyle Anderson, ‘The Egyptian Labor Corps: Workers, Peasants and the State
in World War I’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, 1, 2017,
pp. 5–24.
39 See also: Donald C. Savage, J. Forbes Munro, ‘Carrier Corps Recruitment in
the British East Africa Protectorate 1914–1918’ Journal of African History 7,
2, 1966, pp. 313–24.
198 NOTES
40 Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War Clarendon Press, 1993,
pp. 1–48. For a Russian example: Aaron J. Cohen, ‘Flowers of Evil: Media,
Child Psychology and the Struggle for Russia’s Future during the First World
War’ in James Martin, Robert Coles, eds, Children and War: A Historical
Anthology New York University Press, 2002, pp. 38–49.
41 As quoted in Richard Blom, Hunger: How Food Shaped the Course of the First
World War Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2019, p. 177 (italics in original).
42 Alexander Watson, ‘Morale’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 2,
p. 180.
43 Abbenhuis, Art pp. 111–12. For more: Susanne Wolf, Guarded Neutrality:
Diplomacy and Internment in the Netherlands during the First World War
Brill, 2013.
44 Leonard V. Smith, ‘Mutiny’ in Winter, ed, Cambridge History Volume 2,
pp. 202–3.
46 Caroline Moorhead, Troublesome People: Enemies of War, 1916–1986 Hamish
Hamilton, 1987, pp. 3–80; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box p. 440.
48 Daniel Segesser, ‘To be Avoided at all Hazards – Rebel Irish and Syndicalists
Coming into Office: The Easter Rising, Climatic Conditions and the 1916
Australian Referendum on Conscription’ in Dal Lago et al., eds, 1916
pp. 146–56.
49 Joan Beaumont, ‘Similar, Yet Different: The Conscription Issue in Australia and
New Zealand 1916–17’ Journal of New Zealand Studies 27, 2018, pp. 2–15.
50 Charles-Philippe Courtois, ‘Echoes of the Rising in Quebec’s Conscription
Crisis: The French Canadian Press and the Irish Revolution between 1916 and
1918’ in Dal Lago et al., eds, 1916 pp. 31–48.
51 Cf Aaron Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War Cambridge
52 Timothy D. Hoyt, ‘The Easter Rising and the Changing Character of the
Irregular War’ in Dal Lago et al., eds, 1916 pp. 18–19.
53 Streets-Salter, World War One; Roy, Indian Army pp. 37–8; Mohammad
Rafi, ‘Kulturarbeid and Ideology in the Great War: Germany’s Role in the
Formation of Iranian Nationalism’ in Kai Evers, David Pan, eds, Europe and
the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism Telos Press Publishing, 2018,
pp. 157–79; Jennifer Jenkins, Heike Liebau, Larissa Schmid, ‘Transnationalism
and Insurrection: Independence Committees, Anti-Colonial Networks, and
Germany’s Global War’ Journal of Global History 15, 1, 2020, pp. 61–79.
54 Tim Harper, ‘Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground’
Modern Asian Studies 47, 6, 2013, pp. 1782–811.
56 With immense thanks to Bernadette How for her research on this point. Also:
Ansari, ‘Tasting’ pp. 33–61.
57 Streets-Salter, World War One, p. 17; Stephen McQuillan, ‘Revolutionaries,
Renegades and Refugees: Anti-British Allegiances in the Context of World War
I’ in Dal Lagos et al., eds, 1916, pp. 117–30.
58 Smith, ‘Mutiny’ pp. 199–200.
59 Hoyt, ‘Easter Rising’.
NOTES 199
60 Kris Manjapra, ‘Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition’

in Sugata Bose, Kris Manjapra, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South
Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, p. 163;
Leon Comber, ‘The Singapore Mutiny (1915) and the Genesis of Political
Intelligence in Singapore’ Intelligence and National Security 24, 4, 2009,
pp. 529–41.
61 Dal Lago et al., 1916. Also: M.C. Rast, ‘Ireland’s Sister Nations:
Internationalism and Sectarianism in the Irish Struggle for Independence,
1916–22’ Journal of Global History 10, 3, 2015, pp. 479–501; Jérôme aan
de Wiel, ‘The Shots That Reverberated for a Long Time: 1916–1932: The
Irish Revolution, the Bolsheviks and the European Left’ International History
Review 42, 1, 2020, pp. 195–213.
62 Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, Catalan Nationalism and the Quest for
Independence in the Twenty-First Century. A Historical Perspective
Peristyle, 2020, p. 387.
63 Danielle Ross, ‘From Dublin to Turgai: Discourses on Small Nations and
Violence in the Russian Muslim Press in 1916’ in Dal Lago et al., eds, 1916,
pp. 131–45, quote on pp. 142–3; Alexander Morrison, ‘Peasant Settlers and
the “Civilising Mission” in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917’ Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 43, 3, 2015, esp. pp. 401–2.
64 Sanborn, Drafting pp. 35–6.
65 As examples: Juliette Honvault, ‘World War I and the Perspective of a
Hashemite Order in Yemen’ in Bekele, et al., eds, First World War np;
Bruinessen, ‘A Kurdish’ pp. 69–93; Singha, Indian Labour pp. 172–3.
66 Osuntokun, ‘Disaffection’ pp. 186, 191; Patrick Gilkes, Martin Plaut, ‘Great
War Intrigues in the Horn of Africa’ in Bekele et al., eds, First World War;
Jason Pack, ‘The Antecedents and Implications of the So-Called Anglo-Sanussi
War 1915–1917’ in T.G. Fraser, ed., The First World War and Its Aftermath
Gingko Library, 2015, pp. 41–62; George L. Simpson Jr., ‘British Perspectives
on Aulihan Somali Unrest in the East Africa Protectorate, 1915–1918’
Northeast African Studies 6, 1–2, 1999, pp. 7–43; Stapleton, ‘Impact’ pp. 119–
22; Black, Age pp. 72–7.
67 Haggai Erlich, ‘WWI in the Middle East and Africa: Nationalist Movements in
a Formative Age’ in Bekele et al., eds, First World War pp. 12–13; Rogan, The
Fall pp. 275–309.
68 Mark Farha, ‘From Anti-Imperial Dissent to National Consent: The First
World War and the Formation of a Trans-Sectarian National Consciousness in
Lebanon’ in Fraser, ed., Aftermath pp. 100–1.
69 Farrar, Conflict p. 26.
70 Matthias Blum, ‘Government Decisions before and during the First World War
and the Living Standards in Germany during a Drastic National Experiment’
Explorations in Economic History 48, 4, 2011, pp. 556–67.
71 Paul Vigness, The Neutrality of Norway in the World War Stanford University
Press, 1932, p. 53.
72 As quoted in Vigness, Neutrality p. 53.
73 Vigness, Neutrality p. 93.
75 Neiberg, Path to War p. 100.
200 NOTES
76 Cf The War Business in the United States American Embarge Conference,

1916, available in The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800–1926
database, Gale Centrage.
77 Neiberg, Path to War p. 103. Also: S. Marianne Johnson, Ian Isherwood,
‘Gettysburg and the Great War’ War & Society 36, 3, 2017, pp. 217–34.
78 James A. Sandos, ‘German Involvement in Northern Mexico, 1915–1916: A
New Look at the Columbus Raid’ Hispanic American Historical Review 50,
1, 1970, pp. 85–8; Michael E. Neagle, ‘A Bandit Worth Hunting: Pancho Villa
and America’s War on Terror in Mexico 1916–1917’ Terrorism and Political
Violence 2019, doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2019.1632199.
79 Alexander Barnes, ‘On the Border: The National Guard Mobilizes for War in
1916’ Army Sustainment 48, 2, 2016, pp. 66–72; Timothy Johnson, ‘Nitrogen
Nation: The Legacy of World War I and the Politics of Chemical Agriculture
in the United States’ Agricultural History 90, 2, 2016, p. 216.
80 Michael Neiberg, ‘German Spies in New York!’ Military History 31, 1, 2013,
pp. 66–71.
81 As quoted in Michael Neiberg, ‘Blinking Eyes Began to Open: Legacies from
America’s Road to the Great War 1914–1917’ Diplomatic History 38, 4,
2014, p. 807.
82 Ross Kennedy, ‘Peace Initiatives’ 1914–1918 Online https://
encyclopedia.1914–1918-online.net/article/peace_initiatives (accessed
November 2020).
83 Salvado, Spain pp. 5–26, quote on p. 9.
84 Black, Age p. 18.
85 Sanders, Taylor, British Propaganda p. 11.
86 Landry Charrier, ‘Switzerland during the Great War: “Front of Dissidence”
and Platform for Franco-German Exchanges’ in Allisa Miller, Laura Rowe,
James Kitchen, eds, Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of
the First World War Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 147–9.
87 Chris Kostov, ‘Pre-War Politics and Bulgarian Public Opinion at the Outbreak
of WW1 (1913–1915)’ Studia Historyczne 4, 2014, pp. 457–72.
88 V.N. Vinogradov, ‘Romania in the First World War: The Years of Neutrality,
1914–1916’ International History Review 14, 3, 1992, pp. 441–61.
89 Michael B. Barrett, Prelude to Blitzkrieg: The 1916 Austro-German Campaign
in Romania Indiana University Press, 2013.
90 Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘Portuguese Intervention 9 March 1916: Germany
Declares War on Portugal’ in Alan Sharp, ed., Sarajevo 1914 – Versailles 1919:
The War and Peace That Made the Modern World Haus, 2014, pp. 180–5.
91 Samuël Kruizinga, ‘Neutrality’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 2,
pp. 554–5. For more on the Portuguese war in East Africa: Ana Pires, ‘The
First World War in Portuguese East Africa: Civilian and Military Encounters
in the Indian Ocean’ e-Journal of Portuguese History 15, 1, 2017, np.
92 Vigness, Neutrality p. 90.
93 Thomas D. Westerman, ‘Touring Occupied Belgium: American Humanitarians
at “Work” and “Leisure” (1914–1917)’ First World War Studies 5, 1, 2014,
pp. 43–53.
94 Johan Den Hertog, ‘The Commission for the Relief of Belgium and the
Political Diplomatic History of the First World War’ Diplomacy & Statecraft
21, 4, 2010, pp. 593–613.
NOTES 201
95 Bent Blüdnikow, ‘Denmark during the First World War’ Journal of

Contemporary History 24, 1989, pp. 683–703; Karen Gram-Skjoldager,
‘Denmark during the First World War: Neutral Policy, Economy and Culture’
Journal of Modern European History 17, 2, 2019, p. 240; Jennifer D. Keene,
‘Americans Respond: Perspectives on the Global War, 1914–1917’ Geschichte
und Gesellschaft 40, 2, 2014, pp. 266–86; Elisabeth Piller, ‘To Aid the
Fatherland: German-Americans, Transatlantic Relief Work and American
Neutrality, 1914–17’ Immigrants and Minorities 35, 6, 2017, pp. 196–215;
Caroline Reeves, ‘Sovereignty and the Chinese Red Cross Society: The
Differentiated Practice of International Law in Shandong, 1914–1916’ Journal
of the History of International Law 13, 2011, pp. 155–77.
96 Blüdnikow, ‘Denmark’.
97 Georg Cavallar, ‘Eye-Deep in Hell: Heinrich Lammasch, the Confederation
of Neutral States, and Austrian Neutrality, 1899–1920’ in Rebecka Letteval,
Geert Somsen, Sven Widmalm, eds, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe
Routledge, 2012, p. 281.
98 Ruy Barbosa, Le Devoir des Neutres Félix Alcan, 1917, pp. 62–5.
99 Annette Becker, ‘From the Bulletin Internationale des Sociétés de la Croix Rouge
to the International Review of the Red Cross: The Great War as Revelator’
International Review of the Red Cross 100, 907–9, 2019, pp. 97–113.
100 Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism 1918–
1924 Cambridge University Press, 2014; Keith Watenpaugh, ‘The League of
Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern
Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’ American Historical Review 115, 5, 2010, p. 1319.
101 Thomas Munro, ‘The Courageous Conference: British and American
Newspaper Coverage of the 1915 Women’s Peace Congress at The Hague’,
Australian Journal of Politics and History 64, 3, 2018, pp. 422–35.
102 L.P. Lochner, The Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation np, 1916;
Women’s Manifesto. A Clear and Concise Exposition of the Inception and
Development of the Plan for a Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation
Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation, 1916 (with thanks to the
Peace Collection at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania).
103 Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Øyvind Tønnesson, ‘Unity and Divergence:
Scandinavian Internationalism 1914–1921’ Contemporary European History
17, 3, 2008, p. 309.
104 Martin Ceadel, ‘Enforced Pacific Settlement or Guaranteed Mutual Defence?
British and US Approaches to Collective Security in the Eclectic Covenant of
the League of Nations’ International History Review 35, 5, 2013, pp. 996–7.
105 Sakiko Kaiga, ‘The Use of Force to Prevent War? The Bryce Group’s “Proposal
for the Avoidance of War” 1914–1915’ Journal of British Studies 57, 2, 2018,
pp. 308–32; Martin David Dubin, ‘Toward the Concept of Collective Security:
The Bryce Group’s “Proposals for the Avoidance of War” 1914–1917’
International Organization 24, 2, 1970, pp. 288–318.
106 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law, 1870–1960 Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 220,
232, 235.
107 Cf Heather Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action
during the First World War’ European Review of History 16, 5, 2009,
pp. 697–713.
202 NOTES
108 Cf Sven Widmalm, ‘A Superior Type of Universal Civilisation: Science as

