World War One
in World History
Eric Beckman
Anoka HS, MN
@ERBeckman@historians.social
www.ebeckman.org/global-wwi
A world war?
Historian Hew Strachan: “the title ‘the world war’ was a statement about its importance, not a statement about its geographical scale.”
Quoted by Michelle Moyd in Extra-European Theatres of War
Poster circa 1917. “Freiheit Der Meere” (Freedom of the Seas), Subtitled: England Der Blutsauger Derwelt (England, The Bloodsucker of the World) , via Vulgar Army tumblr
Guiding ideas
Goal: Participants will include more global dimensions of World War I in their classes
Thesis: Reflexive relationship of colonialism and WWI makes this a World History topic
What is World History?
Global Perspective: World History “acknowledges and integrates the historical experiences of all of the world's people.”
Integration and Difference: “[T]he processes of world history have drawn peoples of the world together and...the patterns of world history also reveal the diversity of the human experience”
World History may be“humanity's attempt to fully understand itself in an age of globalization”
Historians Candice Goucher and Linda Walton
Annenberg Learner’s Bridging World History, emphasis added
World War I MN State Standards (9.4.3.11.7 & 9.4.3.12.1)
Describe European imperialism; explain its effects on interactions with colonized peoples in Africa and Asia. (The Age of Revolutions: 1750+1922)
Describe the social, political and economic causes and consequences of World War I. (A Half Century of Crisis and Achievement: 1900+1950)
World War I, mostly fought in Europe, but...
Global empires = global war
Source: Wikimedia
Globalizing the study of WWI
Themes that apply globally:
Global dimensions:
Global Movements
Soldiers and civilians
“Between 1914 and 1918 in a grotesque reversal of Joseph Conrad’s, vision hundreds of thousands of nonwhite men were sailing to the heart of whiteness and beyond to witness the horror, the horror of Western warfare.
Indeed, if we visited Ypres during the wartime, one would have seen Indian sepoys, Tirailleurs Senegalese , North African Spahis, Chinese and Indochinese workers, Egyptian and South African labor corps, Maori pioneer battalions, First Nation Canadians, aboriginal Australians, in addition to the white troops and workers from Europe and the British dominions.”
~Dr Santanu Das
Congolese soldiers disembark in France (left). Sources: Image, British Library via The Atlantic
British library podcast;
Global Labor Migrations
Chinese workers in France
Labor migration
“I went to the war to eat, to eat. That is all.”
~Malawi woman quoted by Dr Santanu Das
Colonial troops in Europe
Men from Indochina in France
Sources: Bibliotheque nationale
de France and Library of Congress (next), both via The Atlantic
“Who will Take this Uniform, Money and Rifle?”
Source: Imperial War Museum
Colonial Troops
1.3 million Indian troops served Britain
Sources: Imperial War Museums; text, BBC Magazine
Indian Troops
Gas drill on the Salonika front
Source: IWM, via Ottoman History Podcast
Indian Cyclists at the Battle of the Somme, 1916
Source: IWM
Teachers should counter white washing of world wars
Source: The Guardian
Story of a British officer brought before a court martial (later dismissed) for not abandoning his Indian troops at Dunkirk in 1940
Colonial Troops
African soldiers served France and Belgium
Source: St. Mihiel Tripwire
Tirailleurs Sénégalais
Source: BlackPast.org
Flag of the 43rd battalion of Senegalese soldiers decorated with the fourragère (Jan 1918)
Source: wikipedia, scanned image
Muslim dead at Verdun
Source: photos by Peter Wilson, @PWilson_14
Moroccan Cavalry Patrol, Belgium, October, 1914
Source: British Library
“It didn’t matter where you fought you just ended up in another part of the world that you probably had no intention of seeing or didn’t even know existed...you could be a Turkish soldier in Basra and wind up as a prisoner of war in Burma.”
Historian Vedica Kant
28 December 2012
Consider: Moroccan POWs captured by Germans in Belgium, recruited into Ottoman Army to fight British troops, mainly Indian, in Iraq. Ottoman History Podcast
Letter from Ottoman prisoner of war, 1916
Source:
British settler colonies
1915 Postcard
(Source: British Library)
The world fought at Gallipoli
Maori soldier in a trench. Source: IWM “20 Remarkable Photos from Gallipoli”
Global Warfare
Major Theaters Beyond Europe
Fronts: Africa, Southwest and East Asia, and Oceania
Sources: The Story of the Great War, via Vox.com; atlas-historique.net, via KC Johnson; MentalFloss
Japanese and Australian
Australian nurses and reservists in New Guinea, 1914
Source: ABC News
East Asia and Oceania
Japanese imperialism
Sources: Wikipedia; next slide, Illustrated War News, 1914, via The Atlantic
German East Asia Squadron
HMAS Australia
(source: wikipedia)
African Fronts: British v. Germany
Indian Troops in East Africa
In East Africa, Indian and African soldiers commanded by British officers and supported by Kenyan and Nigerian laborers, fought African soldiers commanded by German officers.
