The British Empire and the First World War

Ashley Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138932197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317374640
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The British Empire played a crucial part in the First World War, supplying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and labourers as well as a range of essential resources, from foodstuffs to minerals, mules, and munitions. In turn, many imperial territories were deeply affected by wartime phenomena, such as inflation, food shortages, combat, and the presence of large numbers of foreign troops.

This collection offers a comprehensive selection of essays illuminating the extent of the Empire's war contribution and experience, and the richness of scholarly research on the subject. Whether supporting British military operations, aiding the British imperial economy, or experiencing significant wartime effects on the home fronts of the Empire, the war had a profound impact on the colonies and their people.

The chapters in this volume were originally published in Australian Historical Studies, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, First World War Studies or The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.

The British Empire and the First World War: Paradoxes and New Questions

Ashley Jackson and James E. Kitchen

From start to finish, the First World War was a global and imperial conflict. The British Empire’s war began and ended in Africa. The first shot of the war to be fired by a soldier under British command was that of Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi of the West African Frontier Force on 12 August 1914 as Anglo-French forces set about dismantling the small German presence in Togoland.¹ Together with the invasion of Cameroon, this was a campaign that reflected both a metropolitan desire to limit Germany’s ability to interdict Allied maritime supply lines and a sub-imperial and metropolitan wish to secure, and potentially expand, Entente colonial possessions. Similarly, the muddled end to Britain’s First World War beyond Western Europe is exemplified by the belated surrender of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces at Abercorn in Northern Rhodesia 14 days after European armies had stopped eviscerating one another on the Western Front. From first shot until final surrender, and through the nature of its conduct, the First World War can be viewed through a variety of global and imperial lenses which challenge a more traditional Eurocentric focus.

If one views the events of 1914–18 from the standpoint of the interwar years, the First World War was, above all, a global struggle. This was a point that myriad publications in the 1920s and 1930s sought to emphasize. Between 1921 and 1926 Sir Charles Lucas, a Colonial Office civil servant, oversaw the production of a multi-volume and multi-author history of the Empire’s contribution to Allied victory over the Central Powers, entitled The Empire at War. This wide-ranging work – the scope of which has rarely, if ever, been matched – examined every aspect of the imperial war effort, from the considerable contribution made by the ‘white’ Dominions, through to the efforts of smaller imperial territories, such as the participation of Jamaican troops in the battles over the Jordan Valley in 1918.² The achievement of Lucas’s publication was in part to emphasize the truly global nature of the British imperial war effort, with campaigns fought from France to Samoa, from German South-West Africa to Archangel. It also made apparent to its readership the extent to which the whole Empire was mobilized behind the single cause of victory over Prussian militarism and the containment of the Central Powers’ imperial ambitions. It did perhaps neglect to mention the militarizing and aggrandizing tendencies of the British Empire itself, but the core point remained: victory in 1918 was a product of a collective imperial endeavour.

Lucas’s The Empire at War was one of the many lieux de mémoire that were created in the interwar British Empire. The book was thus a site of commemoration produced in order to recall, and establish continuity of memory with, British imperial mobilization, struggle and success in 1914–18.³ Alongside Lucas’s work sat the more formal and utilitarian publication of the British official history, produced under the supervision of Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds. Through its sheer scale and detail it stood as a testament to the battlefield challenges that had been met and largely overcome by British imperial forces. Unlike the German official history, entitled Der Weltkrieg, the British version, although more prosaically titled, did actually take a global perspective on the war.⁴ It devoted entire volumes to the campaigns beyond the Western Front, such as those authored by Major-General George MacMunn and Cyril Falls on the campaigns in Egypt and the Levant. Here the exploits of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in 1916–18 offered a microcosm of the wider imperial war effort. These were campaigns that involved troops from across the Empire, including Indian infantry- and cavalrymen, Australian and New Zealand mounted troops and British West Indians. A small detachment of Rarotongan boat people was even transported from the Pacific to help the advancing army land supplies on the beaches opposite Gaza, the skill sets of colonial subjects being deployed to serve specific military needs in an imperial war. Illustrating the penetrative power of a global conflict, the extraordinary length of the British Empire’s military tentacles, and the exhaustive nature of the official war histories, there was even a volume chronicling the activities of imperial forces operating in Iran throughout the war.⁵

The breadth of the imperial war effort was not only recalled in officially sanctioned publications from the imperial metropole. Throughout the interwar years a multitude of formation histories appeared recalling the specific battlefield exploits of individual battalions, regiments, divisions or expeditionary forces dispatched by a variety of Dominions and colonies. These works often told the personal stories of the men who served, what it felt like to travel far from home, to learn new military roles, and then to deploy these on the industrial battlefield. The audience for such publications was relatively small, focused on former comrades and their families and friends. Nevertheless, they still captured a specific moment in the history of the British Empire and the role that these colonial and Dominion troops had played – no matter how small – in shaping the imperial war effort.⁶

The act of commemorating the British imperial military contribution also took more solid form in bricks, mortar and stone, reflecting the general commemorative culture that developed among former combatant states in the post-war years.⁷ War memorials were, and remain, among the most prominent imperial lieux de mémoire of the Great War. For example, in November 1932 a statue to the men of the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division was unveiled at Port Said in Egypt, a site of memory for Dominion troops within what was then only a pseudo-colonial state following tentative steps towards Egyptian independence in 1922. The memorial did not survive the anti-colonial fervour of 1956, being torn down by the local population in the wake of the Suez Crisis. Nonetheless, the statue of an Australian Light Horseman reaching down to help his wounded New Zealand comrade, sculpted by Web Gilbert and Bertram Mackennal, encapsulated the Dominion experience in the First World War.⁸ The conflict was a moment of shared hardship on the battlefield that saw, in this case, the Dominions coming together for the defence of the British Empire, hence the memorial’s symbolic position at the gateway to the Suez Canal, the arterial hub of imperial communications.