Politics in Sweden, 1917–1926’, Robert Marc Friedman, ‘Has the Swedish
Academy of Sciences … Seen Nothing, Heard Nothing and Understood
Nothing? The First World War, Biased Neutrality and the Nobel Prizes in
Science’ and Kenneth Bertrams, ‘Caught-up by Politics? The Solvay Councils
on Physics and the Trials of Neutrality’, all in Letteval et al., eds, Twentieth-
Century; Stacy Fahrenthold, ‘Transnational Modes and Media: The Syrian
Press in the Mahjar and Emigrant Activism during World War I’ Mashriq &
Mahjar 1, 1, 2013, pp. 30–54.
109 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 149.
110 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 136.
111 Kennedy, ‘Peace’
112 E. Keleher, ‘Emperor Karl and the Sixtus Affair: Politico-Nationalist
Repercussions in the Reich’ Eastern European Quarterly 26, 2, 1992,
pp. 163–84.
113 Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less than War: A New History of America’s
Entry into World War I University Press of Kentucky, 2011, pp. 230–4.
114 Friedensdebatte im deutschen Reichstag mit Kommentaren. Peace.
Discussions in the House of Commons with Comments Nederlands Anti-
Oorlog Raad, 1916; Governments and Parliaments on Peace Collected by
the Nederland Anti-Oorlog Raad Published by the Neutral Conference,
NAOR, 1916.
115 Stevenson, 1914–1918 p. 136.
116 Cf Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘Diplomacy’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History
Volume 2, p. 508.
117 Daniel Larsen, ‘War Pessimism in Britain and an American Peace in Early
1916’ International History Review 34, 4, 2012, p. 813.
118 Frank Winters, ‘Exaggerating the Efficacy of Diplomacy: The Marquis of
Landsdowne’s “Peace Letter” of November 1917’ International History
Review 32, 1, 2010, pp. 25–46.
Chapter 7
1 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global
Empire Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 247; Das, India p. 396;
Mohammad A. Quayum, ‘War, Violence and Rabindranath Tagore’s Quest for
World Peace’ Transnational Literature 9, 2, 2017, http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/
transnational/home.html (accessed September 2020).
2 Yvan Goll, Requiem für die Gefallenen von Europa Rascher, 1917, p. 38
(English translation available at: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem-
for-the-dead-of-europe/); Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Death’s Carnival: The Myriad
Legacies of 1917’ in Maartje Abbenhuis, Neill Atkinson, Kingsley Baird, Gail
Romano, eds, The Myriad Legacies of 1917: A Year of War and Revolution
Palgrave, 2018, pp. 1–2.
3 Winter, ‘War and Anxiety in 1917’ p. 15.
4 Because of difference in calendar use, the two revolutions are also known as
the February and October revolutions (using the Russian calendar of the time).
NOTES 203
5 Cf Pierre Purseigle, ‘The First World War and the Transformation of the State’
International Affairs 90, 2, 2014, pp. 261–2.
6 For a useful overview: Gerhard Besier, Katarzyna Stoklosa, eds, 1917 and the
Consequences Routledge, 2020.
7 Cf Stephen A. Smith, ‘The Russian Revolution, National Self-Determination,
and Anti-Imperialism’ in Oleksa Drachewych, Ian McKay, eds, Left
Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial
and Racial Questions McGill Queen’s University Press, 2020, esp. p. 73.
8 David Motadel, ‘Review of Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First
World War Failed to End, 1917–1923’ Times Literary Supplement, 6 January
2017.
9 Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End
Straus and Giroux, 2016.
10 Abbenhuis, Morrell, First Age, Chapter 10.
11 Solomon Grigor’evich Gurevich as quoted in Richard Bessel, ‘Revolution’ in
Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 1, p. 126.
12 Jean-Jacques Becker, 1917 en Europe: L’Année Impossible Complexe, 1997. Cf
Jörn Leonhard, ‘1917 und die Revolution Steigende Erwartungen’ Journal of
Modern European History 15, 2, 2017, p. 157.
13 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution Oxford University Press, 1994,
pp. 32–5.
14 Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War Routledge, 2005, p. 178.
15 Nicolas Werth, ‘Russia 1917: The Soldiers’ Revolution’ South Central Review
34, 3, 2017, p. 49.
16 Quoted in Peter Gatrell, ‘Tsarist Russia at War: The View from above, 1914 –
February 1917’ Journal of Modern History 87, 2015, p. 668.
17 Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during
World War I’ Journal of Modern History 69, 4, 1997, p. 697; Fitzpatrick,
Russian p. 44.
18 Werth, ‘Russia’ p. 50.
19 Semion Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917
Revolution Oxford University Press, 2013, Chapter 10.
20 Fitzpatrick, Russian p. 43.
21 Quoted in Kathy Ferguson, ‘The Russian Revolution and Anarchist
Imaginaries’ South Atlantic Quarterly 116, 4, 2017, pp. 747–8.
23 Smith, ‘Mutiny’ p. 208.
25 Smith, ‘Mutiny’ p. 208. Also: Joshua Sanborn, ‘Russian Empire’ in Robert
Gerwarth, Erez Manela, eds, Empires at War: 1911–1923 Oxford University
Press, 2014, p. 102; Werth, ‘Russia’ p. 54.
26 Joshua Sanborn, ‘The Genesis of Russian Warlordism: Violence and
Governance during the First World War and the Civil War’ Contemporary
European History 19, 3, 2010, pp. 195–213, quote on p. 196.
27 Quoted in Werth, ‘Russia’ p. 56, fn 16.
28 Sanborn, ‘Russian Empire’ p. 101.
29 Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train Penguin, 2016.
30 Elizabeth Jones Hemenway, ‘Nicholas in Hell: Rewriting the Tsarist Narrative
in the Revolutionary Skazki of 1917’ Russian Review 60, 2, 2001, p. 189.
204 NOTES

34 Aaron B. Retish, Matthew Rendle, ‘Introduction from Lenin’s Overcoat? The
Global Impact of the Russian Revolution’ Revolutionary Russia 31, 2, 2018,
pp. 145–51, quote on p. 146.
35 Purseigle, ‘Transformation’ p. 252.
36 Cf David Stevenson, ‘Britain’s Biggest Wartime Stoppage: The Origins of the
Engineering Strike of May 1917’ History 105, 365, 2020, pp. 268–90.
37 David Englander, ‘Discipline and Morale in the British Army 1917–1918’ in
John Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First
World War Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 139.
38 Stevenson, ‘Wartime Stoppage’ p. 268.
39 Purseigle, ‘Transformation’ p. 261; John Horne, ‘Remobilizing for “Total War”:
France and Britain 1917–1918’ in Horne, ed., State pp. 195–8.
40 Englander, ‘Discipline’ p. 140.
41 Tames, ‘War’ pp. 201–16.
42 George Morton-Jack, The Indian Empire at War Abacus, 2018, pp. 432–3;
Singha, The Coolie’s p. 321.
43 Singha, Indian Labour pp. 114–16.
44 Rinke, Latin America p. 166; Alexander Trapeznik, ‘New Zealand’s Perceptions
of the Russian Revolution of 1917’ Revolutionary Russia 19, 1, 2006, p. 71;
P.J. O’Farrell, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Labour Movements of Australia
and New Zealand, 1917–1922’ International Review of Social History 8, 2,
1963, pp. 177–97.
45 Franziska Yost, ‘Glory to the Russian Maximalists! Reactions to the Russian
Revolution in Argentina and Brazil 1917–22’ Revolutionary Russia 31, 2, 2018,
pp. 247–60.
46 Olivier Compagnon, ‘Latin America’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume
1, p. 545.
47 Francisco J. Romero Salvado, ‘The Great War and the Crisis of Liberalism in
Spain, 1916–1917’ Historical Journal 46, 4, 2003, p. 905; Arturo Zoffmann
Rodriguez, ‘An Uncanny Honeymoon: Spanish Anarchism and the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat 1917–22’ International Labor and Working-Class History
94, 2018, pp. 5–26.
48 Cf Paul Preston, ‘The Origins of the Socialist Schism in Spain, 1917–31’
Journal of Contemporary History 12, 1977, pp. 101–32.
49 Gerwarth, Vanquished pp. 153–4.
50 Robert Bollard, ‘The Great Strike of 1917 – Was Defeat Inevitable?’ Australian
Journal of Politics and History 56, 2, 2010, pp. 159–60; O’Farrell, ‘Labour
Movements’ pp. 177–80.
51 Steven Loveridge, ‘What Should Daddy Do in the Great War? The Second
Division Question and Conditional Commitment to New Zealand’s War Effort,
1917–1918’ Journal of New Zealand Studies 27, 2018, pp. 16–34. Cf Adrian
Gregory, The Last War: British Society and the First World War Cambridge
52 John Horne, ‘The Living’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 3,
pp. 598–606; Guoqi, ‘Asia’, esp. Chapter 4.
NOTES 205
53 Watson, Ring p. 451; William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace Yale
University Press, 2014, pp. 212–14.
54 Horne, ‘Remobilizing’ p. 203.
55 Watson, Ring pp. 484–5.
56 Simonette Ortaggi, ‘Italian Women during the Great War’ in Gail Braybon, ed.,
Evidence, History pp. 216–38, quotes on p. 224.
57 Paul Corner, Giovanna Procacci, ‘The Italian Experience of “Total”
Mobilization 1915–1920’ in Horne, ed., State pp. 223–32.
58 As quoted in Gerwarth, Vanquished p. 160.
59 Gerwarth, Vanquished p. 160.
60 Stephen C. MacDonald, ‘Crisis, War and Revolution in Europe 1917–23’ in
Hans A. Schmitt, ed., Neutral Europe between War and Revolution 1917–1923
University Press of Virginia, 1988, pp. 235–9.
61 Joe Lunn, ‘Kande Kamara Speaks’ in Melvin E. Page, ed., Africa and the First
World War Macmillan, 1987, p. 36.
62 Michelle Moyd, ‘Resistance and Rebellions (Africa)’ 1914–1918 Online https://
encyclopedia.1914–1918-online.net/article/resistance_and_rebellions_africa
(accessed September 2020).
63 Moyd, ‘Resistance’ p. 6.
64 Nasson, ‘Africa’ pp. 456–7. As an example: John Maynard, ‘On the Political
“Warpath”: Native Americans and Australian Aborigines after the First World
War’ Wicazo Sa Review 32, 1, 2017, pp. 48–62.
65 Genova, Colonial pp. 33–40.
66 Cited in Lunn, ‘Kamara’ p. 43.
67 Cited in Lunn, ‘Kamara’ p. 43.
68 Anne Summers, R.W. Johnson, ‘World War I Conscription and Social Change
in Guinea’ Journal of African History 19, 1, 1978, pp. 25–38; Sarah-Jane (Saje)
Mathieu, ‘L’Union Fait la Force: Black Soldiers in the Great War’ First World
War Studies 9, 2, 2018, pp. 230–44; B. P. Willan, ‘The South African Native
Labour Contingent, 1916–1918’ Journal of African History 19, 1, 1978,
pp. 61–86.
69 This was called Ethische Politiek (Ethical Policy) and may be regarded as a
variation to the ‘white man’s burden’ rhetoric in Britain.
70 Henk Sneevliet ‘Zegepraal’ De Indiër, 17 Marchs 1917. Also: Klaas Stutje,
‘“Volk van Java, de Russische Revolutie Houdt ook Lessen in Voor U”:
Indonesisch Socialisme, Bolsjewisme, en het Spook van het Anarchisme’
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 130, 3, 2017, pp. 427–47.
71 Kees Van Dijk, The Netherlands Indies in the First World War Brill, 2014, p. 591.
72 For an example: Rudolf Mrázek, ‘Tan Malaka: A Political Personality’s
Structure of Experience’ Indonesia 14, 1972, pp. 1–48.
73 Cf Harry A. Poeze, Tan Malaka: Strijder voor Indonesie’s Vrijheid: Levelsloop
van 1897 tot 1945 Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.
74 Tatiana Linkhoeva, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Emergence of Japanese
Anticommunism’ Revolutionary Russia 31, 2, 2018, p. 263.
75 Linkhoeva, ‘Russian Revolution’ pp. 264–6; John H. Morrow, ‘Imperial
Framework’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 1, p. 427.
76 Linkhoeva, ‘Russian Revolution’ pp. 270–1.
77 Leonhard, Pandora’s Box pp. 633–5.
206 NOTES
78 Das, India pp. 109–10.