Indian Workers Repair Railway in British East Africa
Source: @HistoryKe
King’s African Rifles, Taveta Kenya
Source: @HistoryKe
Masai scouts tracked German Askari for British
African Sailors aboard HMAS Pioneer
Colonialism intensified the privations of war
“The massive mobilisation of labour in East and Central Africa in 1916-18 virtually decimated large areas and brought in its wake food shortages, famine and disease. The removal of men in large numbers from family life and rural production had a marked effect on African society.”
~Historian David Killingray,
quoted in “Extra-European Theatres of War”
WWI Memorials in Nairobi & Mombasa feature porters of the Carrier Corps
Source: @d4vidmcdonald19
African Carrier Corps in British service in East Africa
Source: @d4vidmcdonald19
South African Gun in German South West Africa (Namibia)
Source: Wikiwand, South West Africa Campaign
Ottoman Middle East
Imperial Camel Corps
Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and India
Source: IWM
Indian soldiers in Mesopotamia with anti-aircraft gun
Source: IWM via Ottoman History Podcast
New Zealand Riflemen with German POWs in Palestine, 1918
Source: Library of Congress,
via The Atlantic
Total war and privation
Source: Ottoman History Podcast
North Atlantic
German submarines
Image source: German Federal Archives via Wikipedia
Aftermath
WWI legacies shaped the 20th C
Shifting Colonial Fortunes, a paradox
Strengthening:
Weakening:
The Wilsonian Moment
14 Points (Jan 1918) to Peace Settlement (May 1919)
Anti-Imperialists seized on “Self-Determination”
CPI Foreign Section
Paris Peace Meetings
Self Determination for India, 1918
Originally published by India Home Rule League’s
London Office
Image from American reprint, South Asian Digital
Indian politicians, December 1918
Indian National Congress: “In view of the pronouncements of President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, and other British statesmen, that to ensure the future peace of the world, the principle of Self-Determination should be applied to all progressive nations,” including India as “one of the progressive nations to whom, the principle of self-determination should be applied.”
Muslim League: “In view of the announcements of President Wilson and the British and Allied Statesmen … India’s right to Self-Determination [should] be recognised by the British government and the Peace Conference...”.
Manela, p. 96
Egypt, 1918-1919
Using Wilson’s words
Petitions to US consul and President Wilson
Manela 65, 70-71
Korean Nationalism
US-based KNA, including Syngman Rhee wrote to Wilson in December 1918
Source: Manela, pp. 126-127
Crowd in Beijing celebrated the armistice, 1918
Some banners with Wilsonian slogans.
Hopeful that Japan would vacate occupied Chinese territory
Petitions to Paris Peace negotiators often invoked Wilson--ex: ““the exalted ideas inspiring the immortal message of President Wilson”--to press Chinese claims
Manela, pp 104, 117
1919: Year of anti-colonial nationalism
1st Pan-African Congress, February 1919
Demanded home rule for African colonies
Image source: Wikipedia
W.E.B. DuBois in France, 1919
Source: The Crisis, June 1919
March 1st Movement, Korea, 1919
March 1st, 1919:
Beginning of nationalist movement
Source: Manela, p. 132
Korean women marching for independence in Seoul, 1919
Image via Manela, p. 135
May 4th Movement, 1919
Protests against Versailles Treaty allowing continued Japanese occupation of Shandong (home of Confucius)
Bitterly invoked Wilson in their protests
Mass movement included radical students, such as Mao Zedong, who later led the CCP
Shanghai Student Union pamphlet:
“Throughout the world like the voice of a prophet has gone the word of Woodrow Wilson strengthening the weak and giving courage to the struggling. And the Chinese have listened and they too have heard… . They have been told that in the dispensation which is to be made after the war un-militaristic nations like China would have an opportunity to develop their culture, their industry, their civilization, unhampered. . . . They looked for the dawn of this new Messiah; but no sun rose for China. Even the cradle of the nation was stolen.”
Manela, p. 188
Global Influenza Pandemic, 1918-1919
Taubenberger, Jeffery K, and David M. Morens. "1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics." Emerging Infectious Diseases. Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 2006): n. pag. Web. 18 Mar. 2017
Howard Phillips, 1914-1918 Online, Influenza Pandemic.
Hardest hit by Influenza
Sources: Historian Howard Phillips, Influenza Pandemic and Influenza Pandemic (Africa); Secretariat of the Pacific Community; (demographer Kevin Hill)
WWI Accelerated American Ascendance (but not yet a superpower)
Net debtor to creditor
Expanding export markets (esp. Asia & Latin America)
Merchant Marine grew (but 40% of Britain)
Military power, diplomatic presence
(Source: Kennedy, Over Here, 298, 325, 337, 338)
World War I in Global Memory: “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”
Resources
Resource sites
Resource sites
Podcast:
Books Cited
Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford University Press. 2007. Kindle Edition.
Kenneday, Over Here
Weitz, Weimar Germany,
At the Wilson