79 Leonhard, Pandora’s Box.
Chapter 8
1 Tato, ‘Overseas’ p. 47.
2 Sanz, Tato, ‘Neutralist Crossroads’ pp. 2–3.
4 Compagnon, ‘Latin America’ p. 552.
5 Tato, ‘Overseas’ pp. 48–54.
6 Tato, ‘Overseas’ pp. 48–54.
7 Compagnon, ‘Latin America’ p. 550.
8 For a useful overview of Latin American states and their shifts to belligerency:
Stefan Rinke, Karina Kriegesmann, ‘Latin America’ in 1914–1918 Online
https://encyclopedia.1914–1918-online.net/article/latin_america (accessed
October 2020). Also: Compagnon, ‘Latin America’ p. 547; Rinke, Latin
America pp. 108–60.
9 Rinke, Latin America pp. 143–52.
11 John Coogan, ‘Wilsononian Diplomacy in War and Peace’ in Gordon Martel,
ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered 1890–1993 Routledge, 1994,
p. 78.
12 Woodrow Wilson, Presidential Speech, 26 February 1917, available at: https://
millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/february-26–1917-
message-regarding-safety-merchant-ships (accessed November 2020).
13 Translation of a Proclamation by the president of the Republic of Panama,
Ramón Maximiliano Valdés, 7 April 1917, National Archives, Kew, ADM
116/1721. With grateful thanks to Annalise Higgins.
14 Cf Pål Wrange, Impartial or Uninvolved? The Anatomy of 20th Century
Doctrine on the Law of Neutrality Elanders, 2007, p. 246.
15 Dirk Steffen, ‘The Holtzendorff Memorandum of 22 December 1916 and
Germany’s Declaration of Unrestricted U-boat Warfare’ Journal of Military
History 68, 1, 2004, pp. 215–24.
16 Kathleen Burk, ‘Great Britain and the United States, 1917–1918: The Turning
Point’ International History Review 1, 2, 1979, p. 234.
17 Mulligan, Great War pp. 189–90.
18 Stevenson, 1914–1918 pp. 321–2.
20 Paul Kennedy, ‘The War at Sea’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 1,
pp. 337–43; Michael Adas, ‘Ambivalent Ally: American Military Intervention
and the Legacy of the World War I’ in Thomas D. Zeiler, David K. Ekbladh,
Benjamin C. Montoya, eds, Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global
Legacies of the Great War Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 89–90.
21 As quoted in Beltran Mathieu, ‘The Neutrality of Chile during the European
War’ American Journal of International Law 14, 3, 1920, p. 324.
22 Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global
Order Penguin, 2014, p. 39.
NOTES 207
23 Neiberg, Path to War. Also: Neiberg, ‘Blinking Eyes’ pp. 801–12.

24 J. Bennett, M. Hampton, ‘World War I and the Anglo-American Imagined
Community’ in J.H. Wiener, M. Hampton, eds, Anglo-American Media
Interactions Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p. 167.
25 Fulwider, German Propaganda.
26 Gerhard Krebs, ‘German-Japanese-United States Mutual Perceptions and
Diplomatic Initiatives over Mexico: New Perspectives on the Zimmerman
Telegram’ in Jan Schmidt, Katja Schmidtpott, eds, The East Asian Dimension
of the First World War Campus Verlag, 2020, pp. 247–67.
27 Tooze, Deluge pp. 65–7.
28 Mulligan, Great War p. 194.
29 Tooze, Deluge pp. 68–9.
30 President Woodrow Wilson, 2 April 1917 speech, as quoted by Quincy Wright,
‘The Present Status of Neutrality’ American Journal of International Law 34,
3, 1940, p. 391.
31 Tooze, Deluge p. 67.
32 Alan Sharp, ‘The Genie That Would Not Go Back into the Bottle: National
Self-Determination and the Legacy of the First World War and the Peace
Settlement’ in Seamus Dunn, T. G. Fraser, eds, Europe and Ethnicity: World
War I and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict Routledge, 1996, p. 11.
33 Cf Nadine Aklund-Lange, Stéphane Tison, eds, En Guerre pour la Paix:
Correspondance Paul d’Estournelles de Constant – Nicholas Murray Butler
1914–1919 Alma, 2018, esp. pp. 23–4.
34 Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘International Law and the “Peace through Law”
Movement in the Age of Empire, 1870–1920’ in Randall Lesaffer, Stephen
Neff, eds, Cambridge History of International Law. Volume IX: Global
International Law in the Age of Empire Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming.
35 For an excellent body of work on this subject: Letteval et al., eds,
Neutrality.
36 Vidar Enebakk, ‘Nobel Science of Peace: Norwegian Neutrality,
Internationalism and the Nobel Peace Prize’ in Letteval et al., eds, Neutrality
p. 299.
37 Marta Stachurska-Kounta, ‘Norway’s Legalistic Approach to Peace in the
Aftermath of the First World War’ in Maartje Abbenhuis, Christopher Barber,
Annalise Higgins, eds, War, Peace and International Order? The Legacies of the
Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 Routledge, 2017, pp. 171–88.
38 Stachurska-Kounta, ‘Norway’s’ p. 172.
39 As an example: Oscar Straus, Preparedness against the Rebarbarization of the
World League to Enforce Peace, 1916/1917.
40 The Effect of Democracy on International Law. Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace Pamphlet no. 30, 1917.
41 Abbenhuis, Hague p. 139; Honeck, ‘Playing’ p. 680.
42 Honeck, ‘Playing’ p. 680.
43 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 285.
44 Christopher Capozzola, ‘Legacies for Citizenship: Pinpointing Americans
during and after World War I’ in Zeiler, ed., Beyond p. 110.
208 NOTES
45 Jennifer Keene, ‘A “Brutalizing” War? The USA after the First World War’
Journal of Contemporary History 50, 1, 2015, p. 79. Also: Keene, ‘W. E. B. Du
Bois’ pp. 135–52; Jennifer Keene, ‘Deeds Not Words: American Social Justice
Movements and World War I’ Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
17, 4, 2018, pp. 704–18.
46 As quoted in Capozzola, ‘Legacies’ p. 116.
47 Keene, ‘North’ p. 523; David L. Wood, ‘American Indian Farmland and the
Great War’ Agricultural History Society 55, 3, 1981, pp. 249–65.
48 Capozzola, ‘Legacies’ pp. 115–18.
49 Osborne, Britain’s pp. 167–8.
50 Frey, ‘Anglo-Dutch’ p. 67.
51 Farrar, Conflict pp. 159–62; Vigness, Neutrality pp. 124–63; Frey, ‘Anglo-
Dutch’ pp. 59–84; Blüdnikow, ‘Denmark’ pp. 683–703.
52 For an excellent overview of the impact of Uboat warfare on neutral shipping:
Javier Ponce, ‘Commerce Warfare in the East Central Atlantic during the First
World War: German Submarines around the Canary Islands, 1916–1918’
Mariner’s Mirror 100, 3, 2014, pp. 335–48. Also useful: Rolf Hobson, Tom
Kristiansen, Nils Arne Sørensen, Gunnar Åselius, ‘Scandinavia in the First
World War’ and Gjermund F. Rongved, ‘Money Talks: Failed Cooperation over
the Gold Problem of the Scandinavian Monetary Union during the First World
War’ both in Claes Ahlund, ed., Scandinavia in the First World War Nordic
Academic Press, 2012, pp. 31–5, 39–40, pp. 240–2.
53 Although they did not disappear completely: Dehne, ‘Profiting’ pp. 67–86.
54 Adam Burns, American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United
States 1783–2013 Edinburgh University Press, 2017, p. 138; M.W. Shannon,
Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation 1915–1935
Palgrave, 1996, p. 7.
55 Irene Fattacciu, ‘Central America, the Caribbean and the First World War’ in
Alan Sharp, ed., Sarajevo 1914 – Versailles 1919: The War and Peace That
Made the Modern World Haus, 2014, p. 220.
58 Emily Rosenberg, ‘The Great War, Wilsonianism and the Challenges to a
United States Empire’ in Zeiler, ed., Beyond pp. 213–31.
59 As an example: José Antonio Montero Jiménez, ‘Images, Ideology and
Propaganda: The Works of the American Committee on Public Information
in Spain c. 1917–1918’ Hispania 68, 2008, pp. 211–34. Also: Rinke, Latin
America p. 118.
60 Edoardo Braschi, ‘In the Grasp of the United States’ in Sharp, ed., Sarajevo
p. 227.
62 Edoardo Braschi, ‘The Wavering Road 26 October 1917: Brazil Declares War
on Germany’ in Sharp, ed., Sarajevo, pp. 242–6.
63 Braschi, ‘Wavering’ pp. 242–6.
64 Rosenberg, ‘Great War’ p. 213. Cf Lloyd E. Ambrosius, ‘The Great War,
Americanism Revisited, and the Anti-Wilson Crusade’ in Serge Ricard, ed., A
Companion to Theodore Roosevelt Blackwell, 2011, pp. 468–84.
65 Burns, American Imperialism p. 101.
66 Rosenberg, ‘Great War’ pp. 219–20.
NOTES 209
67 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the

International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism Oxford University Press,
2007.
68 Jack Patrick Hayes, ‘The Political and Natural Eco-Footprint of the First World
War in East Asia: Environments, Systems Building and the Japanese Empire
1914–1923’ in Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, John Robert McNeill, Martin
Schmid, eds, Environmental Histories of the First World War Cambridge
University Press, 2018, pp. 152–72; Wu Lin-chin, ‘The First World War and
Chinese-American Economic Networks’ in Jan Schmidt, Schmidtpott, eds, East
Asian pp. 231–46
69 Guoqi, ‘Great War’ p. 107.
70 Xu Guoqi, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War
Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 1, 17.
71 Stephen G. Craft, ‘Angling for an Invitation to Paris: China’s Entry into the
First World War’ International History Review 16, 1, 1994, p. 1.
72 Craft, ‘Angling’ p. 16.
73 Craft, ‘Angling’ p. 15.
74 Jonathan Clements, ‘Labourers in Place of Soldiers’ in Sharp, ed., Sarajevo
p. 240.
75 As quoted in Guoqi, ‘Great War’ p. 119.
78 Zhang Yan, ‘The British Recruitment Campaigns of the Chinese Labour Corps
during the First World War and the Shandong Workers’ Motives to Enrol’ in
Schmidt et al., eds, East Asia p. 389.
79 Guoqi, Strangers.
81 As quoted in Guoqi, Strangers p. 221.
82 Xu Guoqi, ‘The Year 1919 and the Question of “What Is China?”’
International Politics 55, 6, 2018, pp. 754–5.
83 As quoted by Tooze, Deluge p. 98.
84 Mulligan, Great War pp. 198–9.
85 Clements, ‘Labourers’ p. 241.
87 Gregory V. Raymond, ‘War as Membership: International Society and Thailand’s
Participation in World War I’ Asian Studies Review 43, 1, pp. 132–47.
88 Andrew Dalby, ‘Why on Earth Was Siam a Participant in the First World War?’
in Sharp, ed., Sarajevo pp. 234–6; Raymond, ‘Membership’ 132–3.
89 Raymond, ‘Membership’ pp. 137–40.
90 Mariella Hudson, ‘Why Did Liberia Enter the First World War?’ in Sharp, ed.,
Sarajevo pp. 247–9.
91 As quoted in William Gillispie, ‘Colonialism in Global Conflict: Liberia’s Entry
and Participation in World War One’ First World War Studies 9, 1, 2018,
p. 119.
92 Gillispie, ‘Colonialism’ pp. 111, 120–1.
93 Jyotirmoy Pal Chaudhuri, Whitehall and the Black Republic: A Study of
Colonial Britain’s Attitude towards Liberia 1914–1939 Palgrave MacMillan,
2018, Chapter 3; Hudson, ‘Why?’ p. 249.
94 Gillispie, ‘Colonialism’ p. 122.
210 NOTES
95 Andrew Dalby, ‘Greece and the First World War’ in Sharp, ed., Sarajevo
pp. 228–33, quote on p. 233.
96 Abbenhuis, Art esp. Chapter 12.
97 Tames, Oorlog p. 114.
98 Tames, Oorlog pp. 118–19.
99 Mathieu, ‘Neutrality’ pp. 319–42, last quote on p. 342.
100 Cf Rinke, Latin America pp. 150–3; Tames, ‘War’ p. 205.
101 Tames, ‘War’ p. 211.
102 In Abbenhuis, ‘Not Silent’ p. 35.
103 Quoted in Abbenhuis, Age of Neutrals p. 11.
104 As described in Hull, Scrap pp. 1–2.
105 Letteval et al., Neutrality.
106 Cf Stephen C. Neff, The Rights and Duties of Neutrals: A General History
Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 168.
Chapter 9
1 Rinke, Latin America pp. 256–7; Schmitt, ed., Neutral Europe.
3 Lieutenant R.G. Dickson, as quoted in David Stevenson, With Our Backs
to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 Harvard University Press, 2011,
p. 509.
4 Becker, ‘Great War’ p. 1029.
5 Cf Raymond Sontag, A Broken World 1919–1939 Harper & Row, 1971; Sally
Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918–1933
Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
6 Stevenson, Backs p. 1.
7 John Horne, ‘Defending Victory: Paramilitary Politics in France, 1918–1926:
A Counter-Example’ in Robert Gerwarth, ed., War in Peace: Paramilitary
Violence in Europe after the Great War Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 218.
Cf Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of
National Security in the Era of the First World War Cambridge University
Press, 2013, pp. 79–80.
9 Cited in Ramachandra Guha, ‘Travelling with Tagore’ 2012, available at:
http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/traveling-with-tagore-penguin-classics.html
(accessed November 2020).
10 As quoted in Rinke, Latin America p. 258.
12 Gerwarth, ed., War in Peace.
13 P.A. Niall, A.S. Johnson, Juergen Mueller, ‘Updating the Accounts: Global
Mortality of the 1918–1920 “Spanish” Influenza Pandemic’ Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 76, 1, 2002, p. 114.
14 Anne Rasmussen, ‘The Spanish Flu’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume
3, p. 336.
15 Cited in Rasmussen, ‘Spanish Flu’ pp. 350–1.
16 al-Qattan, ‘Historicising’ p. 126.
NOTES 211
17 Mark Osborne Humphries, ‘Paths of Infection: The First World War and the
Origins of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic’ War in History 21, 1, 2013, pp. 55–81.
18 Rasmussen, ‘Spanish Flu’ pp. 337–8.
19 Rasmussen, ‘Spanish Flu’ pp. 339–43.
20 Geoffrey Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New
Zealand Canterbury University Press, 2005.
21 Michael Tyquin, ‘Problems in Paradise: Medical Aspects of the New Zealand
Occupation of Western Samoa, 1914–1918’ Journal of Military and Veterans’
Health 20, 2, 2012, p. 9; Sandra M. Tomkins, ‘The Influenza Epidemic of
1918–19 in Western Samoa’ Journal of Pacific History 27, 2, 1992, pp. 181–97.
22 Fawaz, Land p. 61.
23 Niall et al., ‘Updating’ p. 112.
24 Nasson, ‘Africa’ p. 442. Also: Leonhard, Pandora’s Box p. 825.
25 Michelle Moyd, ‘Radical Potentials, Conservative Realities: African Veterans of
the German Colonial Army in Post-World War I Tanganyika’ First World War
Studies, 10, 1, 2019, p. 94.
26 Stapleton, ‘Impact’ p. 123.
27 For a useful overview: Mulligan, Great War pp. 255–7.
28 For a useful history: Stevenson, Backs pp. 514–28.
29 Helen L. Boak, ‘Women in the German Revolution’ in G. Kets, J. Muldoon, eds,
The German Revolution and Political Theory Springer, 2019, p. 40.
30 Boak, ‘Women’ p. 31.
32 For more: George Vascik, Mark Sadler, The Stab-in-the-Back Myth and the Fall
of the Weimar Republic Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 1–3.
33 Boak, ‘Women’ p. 38.
34 As quoted in Boak, ‘Women’ p. 36.
35 As quoted in Boak, ‘Women’ p. 39.
36 Joe Lunn, ‘France’s Legacy to Demba Mboup? A Senenalese Griot and His
Descendants Remember His Military Service during the First World War’
in Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing Cambridge
University Press, 2011, pp. 108–24, quote on p. 116.
37 Lunn, ‘Mboup’ p. 117.
38 Soutar, Whitiki! p. 493.
39 Morrow, ‘Imperial’ p. 432.
40 Yusuf Meherally, The Price of Liberty Sneha, 1948; Rohan Dhabade,
Something about Jallianwala Bagh and the Days of British Empire Evince,
2019, p. 169.
41 Kalyan Sen Gupta, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore Ashgate, 2005,
p. 3.
42 Simon Featherstone, ‘The School Play and the Murder Machine: Nationalism
and Amateur Theatre in the Work of Patrick Pearse and Rabindranath Tagore’
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53, 5, 2017, p. 574.
43 Rogan, The Fall pp. 385–7. Also: Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, ‘Intoxication
and Imperialism: Nightlife in Occupied Istanbul, 1918–1923’ Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, 2, 2017, pp. 299–313.
44 Rogan, The Fall pp. 387–8.
46 Mulligan, Great War p. 315.
212 NOTES
47 Rogan, The Fall pp. 390–5; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box p. 841.

48 Tooze, Deluge p. 233.
49 Mohammad Gholi Majd, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia 1917–
1919 University Press of America, 2003.
50 Umut Özsu, Formalising Displacement: International Law and Population
Transfers Oxford University Press, 2014.
51 Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee Oxford University Press,
2015.
52 Fawaz, Land.
53 Gerwarth, Vanquished pp. 171–86; Mulligan, Great War pp. 267–301.
54 Manela, Wilsonian.
55 Cf Marcus Payk, ‘What We Seek Is the Reign of Law: The Legalism of the Paris
Peace Settlement after the Great War’ European Journal of International Law
39, 3, 2018, p. 815.
56 Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy,
Citizenship and Internationalism c. 1918–1945 Manchester University Press,
2011; Thomas R. Davies, ‘Internationalism in a Divided World: The Experience
of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, 1919–1939’
Peace & Change 37, 2, 2012, pp. 227–52.
57 Patrica Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of
Nations Oxford University Press, 2010; Patricia Clavin, ‘The Austrian Hunger
Crisis and the Genesis of International Organization after the First World War’
International Affairs 90, 2, 2014, pp. 265–78.
58 Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s
59 Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘This Is an Account of Failure: The Contested
Historiography of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899, 1907 and 1915’
Diplomacy & Statecraft 3, 2, 2021, pp. 1–30.
60 Klaus Schwabe, ‘Woodrow Wilson and Germany’s Membership of the League
of Nations, 1918–1919’ Central European History 8, 1, 1975, pp. 3–22.
61 Michael Olsansky, ‘Under the Spell of the League of Nations: Different Notions
of Neutrality in the Swiss Military Elite at the End of the First World War’
2015, https://knhg.nl/wp/content/uploads/2015/08/Michael-Olsansky.pdf
(accessed November 2020).
62 Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War Cambridge University Press, 2005,
pp. 244–77; Stevenson, 1914–1918 pp. 508–10.
63 Tan Malaka, ‘Is er een “Koloniaal Probleem?”’ Bijdragen aan Hindi Ja Poeh
Tra 1, 1918–1919, pp. 161–164.
64 Cf Leonhard, Pandora’s Box.
65 Cf Akira Iriye, ‘The Historiographic Impact of the Great War’ in T.W. Zeiler,
D.K. Ekbladh, B.C. Montoya, eds, Beyond 1917: The United States and the
Global Legacies of the Great War Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 34.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Please find here a curated list of readings in English on the global history of
the First World War, listed by general readings and chapter-specific themes.
To avoid duplication, we have only listed each reference once.
General Histories of the First World War

1914–1918 Online: International Encyclopaedia of the First World War Freie
Universität Berlin, http://www.1914–1918-online.net
Brose, Eric Dorn, The History of the Great War: World War One and the
International Crisis of the Early Twentieth Century Oxford University Press,
2010
Horne, John, ed., A Companion to World War I Wiley-Blackwell, 2010
Leonhard, Jörn, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War Belknap, 2014
Stevenson, David, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War Penguin, 2004
Strachan, Hew, The First World War Volume 1: To Arms Oxford University Press,
2001
Winter, Jay, ed., Cambridge History of the First World War, Three Volumes,
Cambridge University Press, 2014
Regional and Thematic Histories

of the First World War
Ahlund, Claes, ed., Scandinavia in the First World War: Studies in the War
Experience of the Northern Neutrals Nordic Academic Press, 2012
Albert, Bill, South America and the First World War: The Impact of War on Brazil,
Argentina, Peru and Chile Cambridge University Press, 1988
Anievas, Alexander, ed., Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of
Modern World Politics Brill, 2015
Atabaki, Touraj, ed., Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great
Powers I.B. Tauris, 2006
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane, Annette Becker, Understanding the First World War
Hill & Wang, 2003
Braybon, Gail, ed., Evidence, History and the Great War Berghahn, 2003
Broadberry, Stephen, Mark Harrison, eds, The Economics of World War 1
214 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daly, Selena, Martina Salvante, Vanda Wilcox, eds, Landscapes of the First World
War Palgrave MacMillan, 2018
Das, Santanu, India, Empire and First World War Culture Cambridge University
Press, 2018
Das, Santanu, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing Cambridge
University Press, 2011
Dehne, Phillip, On the Far Western Front: Britain’s First World War in South
America Manchester University Press, 2009
Dickinson, F.R., War and National Reinvention: Japan and the Great War 1914–
1919 Harvard University Press, 1999
Ewence, Hannah, Tim Grady, eds, Minorities and the First World War Palgrave
MacMillan, 2017
Fawaz, Leila Tarazi, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War
Harvard University Press, 2014
Fraser, T.G., ed., The First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping of the
Middle East Gingko Library, 2015
Gatrell, Peter, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History Routledge,
2005
Grayzel, Susan, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in
Britain and France during the First World War University of North Carolina
Press, 1999
Guoqi, Xu, Asia and the Great War: A Shared History Oxford University Press,
2016
Holquist, Peter, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis
1914–1921 Harvard University Press, 2002
Jones, Heather, Jennifer O’Brien, Christoph Schmidt-Supprian, eds, Untold War:
New Perspectives in First World War Studies Brill, 2015
Keene, Jennifer, Michael Neiberg, eds, Finding Common Ground: New Directions
in First World War Studies Brill, 2011
Kitchen, James E., Alisa Miller, Laura Rowe, Other Combatants, Other Fronts:
Competing Histories of the First World War Cambridge Scholars, 2011
Kruizinga, Samuël, Johan Den Hertog, eds, Caught in the Middle: Neutrals,
Neutrality and the First World War Amsterdam University Press, 2011
Lakitsch, M., S. Reitmar-Juárez, K. Seidel, eds, Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The
Great War as a Global War LIT, 2015
Lettevall, Rebecka, Geert Somsen, Sven Widmalm, eds, Neutrality in Twentieth-
Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture and Politics after the First
World War Routledge, 2012
Manz, Stefan, Panikos Panayi, Matthew Stibbe, eds, Internment during the First
World War: A Mass Global Phenomenon Routledge, 2019
Minohara, Tosh, Evan Dawley, Tze-ki Hon, eds, The Decade of the Great War:
Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s Brill, 2015
Mulligan, William, The Great War for Peace Yale University Press, 2014
Page, Melvin E., Africa and the First World War Palgrave MacMillan, 1987
Rinke, Stefan, Latin America and the First World War Cambridge University Press,
2017
Rogan, Eugene, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East
1914–1920 Penguin, 2015
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 215
Schmidt, Jan, Katja Schmidtpott, eds, The East Asian Dimension of the First World
War Campus, 2020
Smith, Andrew, Simon Mollan, Kevin Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First World
War on International Business Routledge, 2017
Streets-Salter, Heather, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and
Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict Cambridge University Press,
2017
Tucker, Richard P., Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, Martin Schmid, eds, Environmental
Histories of the First World War Cambridge University Press, 2018
Watson, Alexander, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–
1918 Penguin, 2014
Zollmann, Jakob, Naulila 1914: World War I in Angola and International Law:
A Study in (Post-)Colonial Border Regimes and Interstate Arbitration Nomos,
2016
Introduction: A Total Global Tragedy

Abbenhuis, Maartje, ‘On the Edge of the Storm? Situating Switzerland’s Neutrality
in the Context of the First World War’ in Michael M. Olsansky, ed., Am Rande
des Sturms: das Schweizer Militär im Ersten Weltkrieg Hier und Jetz, 2018,
pp. 27–9
Becker, Annette, ‘The Great War: World War, Total War’ International Review of
the Red Cross 97, 2015, pp. 1029–45
Compagnon, Olivier, Pierre Purseigle, ‘Geographies of Mobilization and Territories
of Belligerence during the First World War’ Annales (English Edition) 71, 1,
2016, pp. 37–60
Gatrell, Peter, ‘The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 1914–1917’
in Gail Braybon, ed., Evidence, History and the Great War Berghahn, 2003,
pp. 198–215
Horne, John, ‘End of a Paradigm? The Cultural History of the Great War’ Past &
Present 242, 2019, pp. 155–92
Keene, Jennifer D., ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and the Wounded World: Seeking Meaning
in the First World War for African-Americans’ Peace & Change 26, 2, 2001,
pp. 135–52
Kramer, Alan, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World
War Oxford University Press, 2007
Mulligan, William, ‘Total War’ War in History 15, 2, 2008, pp. 211–21
Saint Amour, Paul K., Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form
Oxford University Press, 2015
Stapleton, Tim, ‘The Impact of the First World War on African People’ in John
Laband, ed., Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Africa Greenwood, 2007,
pp. 113–38
Stockton, C.H., ‘The Declaration of Paris’ American Journal of International Law
14, 1920, pp. 356–68
Strikwerda, Carl, ‘World War I in the History of Globalization’ Historical
Reflections 42, 3, 2016, pp. 112–32
Chapter 1: A World of War before 1914

Abbenhuis, Maartje, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics 1815–1914
Abbenhuis, Maartje, The Hague Conferences in International Politics 1898–1915
Bloomsbury, 2019
Abbenhuis, Maartje, ‘A Most Useful Tool for Diplomacy and Statecraft: Neutrality
and Europe in the “Long” Nineteenth Century 1815–1914’ International
History Review 35, 1, 2013, pp. 1–22
Abbenhuis, Maartje, Gordon Morrell, The First Age of Industrial Globalization:
An International History 1815–1914 Bloomsbury, 2019
Burton, Antoinette, The Trouble with Empire Oxford University Press, 2015
Crawford, Emily, ‘The Enduring Legacy of the St Petersburg Declaration:
Distinction, Military Necessity and the Prohibition of Causing Unnecessary
Suffering and Superfluous Injury in IHL’ Journal of the History of International
Law 20, 4, 2019, pp. 544–66
Eichhorn, Niels, ‘A “Century of Peace” That Was Not: War in the Nineteenth
Century’ Journal of Military History 84, 4, 2020, pp. 1051–77
Geppert, Dominik, William Mulligan, Andreas Rose, eds, The Wars before the
Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First
World War Cambridge University Press, 2015
Gerbig-Fabel, Marco, ‘Photographic Artefacts of War 1904–1905: The Russo-
Japanese War as Transnational Media Event’ European Review of History 15, 6,
2008, pp. 629–42
Gong, G.W., The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society Clarendon
Press, 1984
Howland, Douglas, ‘Sovereignty and the Laws of War: International Consequences
of Japan’s 1905 Victory over Russia’ Law and History Review 29, 1, 2011,
pp. 53–97
Kowner, Rotem, ed., The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War Routledge, 2007
Lake, Marilyn, Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Man’s
Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality Cambridge
Mulligan, William, The Origins of the First World War Second Edition, Cambridge
Neiberg, Michael, Dance of the Furies: European and the Outbreak of World War
I Harvard University Press, 2011
Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the
Nineteenth Century Princeton University Press, 2014
Partner, Simon, ‘Peasants into Citizens? The Meiji Village in the Russo-Japanese
War’ Monumenta Nipponica 62, 2, 2007, pp. 178–206
Segesser, Daniel, ‘“Unlawful Warfare Is Uncivilized”: The International Debate on
the Punishment of War Crimes, 1872–1918’ European Review of History 14, 2,
2007, pp. 215–34
Steinberg, John W., Bruce W. Menning, David Schimelpenninck Van Der Oye,
Shinji Yokote, eds, Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero
Leiden, Brill, 2005
Chapter 2: Germany’s Invasion of Belgium and

the Expectations of Civilized War
Cabanes, Bruno, August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed
the World Yale University Press, 2016
Chiu, Eugene W., ‘The First World War and Its Impact on Chinese Concepts of
Modernity’ in Jan Schmidt, Katja Schmidtpott, eds, The East Asian Dimension
of the First World War Campus, 2020, pp. 93–4
Fulbrook, Mary, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German
Dictatorships Oxford University Press, 2011
Galen Last, D. van, Black Shame: African Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1922
Bloomsbury, 2016
Guite, J. and T. Haokip, eds, The Anglo-Kuki War, 1917–1919 Routledge, 2019
Gullace, Nicoletta F., ‘Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and
International Law during the First World War’ American Historical Review 102,
3, 1997, p. 714
Horne, John, Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial Yale
Hull, Isabel V., A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during
the Great War Cornell University Press, 2014
Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National
Identity, and German Occupation Cambridge University Press, 2004
Nielsen, M. B., ‘Delegitimating Empire: German and British Representations of
Colonial Violence, 1918–1919’ International History Review 42, 4, 2020,
pp. 833–50
Purseigle, Pierre, ‘“A Wave on to Our Shores”: The Exile and Resettlement of
Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918’ Contemporary European History
16, 4, 2007, pp. 427–44
Schaepdrijver, Sophie de, ed., ‘We Who Are So Cosmopolitan’: The War Diary of
Constance Graeffe, 1914–1915 Archives Générales du Royaume, 2008
Soutar, Monty, Whitiki! Whiti! Whiti! E! Maori in the First World War Bateman
Books, 2019
Tames, Ismee, ‘“War on Our Minds”: War, Neutrality and Identity in Dutch Public
Debate during the First World War’ First World War Studies 3, 2, 2012,
pp. 201–16
Tuscano, Alberto, ‘“America’s Belgium”: W.E.B. Du Bois on Race, Class, and
the Origins of World War I’ in Alexander Anievas, ed., Cataclysm 1914:
The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics Brill, 2015,
pp. 236–57
Watson, Alexander, ‘Unheard-of Brutality: Russian Atrocities against Civilians in
East Prussia, 1914–1915’ Journal of Modern History 86, 4, 2014, pp. 780–825
Welch, David, Germany, Propaganda and Total War: The Sins of Omission Athlone
Press, 2000
Chapter 3: Short-War Ambitions

Ansari, Humayun, ‘“Tasting the King’s Salt”: Muslims Contested Loyalties and the
First World War’ in Hannah Ewence, Tim Grady, eds, Minorities and the First
World War Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 33–61
Bailey, Mark, ‘Supporting the Wartime Economy: Imperial Maritime Trade and the
Globalized Maritime Trade System 1914–1916’ Journal of Maritime Research
19, 1, 2017, pp. 23–45
Frey, Marc, ‘Trade, Ships and the Neutrality of the Netherlands in the First World
War’ International History Review 19, 3, 1997, pp. 541–62
Goldthree, Reena N., ‘A Greater Enterprise Than the Panama Canal: Migrant
Labor and Military Recruitment in the World War I-Era Circum-Caribbean’
Labor 13, 3–4, 2016, pp. 57–82
Horn, Martin, Britain, France and the Financing of the First World War McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2002
Meyer, Kathryn, ‘Trade and Nationality at Shanghai upon the Outbreak of
the First World War 1914–1915’ International History Review 10, 2, 1988,
pp. 238–60
Moyd, Michelle, ‘We Don’t Want to Die for Nothing’: Askari at War in German
East-Africa, 1914–1918’ in Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War
Writing Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 90–107
Osuntokun, Akinjide, ‘Disaffection and Revolts in Nigeria during the First World
War, 1914–1918’ Canadian Journal of African Studies 5, 2, 1971, pp. 171–81
Pennell, Catriona, A Kingdom United. Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the
First World War in Britain and Ireland Oxford University Press, 2013
Rausch, Jane M., Colombia and World War I: The Experience of a Neutral
Latin American Nation during the Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1921
Lexington Books, 2014
Roberts, Richard, ‘A Tremendous Panic: The Global Financial Crisis of 1914’ in
Andrew Smith, Simon Mollan, Kevin D. Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First
World War on International Business Routledge, 2017, pp. 121–41
Sanders, M. L., Philip Taylor, British Propaganda in the First World War 1914–
1918 MacMillan, 1982
Young, John W., ‘Emotions and the British Government’s Decision for War in 1914’
Diplomacy & Statecraft 29, 4, 2018, pp. 543–64
Zollmann, Jakob, Naulila 1914: World War I in Angola and International Law
Nomos, 2016
Chapter 4: Long-War Realities

Aglietti, Marcella, ‘Patriotism and Neutrality: The Spanish Parliament and the
Great War, 1914–18’ Parliaments, Estates and Representation 36, 1, 2016,
pp. 54–70
Boom, Willem H. van, ‘The Great War and Dutch Contract Law: Resistance,
Responsiveness and Neutrality’ Comparative Legal History 2, 2, 2014,
pp. 303–24
Burk, Kathleen, Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 George Allen
& Unwin, 1985
Chaudhuri, Jyotirmoy Pal, Whitehall and the Black Republic: A Study of Colonial
Britain’s Attitude towards Liberia 1914–1939 Palgrave MacMillan, 2018
Coogan, John W., The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime
Rights, 1899–1915 Cornell University Press, 1981
Coogan, John W., ‘The Short-War Illusion Resurrected: The Myth of Economic
Warfare as the British Schlieffen Plan’ Journal of Strategic Studies 38, 7, 2015,
pp. 1048–60
Dilley, Andrew, ‘Trade after the Deluge: British Commerce, Armageddon and the
Political Economy of Globalisation 1914–1918’ in A. Smith, S. Mollan,
K. D. Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First World War on International Business
Routledge, 2017, pp. 25–46
Farrar, Marjorie Milbank, Conflict and Compromise: The Strategy, Politics and
Diplomacy of the French Blockade 1914–1918 Martinus Nijhoff, 1974
Huber, Valeska, ‘Connecting Colonial Seas: The “International Colonisation” of
Port Said and the Suez Canal during and after the First World War’ European
Review of History 19, 1, 2012, pp. 148–51
Kruizinga, Samuël, ‘Government by Committee: Dutch Economic Policy during
the First World War’ in James Kitchen, Alisa Miller, Laura Rowe, eds, Other
Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War
Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 99–124
Kruizinga, Samuël, ‘Sailing in Uncharted Waters: Four Dutch Steamship Companies
during the First World War, 1914–1918’ International Journal of Maritime
History 27, 2 2015, pp. 227–49
Neff, Stephen C., ‘Disrupting a Delicate Balance: The Allied Blockade Policy and
the Law of Maritime Neutrality during the Great War’ European Journal of
International Law 29, 2, 2018, pp. 459–75
Neilson, Keith, ‘The Maritime Way in Munitions: The Entente and Supply in the
First World War’ Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 14, 3–4, 2012, pp. 1–18
Nijs, Thimo de, ‘Food Provision and Food Retailing in The Hague 1914–1930’ in
Frank Trentmann, Flemming Just, eds, Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age
of Two World Wars Palgrave, 2006, pp. 65–87
Osborne, Eric W., Britain’s Economic Blockade of Germany 1914–1918 Frank
Cass, 2004
Reger, Jeffrey D., ‘Lamps, Never before Dim Are Being Extinguished from Lack
of Olive Oil: Deforestation and Famine in Palestine at War and in Peace under
the Late Ottoman Empire and Early British Empire, 1910–1920’ in Selena
Daly, Martina Salvante, Vanda Wilcox, eds, Landscapes of the First World War
Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, pp. 37–56
Singha, Radhika, ‘India’s Silver Bullets: War Loans and War Propaganda 1917–
1918’ in M. Abbenhuis, N. Atkinson, K. Baird, G. Romano, eds., Myriad
Legacies of 1917: A Year of War and Revolution Palgrave MacMillan, 2018,
pp. 77–102
Townsend, Susan C., ‘The Great War and Urban Crisis: Conceptualizing the
Industrial Metropolis in Japan and Britain in the 1910s’ in T. Minohara, T. Hon,
E. Dawley, eds, The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the
1910s Brill, 2014, pp. 301–22
Vandamme, Tobit, ‘The Rise of Nationalism in a Cosmopolitan Port City: The

Foreign Communities of Shanghai during the First World War’ Journal of World
History 29, 1, 2018, pp. 37–64
Vincent, C. Paul, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany 1915–
1919 Ohio University Press, 1985
Weinreb, Alice, ‘Beans Are Bullets, Potatoes Are Powder: Food as a Weapon during
the First World War’ in Richard p. Tucker, Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, Martin
Schmid, eds, Environmental Histories of the First World War Cambridge
University Press, 2018, pp. 19–37
Chapter 5: The Barbarian Next Door

Abbenhuis, Maartje, ‘Where War Met Peace: The Borders of the Neutral
Netherlands with Belgium and Germany in the First World War’ Journal of
Borderland Studies 22, 1, 2007, pp. 53–77
Alexeeva, Olga V., ‘Experiencing War: Chinese Workers in Russia during the First
World War’ Chinese Historical Review 25, 1, 2018, pp. 46–66
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, ‘1915: Stalemate’ in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge
History of the First World War, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2014,
pp. 65–88
Bergen, Leo van, Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Man-Monkey, Monkey-Man: Neutrality and
the Discussions about the “Inhumanity” of Poison Gas in the Netherlands and
International Committee of the Red Cross’ First World War Studies 3, 1, 2012,
pp. 1–23
Bloxham, Donald, ‘The First World War and the Development of the Armenian
Genocide’ in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Múge Göçek, Norman A. Naimark,
eds, A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman
Empire Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 260–75
Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I
Gullace, Nicoletta, ‘Friends, Aliens and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the
Lusitania Riots of 1915’ Journal of Social History 39, 2, 2005, pp. 345–67
Horne, John, ‘Nineteen Fifteen and the Totalizing Logic of the First World War’
Thyssen Lectures IV The Great War beyond National Perspectives Max Weber
Stiftung 32, 2017, http://www.oiist.org/?q=de/node/33
Hyland Jr., Steven, ‘The Syrian-Ottoman Home Front in Buenos Aires and Rosario
during the First World War’ Journal of Migration History 4, 1, 2018, pp. 211–
35
Jones, Heather, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War
Lohr, Eric, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens
during World War I Harvard University Press, 2003
Page, Melvin, ‘Africa’s First “High Tech” War: The Technological Impact of World
War One on Africans’ Journal of African Military History 2, 1, 2018, pp. 24–61
Panayi, Panikos, ed., Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in
Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars Berg, 1993
Protasio, John, The Day the World Was Shocked: The Lusitania Disaster and Its
Influence on the Course of World War One Casemate, 2015
Roy, Kaushik, The Indian Army and the First World War 1914–1918 Oxford
Slotten, Hugh R., ‘Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism? American Responses
to World War 1 Poison Gas, 1915–1930’ Journal of American History 77, 2,
1990, pp. 476–98
Tato, María Ínes, ‘A Discordant Voice from the Trenches: Juan José de Soiza
Reilly’s War Chronicles’ Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 41, 2, 2017,
np
Thompson, Paul, ‘The Lusitania Riots in Pietermaritzburg 13–14 May 1915’ War
& Society 36, 1, 2017, pp. 1–30
Trommler, Frank, ‘The Lusitania Effect: America’s Mobilization against Germany
in World War I’ German Studies Review 32, 2, 2009, pp. 241–66
Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates, ‘The British Occupation of Mesopotamia 1914–1922’
Journal of Strategic Studies 30, 2, 2007, pp. 349–77
Watson, Alexander, The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyśl Penguin, 2019
Chapter 6: The Test of Endurance

Becker, Annette, ‘From the Bulletin Internationale des Sociétés de la Croix Rouge
to the International Review of the Red Cross: The Great War as Revelator’
International Review of the Red Cross 100, 907–9, 2019, pp. 97–113
Bekele, Shiferaw, Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, Alessandro Volterra and Massimo
Zaccaria, eds, The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa (1911–1924)
Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes, 2018
Bose, Sugata and Kris Manjapra, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia
and the Global Circulation of Ideas Palgrave MacMillan, 2010
Cohen, Aaron J., ‘Flowers of Evil: Media, Child Psychology and the Struggle for
Russia’s Future during the First World War’ in James Martin, Robert Coles, eds,
Children and War: A Historical Anthology New York University Press, 2002,
pp. 38–49
Dal Lago, Enrico, Róisín Healy and Gearóid Barry, eds, 1916 in Global Context:
An Anti-Imperial Moment Routledge, 2019
Fahrenthold, Stacy, ‘Transnational Modes and Media: The Syrian Press in the
Mahjar and Emigrant Activism during World War I’ Mashriq & Mahjar 1, 1,
2013, pp. 30–54
Gram-Skjoldager, Karen, ‘Denmark during the First World War: Neutral Policy,
Economy and Culture’ Journal of Modern European History 17, 2, 2019,
pp. 234–50
Harper, Tim ‘Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground’ Modern
Asian Studies 47, 6, 2013, pp. 1782–811
Johnson, S. Marianne, Ian Isherwood, ‘Gettysburg and the Great War’ War &
Society 36, 3, 2017, pp. 217–34
Jones, Heather, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action during the
First World War’ European Review of History 16, 5, 2009, pp. 697–713
Kaiga, Sakiko, ‘The Use of Force to Prevent War? The Bryce Group’s “Proposal
for the Avoidance of War” 1914–1915’ Journal of British Studies 57, 2, 2018,
pp. 308–32
Keene, Jennifer D., ‘Americans Respond: Perspectives on the Global War, 1914–
1917’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 40, 2, 2014, pp. 266–86
Liebau, Heike, ‘Kaiser ki Jay (Long Live the Kaiser): Perceptions of World War
I and the Socio-Religious Movement among the Oraons in Chota Nagpur,
1914–1916’ in H. Liebau, K. Bromber, K. Lange, D. Hamzah, R. Ahiya, eds, The
World in World Wars Brill, 2010, pp. 251–75
Moyd, Michelle, ‘Ordeal and Opportunity: Ending the First World War in Africa’
Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 43, 1, 2019, pp. 145–54
Neiberg, Michael, ‘German Spies in New York!’ Military History 31, 1, 2013,
pp. 66–71
Nicolson, Beryl, ‘On the Front Line in Someone Else’s War: Mallakastër, Albania
1916–1918’ Region 4, 2, 2015, pp. 247–63
Page, Melvin E., The Chiwaya War: Malawians in the First World War Westview,
2000
Piller, Elisabeth, ‘American War Relief, Cultural Mobilization and the Myth
of Impartial Humanitarianism 1914–1917’ Journal of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era 17, 4, 2018, pp. 619–35
Ponce, Javier, ‘Commerce Warfare in the East Central Atlantic during the First
World War: German Submarines around the Canary Islands, 1916–1918’
Mariner’s Mirror 100, 3, 2014, pp. 335–48
Reeves, Caroline, ‘Sovereignty and the Chinese Red Cross Society: The
Differentiated Practice of International Law in Shandong, 1914–1916’ Journal
of the History of International Law 13, 2011, pp. 155–77
Salvado, Francisco Romero, Spain: Between War and Revolution Routledge, 1999
Singha, Radhika, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict,
1914–1921 Oxford University Press, 2020
Tanielian, Melanie, ‘Politics of Wartime Relief in Ottoman Beirut (1914–1918)’
First World War Studies 5, 1, 2014, pp. 69–82
Wiel, Jérôme aan de, ‘The Shots That Reverberated for a Long Time, 1916–1932:
The Irish Revolution, the Bolsheviks and the European Left’ International
History Review 42, 1, 2020, pp. 195–213
Zaccaria, Massimo, ‘Feeding the War: Canned Meat Production in the Horn
of Africa and the Italian Front’ in Shiferaw Bekele, Uoldelul Chelati Dirar,
Alessandro Volterra, Massimo Zaccaria, eds, The First World War from Tripoli
to Addis Ababa Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes, 2018, np
Chapter 7: Revolutionary Warfare, 1917

Abbenhuis, Maartje, Neill Atkinson, Kingsley Baird, Gail Romano, eds, The
Myriad Faces of 1917: A Year of War and Revolution Palgrave, 2018
Bessel, Richard, ‘Revolution’ in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First
World War, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 126–44
Engel, Barbara Alpern, ‘Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during
World War I’ Journal of Modern History 69, 4, 1997, pp. 696–721
Engelstein, Laura, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914–1921
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Russian Revolution Oxford University Press, 1994
Gerwarth, Robert, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End Straus
and Giroux, 2016
Guoqi, Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War
Hemenway, Elizabeth Jones, ‘Nicholas in Hell: Rewriting the Tsarist Narrative
in the Revolutionary Skazki of 1917’ Russian Review 60, 2, 2001, pp. 185–
204
Holquist, Peter, ‘Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence,
1905–21’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 3, 2003,
pp. 627–52
Horne, John, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World
War Cambridge University Press, 1997
Lieven, Dominic, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia
Penguin, 2016
Linkhoeva, Tatiana, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Emergence of Japanese
Anticommunism’ Revolutionary Russia 31, 2, 2018, pp. 261–78
Loveridge, Steven, ‘What Should Daddy Do in the Great War? The Second Division
Question and Conditional Commitment to New Zealand’s War Effort, 1917–
1918’ Journal of New Zealand Studies 27, 2018, pp. 16–34
Lunn, Joe, ‘Kande Kamara Speaks’ in Melvin E. Page, ed., Africa and the First
World War Macmillan, 1987, pp. 28–53
Ortaggi, Simonette, ‘Italian Women during the Great War’ in Gail Braybon, ed.,
Evidence, History and the Great War Berghahn, 2003, pp. 216–38
Retish, Aaron B., Matthew Rendle, ‘Introduction from Lenin’s Overcoat? The
Global Impact of the Russian Revolution’ Revolutionary Russia 31, 2, 2018,
pp. 145–51
Sanborn, Joshua, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War
and Mass Politics 1905–1925 Northern Illinois University Press, 2003
Sanborn, Joshua, ‘The Genesis of Russian Warlordism: Violence and Governance
during the First World War and the Civil War’ Contemporary European History
19, 3, 2010, pp. 195–213
Smith, Leonard V., ‘Mutiny’ in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First
World War, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 196–217
Stevenson, David, ‘Britain’s Biggest Wartime Stoppage: The Origins of the
Engineering Strike of May 1917’ History 105, 365, 2020, pp. 268–90
Stockdale, Melissa Kirschke, Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and
Citizenship in the First World War Cambridge University Press, 2016
Werth, Nicolas, ‘Russia 1917: The Soldiers’ Revolution’ South Central Review 34,
3, 2017, pp. 48–57
Yost, Franziska, ‘Glory to the Russian Maximalists! Reactions to the Russian
Revolution in Argentina and Brazil 1917–22’ Revolutionary Russia 31, 2, 2018,
pp. 247–60
Chapter 8: The End of Neutrality?

Abbenhuis, Maartje, ‘Not Silent, nor Silenced: Neutrality and the First World War’,
in José-Leonardo Ruiz Sánchez, I. C. Olivero, Garcia Sanz C, eds, Shaping
Neutrality throughout the First World War Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2016
Compagnon, Olivier, ‘Latin America’ in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of
the First World War, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 533–56
Coogan, John, ‘Wilsononian Diplomacy in War and Peace’ in Gordon Martel,
ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered 1890–1993 Routledge, 1994,
pp. 71–89
Craft, Stephen G., ‘Angling for an Invitation to Paris: China’s Entry into the First
World War’ International History Review 16, 1, 1994, pp. 1–24
Dehne, Philip, ‘Profiting Despite the Great War: Argentina’s Grain Multinationals’
in Andrew Smith, Simon Molan, Kevin D. Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First
World War on International Business Routledge, 2017, pp. 67–86
Gillispie, William, ‘Colonialism in Global Conflict: Liberia’s Entry and Participation
in World War One’ First World War Studies 9, 1, 2018, pp. 111–29
Keene, Jennifer, ‘A “Brutalizing” War? The USA after the First World War’ Journal
of Contemporary History 50, 1, 2015, pp. 78–99
Keene, Jennifer, ‘Deeds Not Words: American Social Justice Movements and
World War I’ Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, 4, 2018,
pp. 704–18
Krebs, Gerhard, ‘German-Japanese-United States Mutual Perceptions and
Diplomatic Initiatives over Mexico: New Perspectives on the Zimmerman
Telegram’ in Jan Schmidt, Katja Schmidtpott, eds, The East Asian Dimension of
the First World War Campus Verlag, 2020, pp. 247–67
Neiberg, Michael, ‘Blinking Eyes Began to Open: Legacies from America’s Road to
the Great War, 1914–1917’ Diplomatic History 38, 4, 2014, pp. 801–12
Neiberg, Michael, The Path to War: How the First World War Made Modern
America Oxford University Press, 2016
Raymond, Gregory V., ‘War as Membership: International Society and Thailand’s
Participation in World War I’ Asian Studies Review 43, 1, pp. 132–47
Rinke, Stefan H., Latin America and the First World War, trans. Christopher W
Reid, Cambridge University Press, 2017
Sharp, Alan, ‘The Genie That Would Not Go Back into the Bottle: National Self-
Determination and the Legacy of the First World War and the Peace Settlement’
in Seamus Dunn, T. G. Fraser, eds, Europe and Ethnicity: World War I and
Contemporary Ethnic Conflict Routledge, 1996, pp. 9–28
Tato, María Inés, ‘An Overseas Trench: Social Mobilization in Buenos Aires during
the Great War’ in M. Lakitsch, S. Reitmar-Juárez, K. Seidel, eds, Bellicose
Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War LIT Verlag, 2015,
pp. 43–59
Tooze, Adam, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order
Penguin, 2014
Zeiler, Thomas W., David K. Ekbladh, Benjamin C. Montoya, eds, Beyond 1917:
The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War Oxford University
Press, 2017
Chapter 9: Peace-Making
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The German Revolution and Political Theory Springer, 2019, pp. 25–44
Dhabade, Rohan, Something about Jallianwala Bagh and the Days of British
Empire Evince, 2019
Clavin, Patricia, ‘The Austrian Hunger Crisis and the Genesis of International
Organization after the First World War’ International Affairs 90, 2, 2014,
pp. 265–78
Clavin, Patrica, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of
Nations Oxford University Press, 2010
Gatrell, Peter, The Making of the Modern Refugee Oxford University Press, 2015
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Great War Oxford University Press, 2013
Guoqi, Xu, ‘The Year 1919 and the Question of “What Is China?”’ International
Politics 55, 6, 2018, pp. 752–64
Horne, John, ‘Defending Victory: Paramilitary Politics in France, 1918–1926: A
Counter-Example’ in Robert Gerwarth, ed., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence
in Europe after the Great War Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 216–34
Lunn, Joe, ‘France’s Legacy to Demba Mboup? A Senenalese Griot and His
Descendants Remember His Military Service during the First World War’
in Santanu Das, ed., Race, Empire and First World War Writing Cambridge
University Press, 2011, pp. 108–24
MacArthur-Seal, Daniel-Joseph, ‘Intoxication and Imperialism: Nightlife in
Occupied Istanbul, 1918–1923’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East 37, 2, 2017, pp. 299–313
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Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism Oxford University Press, 2007
Marks, Sally, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918–1933
Palgrave MacMillan, 2003
Moyd, Michelle, ‘Radical Potentials, Conservative Realities: African Veterans of
the German Colonial Army in Post-World War I Tanganyika’ First World War
Studies 10, 1, 2019, pp. 88–107
Osborne Humphries, Mark, ‘Paths of Infection: The First World War and the
Origins of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic’ War in History 21, 1, 2013, pp. 55–81
Rasmussen, Anne, ‘The Spanish Flu’ in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the
First World War, Volume 3, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 334–57
Rice, Geoffrey, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand
Canterbury University Press, 2005
Sammartino, Annemarie H., The Impossible Border: Germany and the East
1914–1922 Cornell University Press, 2010
Schmitt, Hans A., ed., Neutral Europe between War and Revolution 1917–1923
University Press of Virginia, 1988
Stevenson, David, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918
Tomkins, Sara M., ‘The Influenza Epidemic of 1918–19 in Western Samoa’ Journal
of Pacific History 27, 2, 1992, pp. 181–97
INDEX
Abadan 63 Assyrians 56, 170

Aborigines 54 Atlantic Ocean 50, 55, 56, 66
Abyssinia (Ethiopia) 19, 55, 106 atrocities 10, 11, 16–24, 30–8, 71, 77,
Adwa 18 82, 89–92, 105, 131, 136
Africa 8, 19, 30, 35, 36, 40–2, 45, 46, Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane 81
48, 50–5, 58, 66, 70, 78, 81–3, 92, Aulihan Uprising (1915–18) 106
98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 110, 129, Australia 52, 54, 59, 88, 104, 117,
130, 151, 164, 167 126, 162
African Americans 6, 101 Austria-Hungary 1, 9, 12, 17, 24, 25,
Africans 35, 42, 53, 78, 82, 88, 98, 29, 36, 45, 47, 50, 52, 55, 59, 63,
101, 102, 129, 130, 167 64, 66, 67, 90, 94, 98–100, 103,
Aksakal, Mustafa 2 113, 114, 117, 121, 123, 165
Albania 99 Azerbaijan 56
Alexander I (king of Greece) 152
Alsace Lorraine 58, 115 Baghdad 78, 94
Amritsar Massacre (1919) 168–9 Balakian, Grigorius 169
Amsterdam 63 Balkan 9, 23–5, 28–30, 33, 36, 91,
Anglo-Sanussi War (1915–17) 106 110, 152
anti-colonialism 18, 19, 21, 27, 58, Balkan Wars (1912–13) 9, 23–5,
130, 132, 133, 167 28–30, 33, 36
anti-Germanism 2, 31, 34, 41, 42, 47, Baltic Sea 49, 51, 56, 74
83, 85–8, 92, 93, 136, 140 Baltics 17, 49, 51, 56, 74, 91, 121
anti-semitism 86, 90, 91, 166 Bantu 83
Antwerp 36, 40 Barbosa, Rui 111
Apollinaire, Guillaume 161 Barcelona 126
Arab Revolt (1916) 106 Basra 63, 69, 77
Arabia 73, 78, 106, 170 Battle of Ctesiphon (1915) 77
Arabian Gulf 73 Battle of the Marne (1914) 61
Argentina 30, 36, 44, 70, 93, 125, Battle of the Somme (1916) 98, 103
135–7, 139, 146, 154 Becker, Annette 1, 11, 89, 111
Arizona 140 Becker, Jean-Jacques 118, 130
Armenian genocide 91, 92, 94, 169, Beijing 150
170 Belgium 9, 10, 16, 19, 29–43, 45, 46,
Armenians 36, 56, 91, 92, 94, 169, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 61, 66,
170 70, 80, 88, 89, 92, 99, 101, 110,
Armistice (1918) 12, 40, 117, 141, 111, 113, 136, 151, 152, 160
146, 157, 158, 160, 164, 169 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von 31,
Asia 6, 8, 15, 15, 23, 46, 48, 54–8, 66, 41, 113
72, 73, 82, 92, 98, 105, 115, 133, Bignami, Enrico 111
147, 150, 164, 170 Binding, Rudolf 80
Asquith, Herbert 113 Black Sea 17, 56, 57, 72
INDEX 227
blacklisting 70–3, 106, 107, 136, 145, Chaudhuri, Jyotirmoy Pal 71

151, 154 chemical warfare 80–1, 85, 168
Black Tom explosion (1916) 109, 140 Chemin des Dames 103
blockades 17, 49–51, 63, 64, 67, 70, Chen Duxiu 38
73, 74, 81, 85, 106, 107, 111, Cherbourg 84
152–4 Chicago 99, 155
Blücher, Evelyn 102 children 1, 31, 35, 38, 42, 71, 89, 94,
Blue Book Report on the Natives 98, 99, 102, 103, 119, 138, 143,
of South-West Africa and their 152
Treatment by Germany (1918) 42 Chile 48, 70, 154
Bolivia 136 China 3, 12, 16, 18, 38, 46, 47, 54, 57,
Bolshevism 116–17, 122–5, 128–32, 82, 94, 101, 105, 117, 132, 133,
149, 159, 165, 166 See also 137, 147–50, 152, 157, 172
Communism Choson peninsula 19, 23 See also Korea
Bombay 71, 72 Christians 56, 57, 58, 91
Borneo 73 Cicilia 170
Brazil 111, 125, 136, 146, 160 civic cleansing 86, 90–1
Brisbane 162 civil war 2, 12, 27, 55, 109, 116, 118,
Britain, See Great Britain 124, 126, 152, 154, 157, 162, 165,
British Expeditionary Force 61 166, 170
Brooke, Rupert 36 civilians 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 23, 30, 31, 34,
Brusilov, Aleksei 91, 98 35, 40, 42, 54, 58, 62, 64, 65, 74,
Brussels 17, 40 80, 81, 84, 85, 89–94, 98, 104, 105,
Bryce Group 36, 112 108, 111, 119, 122, 129, 144, 151,
Bryce Report (1915) 36–7, 85 160, 168
Buenos Aires 44, 70 civilization 8, 19, 21, 23, 30, 31, 38,
Bulgaria 110 39, 41–3, 46, 57, 82, 83, 113, 136,
Burgfrieden 25, 54 148, 158
Burkina Faso 129, 130 Clausewitz, Karl von 15
Burton, Antoinette 18 Clemenceau, George 5, 158
CODP, See Central Organisation for
Cameroon 52, 98 Durable Peace (CODP)
Canada 55, 88, 104, 145 Colombia 43, 62, 68, 71
Cape Town 88 colonialism 18, 22, 30, 36, 41, 42, 58,
Caribbean 16, 51, 54, 69, 82, 145 82, 89, 103, 129–33, 167, 169, 172
Caribbean Sea 51 colonized communities 18, 54, 82, 106,
Carnegie Endowment for International 129, 172
Peace 24, 28, 33, 36, 143 Commission for the Relief of Belgium
Carnovale, Luigi 155 (CRB) 111
Caroline Islands 56 communism 112, 116, 122–3, 128, 166
Carporetto 128 See also Bolshevism
Catalonia 93, 105 Concha, José Vincente 68
Caucasus 57, 61, 80, 91, 120, 122, 170 Congo 34, 55, 98
Cendrars, Blaise 161 conscription 1, 6, 53, 54, 58, 64, 83,
Central Africa 53, 98 100–4, 106, 116, 118, 126, 144
Central Organisation for Durable Constantine I (king of Greece) 152
Peace (CODP) 111, 112 Constantinople 71, 169
Channel, See English Channel Constantinople Convention (1888) 71
charity 17, 33, 40, 111, 136, 141, 154 contraband 10, 27, 49, 64, 66, 67, 70
228 INDEX
Copenhagen 63 Egypt 2, 59, 71, 102

Costa Rica 136 SMS Emden 72
CRB, See Commission for the Relief of English Channel 51, 63, 66
Belgium (CRB) Erzberger, Matthias 127, 166
Crimean Peninsula 17 Ethiopia, See Abyssinia
Crimean War (1853–56) 17 expansionism 16, 57, 69, 146, 147
Cuba 16, 69, 145
fertilizers 98, 109, 130
Damaraland Concession (1892) 41 Fiji 125
Dardanelles 63, 73, 74, 110 Finland 122
Dar-es-Salaam 51 food 1, 7, 48, 61, 62, 64, 74, 77, 78,
Daudet, Léon 2, 3, 5, 97, 100, 103 81, 90, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 111,
Declaration of London (1909–10) 10, 116, 118, 119, 124, 126, 127, 131,
49–50, 63 148, 165
Declaration of Paris (1856) 17 food riots 48, 99, 126
declaration of war 3, 10, 12, 24, 25, forced labour 89, 100
28, 32, 43, 45–50, 53, 56, 57, 107, France 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 17, 24, 26,
110, 135, 136, 140–2, 150 29–34, 37–45, 48, 50, 52, 58, 61,
Dehne, Philip 70 69, 78, 80–2, 84, 86, 89, 92, 97, 99,
Delagoa Bay 110 101, 103, 109, 113, 117, 124, 125,
demography 71, 101, 102, 164 129, 130, 139, 141, 147, 148, 150,
Denmark 70 151, 155, 158, 160–2, 167
desertion 7, 77, 103, 121, 164 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) 34
Deutsch-Asiatische Bank 71 franc-tireurs 34
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerrecht Franz Ferdinand (Archduke) 24
112 Franz Joseph (Kaiser) 113
Diagne, Blaise 130 free trade 10, 17, 22, 46, 48–51, 55,
diplomatic relations 7, 8, 15, 17, 19, 63–7, 70, 72–5, 106, 117, 151, 154,
22, 24, 25, 28, 43, 57, 65, 67, 92, 171
106, 112, 136–8, 140, 141, 145, Freikorps 165–6
146, 148 French West Africa 70, 82
diseases 73, 90–1, 99, 162, 164 See Fried, Alfred 110
also Spanish flu fuel 7, 61, 63, 68 See also oil
Dolchstoss myth 166
Dominican Republic 69, 145 Galicia 90–2, 98, 121
Duan Qirui 148 Gallipoli 59, 63, 170
Dublin 105 gas attacks, See chemical warfare
Duma 25, 119–20, 123 Gatrell, Peter 4
Dupuis, Emile 108 Geneva Convention 17, 111
Durban 88 genocide 11, 16, 41, 42, 58, 91–2, 169,
Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) 4, 54, 170
105, 117, 130–2, 154, 172 Germany 9, 10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 29–42,
45, 48–50, 58, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 78,
Easter Rising (1916) 104–5 80, 81, 85–8, 93, 94, 98, 102, 103,
economic warfare 10, 11, 17, 49, 51, 107, 110, 113, 122, 127, 136–40,
61–75, 78, 79, 98, 107, 139 145, 146, 148, 151, 154, 164–6
economy 4, 6–8, 10, 11, 15–19, 21, 24, Gerwarth, Robert 117
25, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 54–7, 61–75, Gibraltar 88
80, 98, 101, 145, 151 Godsvrede 25
INDEX 229
Goll, Yvon 115 Indian Expeditionary Force 2, 63, 77, 82

Gorki, Maxime 122 Indian Ocean 56, 57, 66
Goschen, Edward 31 indigenous communities 16, 42, 54, 58,
Graeffe, Constance 39 88, 104, 106, 116, 117, 122, 129,
Grayzel, Susan 38 132, 144, 172
Great Britain 7, 10, 16, 21, 31, 40, Indo-China 54, 150, 167
43–59, 65, 69, 71–3, 88, 94, 101, Indonesia, See Dutch East Indies
103, 106, 112–14, 124, 125, 139 inflation 47, 48, 68, 72, 73, 95, 98, 99,
Greek Orthodox community 91, 170 107, 118, 126, 131, 157
Greene, Sidney 159 Inter-Allied Conference (1916) 106
Guatemala 136, 145 Inter-American High Commission 68
Guilbeaux, Henri 110 International Committee of the Red
Guinea 70 Cross, See Red Cross
Gullace, Nicola 38, 86, 88 internationalism 23, 141, 142
Guoqi, Xu 57, 148 inter-state warfare 6, 9, 15–19, 22, 24,
27, 29, 30, 33, 110, 138, 141, 160,
Hague Conventions (1899, 1907) 10, 172, 173
17, 18, 22, 33, 66, 80, 89, 143 Ireland 54, 58, 59, 64, 83–6, 104, 105,
Hague Peace Conferences (1899, 1907) 160
22, 143–4 isolationism 85, 107, 141
Hague Conference (1915) 112, 164 Istanbul, See Constantinople
Hahn, Albert 149, 153 Italy 40, 55, 90, 99, 110, 117, 128,
Haile Selassi 55, 106 170, 172
Haiti 69, 136, 145 Ivanovich, Matvei 119
Hamburg 63, 66 Ivory Coast 70
Hawai’i 16 Izmir 170
Heinz, Friederich Wilhelm 165–6
Heligoland Bight 51 J.P. Morgan Company 69
Herero 36, 41–2 Jaluitt Atoll 56
Heymann, Lida Gustava 164–5 Japan 1, 3, 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, 22–4,
Hobhouse Report (1901) 36 26, 47–9, 56, 57, 62, 71–3, 94, 99,
Hollywood 93 101, 115, 117, 124, 126, 132, 133,
Honduras 136 147, 148, 167, 172
Hopps, Harry R. 32 Jaures, Jean 103
Horne, John 8, 11, 34, 38, 81, 84 Jews 78, 90, 91, 166
Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad von 90 jihad 57, 58, 91, 93, 104, 106
humanitarian aid 17, 28, 40, 111, 141, Johannesburg 88
154, 155, 171, 173 Jordaan, L.J. 163
humanitarianism 7, 31, 75, 111, 138,
142 Kamara, Kande 129, 130
hunger, See starvation Kariko, Daniel 42
Hutu 55 Kavalli River 70
Kazakhs 4, 105
ICRC, See Red Cross Kemal, Mustafa 170
imperialism 1, 16, 21, 53, 68, 115, 129, Kerensky, Alexander 120–3
146, 168, 172 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert 20, 21
India 2, 6, 41, 54, 58, 59, 62, 72, 74, Korea 16, 19, 23, 99, 117, 132, 133
77–9, 83, 102, 105, 115, 117, 125, Kramer, Alan 34, 38
144, 168, 169 Kuki 41
230 INDEX
Kurdistan 170 Malaka, Tan 132, 172

Kurds 6, 18, 55–6, 91, 170 Malawi 99
Kut al-Amara 77–9, 89 Malaysia 54, 73, 104, 105
Mali 129, 130
labour shortage 100–2 malnutrition, See starvation
Lake Tanganyika 51 Manchuria 23, 57, 132, 147, 148
Landsdowne, Henry Charles Keith Petty- Manela, Erez 146
Fitzmaurice, Marquess of 113, 114 Maori 41, 54, 101, 168
Latin America 18, 24, 39, 44, 48, 50, Mariana Islands 56
51, 55, 68–70, 93, 94, 98, 117, Marshall Islands 56
135–7, 145–7, 160 Mathieu, Benath 154
League of Nations 12, 112, 113, 135, Mboup, Dembo 167, 168
141, 142, 146, 147, 151, 159, 171, McMahon, Henry 71
172 Mediterranean Sea 51, 56, 57, 73, 94
League of Neutral Nations 111 Meiji government 16, 19, 22, 23, 132
League to Enforce Peace 112, 143 Mesopotamia 57, 63, 77
Lebanon 53, 73 Mexico 107, 109, 140
Lemnos 59, 94 Meyer, Kathryn 46
Lenin, Vladimir 110, 116, 122, 123, Middle East 2, 6, 8, 36, 40, 41, 50,
125, 129, 132, 133, 142, 168 54, 55, 58, 66, 74, 80, 89, 91, 93,
Leonhard, Jörn 8, 99, 133, 137 102, 104, 106, 116, 160, 164, 169,
Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von 53 170
Liberia 16, 62, 70, 71, 137, 151, 152 migrants 88, 89, 101, 115, 125, 135
Liebknecht, Karl 166 Milan 128
Liege 35, 40 military service, See conscription
Lifschütz, Alex 154, 155 Military Service Act (1916) 103
Lima 48 mobilization 8, 11, 12, 16, 27, 29, 33,
Limburg Stirum, Johan van 131 39, 41, 46, 50, 53–5, 57, 62, 64, 72,
limited war 8–10, 43, 52, 62, 171 74, 78, 79, 86, 91, 92, 101, 106,
Liverpool 84, 86 121–4, 127, 129, 144, 170
Lloyd George, David 113, 114 Moltke, Helmuth Johannes Ludwig
London 10, 46, 49, 50, 63, 86, 89, 114 von 50
Louvain 35, 40 Monger, David 92
Loveridge, Steven 127 Monrovia 151
loyalty 12, 54, 78, 79, 81–4, 88–90, Moscow 86, 121, 123
92, 95, 99, 100, 110, 115, 117, 118, Moyd, Michelle 53, 130
121, 122, 124–6, 129, 130, 133, Mukherji, Kalyan Kumar 77, 78, 81,
145, 165, 166 82, 94
Ludendorff, Erich 166 Munro, Thomas 25
RMS Lusitania 37, 84–8 Muslims 56–8, 91, 93, 104, 131, 169,
Luxembourg 9, 10, 16, 29, 30, 42, 43, 170
45, 56, 89, 160 Mussolini, Benito 128
Luxemburg, Rosa 22, 166 mutiny 103–5, 124, 131, 164
Lyon 161
Nabatiyya 53
Macdonell, John 37, 38 Nama 41–2
Madagascar 72 Namibia, See South-West Africa
Madras 72 Nasiriyah 77
Madrid 126 Neiberg, Michael 9, 12, 24, 107
INDEX 231
The Netherlands 15, 25, 33, 37, 39, 40, Palestine73, 102
50, 53, 58, 62, 66, 67, 70, 85, 88, Panama 68, 136, 138, 145
99, 103, 111, 131, 132, 137, 143, Panama Canal 55, 68, 69, 145
149, 152–4, 163, 172 Papeete 51, 52
Netherlands Oversea Trust Company Paraguay 136
(NOT) 70 Pax Britannica 46
neutrality 6–8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 27–31, Perez Triana, Santiago 39
37, 45–7, 52, 55, 56, 62, 65, 88, 94, Persia 18, 56, 57, 63, 73, 164, 170
97, 107, 109–11, 126, 131, 135–55, Peru 48, 136
171, 172 Petrograd, See St. Petersburg
New Guinea 50, 52 The Philippines 16, 23, 146
New Mexico 107, 140 Pietermaritzburg 88
New York 84, 85, 109, 159 poison gas, See chemical warfare
New Zealand 21, 40, 41, 52, 54, 59, poisoning 34, 80
86, 88, 104, 117, 127, 162, 168 Poland 91, 92, 99, 113, 127
Ngati Porou 40–1 Polesine 128
Nicaragua 136, 145 Port Said 62, 71, 72
Nicholas II (Tsar) 25, 90, 116, 119, ports 17, 48–52, 63, 71, 74, 126, 147,
123 151, 162
Nigeria 48, 106 Portugal 93, 99, 110
Noailles, Anna Comtesse Mathieu de Prazeres, Otto 160
158 Prior, Robin 99
Nobel, Alfred 142 propaganda 31, 37, 38, 42, 65, 67, 85,
‘non-whites’ 20, 39, 41, 54, 83, 94, 86, 88, 92, 93, 104, 125, 145, 155
130, 131, 167, 168 protests 22, 70, 100, 103, 105, 116,
North Sea 51, 63, 64, 111, 140 117, 122, 125–8, 136, 150, 151
Norway 106, 107, 112, 142 public opinion 24, 31, 37, 125, 136
Noschke, Richard 89 Puerto Rico 16
Nyasaland 82, 83, 99 Punin, Nicolai 119
Punjab 2, 83, 168
oil 48, 56, 63, 68, 69, 170 See also
fuel Qing empire 23, 147 See also China
O’Mara, Pat 86, 88 Qurna 77
Ortaggi, Simonette 128
Orthodox Greeks, See Greek Orthodox racialization 19, 23, 31, 39, 82, 91, 169
community racism 19, 31, 36, 39, 41, 54, 82, 101,
‘Othering’ 11, 84, 86, 88, 103, 112, 129, 131, 167–9, 172, 173
144, 166, 169 Ramos, Juan P. 36
Ottoman Empire 1, 2, 10, 12, 17, 18, rape 31, 38, 39, 90, 91
23, 36, 37, 49, 53, 55, 57–9, 62–4, ‘rape of Belgium’ 10, 31, 38, 86, 144
67, 69, 72–4, 77–9, 91, 92, 95, 98, Rasputin, Grigori 118
100, 103, 104, 106, 114, 117, 121, Rathenau, Walther 166
141, 152, 169–71 rationing 67, 68, 73, 95, 100
rebellion 18, 19, 21, 25, 36, 54, 58, 98,
Pacific Ocean 51, 56, 57, 73, 94, 115 104–6, 170
Pacific region 2, 8, 16, 46, 52, 55–7, Red Cross 17, 33, 110, 111, 154
66, 72, 73, 82 Red Sea 73
pacifism 46, 84, 93, 110, 117, 124, refugees 11, 23, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 66,
127, 142 82, 88, 90, 101, 119, 162
232 INDEX
Reichstag 25, 127 Shanghai 46–8, 62, 71

Rensberg, Nicolaas van 54 shipping 47–51, 57, 63, 64, 66,
Renouvin, Pierre 65 67, 69–71, 73, 98, 104, 107,
revolutionary movements 5, 12, 18, 110, 139
22, 55, 100, 107, 110, 112, 115–33, shortages 48, 61, 68, 98–100, 104,
154, 164, 168 See also Russian 109, 110, 126, 127, 131, 148, 165
Revolutions Siam 54, 105, 137, 150–2
revolutions See also Russian Siberia 91, 94, 147, 148
Revolutions Singapore 54, 104, 105, 131
Ritter, P.H. 53 Singapore Mutiny (1916) 104, 105,
Rolland, Romain 110 131
Romania 69, 92, 110, 113 Smolensk 118
Romanov government, See Tsarist smuggling 27, 67, 70
regime Sneevliet, Henk 131
Roosevelt, Theodore 23, 146 Soiza Reilly, Juan José de 93
Root, Elihu 143 Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg 24
Russia 12, 22, 25, 26, 49–51, 56, 57, South Africa 41, 42, 52, 54, 82, 83, 88,
74, 86, 90, 91, 94, 98, 99, 106, 101
116–25, 132, 133, 139, 148, 149, South-West Africa (Namibia) 41, 42,
172 See also Soviet Union 52
Russian Civil War (1917–23) 118, 124, Soviet Union 1, 118, 167, 168, 172
162, 165 soviets 119, 121–5, 127, 131, 165
Russian Revolutions (1917) 1, 12, 74, Spain 16, 55, 93, 99, 101, 105, 109,
116, 117, 120, 122, 124–33, 136, 117, 126, 161
139, 140, 142, 146, 153 Spanish flu 161–4 See also diseases
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 22, 23, Spartacist uprising (1919) 166
118 Sri Lanka 88
Ruthenians 90, 91 St. Petersburg 119, 121–3
Rwanda 4, 55 St. Petersburg Declaration (1868) 17
starvation 11, 64, 73, 77–9, 81, 85, 90,
Saint-Amour, Paul K. 5 91, 99, 114, 119, 130, 152, 157,
Saloniki 63, 94, 152 164, 169
Samoa 16, 50, 52, 88, 89, 162, 164 state violence 6, 11, 15, 16, 19–22, 30,
Sao Paolo 126 42, 79, 100, 130, 168
Sarbadhikari, Sisir Prasad 94, 95 Stevenson, David 99
Sardinia 17 stock market 47
Sassun Report (1896) 36 Stockton, C.H. 7, 17
Scandinavia 15, 50, 85, 142, 143, 154 Streets-Salter, Heather 54
Schaepdrijver, Sophie de 89 strikes 19, 36, 73, 99, 107, 119, 125,
Schlieffen Plan 29, 34, 50 126, 128
School Peace League 143, 144 Struycken, A.A.H. 37, 38
Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) Sudan 20, 21
36 Suez Canal 57, 63, 71, 72
Senegal 59, 117, 129, 130, 167 Sun Yat-Sen 150
Serbia 9, 24, 25, 29, 36, 37, 47, 50, 63, Sweden 56, 112, 142
90, 92 Switzerland 16, 37, 50, 70, 85, 94, 99,
sexual violence, See rape 110, 111, 115, 122, 155
Shandong 148 Syria 8, 73
INDEX 233
Tabora 55 Vajiradvudh (king of Siam) 150, 151

Tagore, Rabindranath 115, 158, 168, Valdés, Ramón Maximiliano 138
169 Valparaiso 70
Tahiti 51, 52 Vietnam 58, 101
Taiwan 16 Villa, Pancho 107, 109, 140
Tanga 51 Vina del Mar 70
Tanzania 1, 66 violence against civilians 3, 9, 11, 30,
Tata Iron and Steel Works 72 31, 34, 35, 64, 78, 81, 85, 89–91,
Tato, María Inés 136 93, 105, 108, 129, 151, 160, 168
telegraph cables 47, 50, 51, 70 Vistula 80
Texas 140 Vladivostok 72, 94
Thomson-Urrutia Treaty (1914) 68 Volta Bani 117, 129–31
Togoland 52 Vyborg 119
Tokyo 47
total war 2, 4–8, 11, 12, 27, 41, 59, Wagogo 1, 2, 5, 99, 130, 164
61, 62, 64–6, 74, 77–81, 83, 84, war profiteering 38, 73, 74, 107
91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 111, Washington DC 68
117, 118, 130, 133, 135, 140, 145, Watson, Alexander 91
161 Weihaiwei 47
Townshend, Charles 78 Weimar Republic 165, 166
Treaty of Berlin (1885) 52 Wellington 88
Treaty of Versailles (1919) 151 Weseler, Hans 35
Trinidad 125 White Book on Belgium (1915) 42
Trommler, Frank 86 Wilhelm II (Kaiser) 34, 58, 164, 165
Tsarist regime 22, 23, 25, 74, 90, 91, Wilson, Trevor 4
100, 105, 116–23, 132, 172 See Wilson, Woodrow 56, 57, 75, 107,
also Russia 109, 112, 113, 133, 135, 137,
Tsingtao 47, 56, 57, 71, 89, 94, 140–3, 145, 146, 148, 152, 158,
148 168, 170–2
Turkestan 105 Winnebago 144
Turkey, See Ottoman Empire Winter, Jay 12, 116
Tutsi 55 Wolfe, William Leon 145
women 31, 33, 35, 38, 42, 53, 58, 64,
U-boats 64, 66, 81, 84–6, 107, 136–40, 65, 82, 91, 101, 112, 119, 128, 162,
145, 146, 148 164
Ukraine 122, 127 Women’s Peace Conference (1915)
unemployment 47, 48, 70, 98, 126 112, 164
United Kingdom, See Great Britain
United States 1, 3, 6, 8, 12, 18–20, Ypres 32, 80, 81, 85
23, 32, 37, 40, 46, 48, 49, 55–7,
62, 67–9, 75, 85, 93, 98, 101, 105, Zaanstroom 66
107–9, 111, 115, 124, 126, 135–55, Zeebrugge 66
161, 164, 167, 172 Ziemann, Benjamin 99
Uruguay 136 Zweig, Stefan 110
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What is the purpose of the book series being discussed?

What is the purpose of the book series being discussed?

What topics does the book series cover?

What topics does the book series cover?

Global War,

Series Editor: Thomas Zeiler, Professor of American Diplomatic History, University

Series Editorial Board:

New Approaches to International History covers international history during

By its broad and inclusive coverage, New Approaches to International History

We hope readers find this series to be appealing, challenging and thought-

Thomas Zeiler, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

First published in Great Britain 2022

Copyright © Maartje Abbenhuis and Ismee Tames, 2022

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute

Cover design: Terry Woodley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-7586-6

Series: New Approaches to International History

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction: A total global tragedy 1

0.1 The World at War, Chinese map, 1917 3

and material resources. As a result, neutral and belligerent civilians were

were at peace. Neutrality then was an extremely useful tool of statecraft

Significantly, all nineteenth-century wars involved more formally

a result, we sometimes prioritize ‘outlier’ examples, we do so to underscore

rights and in so doing harked back to principles of unrestricted economic

about the shape of communities, nation-states, industrial empires and the

had previously done for Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. There

part, protected by their willingness to localize inter-state wars when they

practices of most European countries up to that point in time, they were

and the establishment of Ethiopia as an independent nation-state, a decisive

standards than wars conducted by ‘white’ against ‘non-white’ people or

of policing an empire, suppressing a rebellion or acquiring territory where

For Koreans and the inhabitants of Manchuria, of course, the Russo-

ILLUSTRATION 1.2 This depiction of Germany at war was published in the

proved a very useful mechanism for governments to obtain widespread buy-

After Austria-Hungary went to war with Serbia on 28 July 1914, most

ILLUSTRATION 2.1 This popular recruitment poster, designed by Harry R.

Slow hours …. Everything before us looks vague and empty …. No one

the population of Belgium […] behaved in a diabolical, not to say bestial,

Yet some of these soldiers were no strangers to exacting extreme violence

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Germany’s invasion of Belgium that

Alongside a relentless stream of newspaper horror stories ‘straight from the

the collective moral influence, of the world, the open disapprobation of

As the war progressed, however, such expectations as Struycken and

The foes are not sahibs

In New Zealand, members of the Ngati Porou iwi (tribe) assembled on 3

In recognition, at least as the English-language Poverty Bay Herald recounted

While the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France was

ILLUSTRATION 3.1 The fear of the outbreak of war’s economic impact on

Commerce that represented the various mercantile, industrial and banking

In the long term, the ability of a local or regional economy to recover

on 4 August), the British government established a State Insurance office

open communication, trade and exchange aided by the expectation that

ILLUSTRATION 3.2 On 22 September 1914, the German armoured cruisers SMS

Ritter’s description bears and eerie resemblance to a diary entry of a Shi’ite

and anti-British revolutionaries in south-east Asia successfully lobbied for