This was one of many memorials to the sacrifices of Dominion troops that sprung up in the interwar years around the battlefields and recruiting grounds of the Empire. In most cases the focus remained resolutely on the Western Front, with Canada eulogizing the spectacular success achieved in securing Vimy Ridge in April 1917. South Africa instead concentrated its commemorative efforts on the traumatic blood loss suffered by its 1st Brigade at Delville Wood on the Somme in July 1916. For Australia and New Zealand the focus of commemoration was also on a military disaster, the debacle at Gallipoli in 1915, and more specifically on the heroic achievements of the Anzacs when they landed on 25 April. The myth-making and complexities involved in Antipodean commemorative culture have spawned almost an entire sub-genre of First World War historiography, but have been ably summarized in the work of Jenny Macleod and Ken Inglis.⁹ For Australia, in particular, remembering the First World War was not just about recalling collective imperial sacrifice, but also the supposed moment at which the modern nation was born in battle.

War memorials were erected throughout the colonial empire as well as the empire of the ‘white’ Dominions, commemorating either particular campaigns and battles or the service of colonial troops. These included the Stanley memorial in the Falkland Islands, commemorating Admiral Sturdee’s victory over Vice Admiral Graf von Spee’s cruiser squadron on 8 December 1914, as well as the service of Falklanders in the Empire’s armed forces. The Basra War Memorial, moved close to Nasiriyah by the Iraqi government in 1997, bears the names of over 40,000 Commonwealth troops who died in Mesopotamia, and whose graves are unknown – testament to the sheer scale of combat activities around the world and their tragic death toll. The Colombo cenotaph in Sri Lanka, another 1920s creation, was moved inland from its prominent position on the Galle Face seafront lest it be used as a marker by Japanese warships in the following global struggle. While it is difficult to know for sure, it is likely that every territory of the British Empire had a war memorial erected, even those involved in a peripheral manner. Outside the parliamentary buildings in Gaborone, Botswana, for instance, a standard-issue granite and bronze memorial marks the fallen of the world wars, including a plaque for Trooper Jonas, a member of the Bechuanaland Protectorate Police, killed in a skirmish on the border with German South-West Africa in the early days of the war, a casualty thousands of miles from the Western front, but a casualty of the Empire’s war nonetheless. Imperial commemoration and monument-making did not end with the interwar years. As late as 2002, Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a new memorial to the collective military service of African, Asian and Caribbean combatants in the two world wars. The Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill in London again reflect a decision to erect a monument with deliberate and significant resonances, designed to tie imperial sacrifices in the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century into the contemporary identity of the former imperial metropole in a post-imperial age. Modern multicultural Britain was thus acknowledging its debt to its former colonial subjects.

These lieux de mémoire suggest that the British Empire has always played an integral part in the story and memory of the First World War, but what was true of the interwar years has not always been the case. After 1945 the British Empire and Dominion dimension of the First World War slipped from view. Increasingly the voices of British ex-servicemen came to dominate popular debate on the conflict, and these invariably reflected a Western European and Western Front bias. From an imperial history perspective as well, the events of 1939–45 and the ensuing three decades of frequently bloody decolonization suggested that what had occurred earlier in the twentieth century was merely a warm-up act for the main event. With the exception of Gallipoli, which retained prominence in the history of the First World War largely due to the fact that it fitted snugly into the popular Alan Clark archetype of bungling generalship, the extra-European battlefields and theatres of 1914–18 slipped from view in the second half of the twentieth century. If the British Empire was seen to be engaged in fighting in the Great War, it more often than not appeared on the cinema screen, where forays into the exotic sideshows of the conflict were slightly more common. The most notable examples of revelling in the imperial pleasure culture of 1914–18 included John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981).

The British Empire appearing merely as an adjunct to the principal narrative of the Great War, or as a source of titillation to enliven dry story-telling, was not confined to the popular cultural productions of the post–1945 period. Many of the major historical works that appeared from the 1960s onwards similarly took a Eurocentric approach to the Great War. It was on the Western Front that the most blood was shed and that the fate of the ‘great powers’ was decided.¹⁰ The British Empire’s efforts in this theatre were noted, such as the role of the Dominions as the ‘cutting edge’ of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1918, but the complexities of the imperial contribution within and outside Europe were ignored.

As Andrew Tait Jarboe and Richard Fogarty have argued, since the beginning of the twenty-first century the global and imperial history of the First World War has enjoyed a considerable renaissance.¹¹ This has reflected a wider historiographical trend over the past 25 years that has seen the somewhat imprecise category of ‘world history’ emerge as an independent field of research.¹² The First World War was a conflict fought by empires – even Belgium, a minor European state, was a significant African colonial power – and which had significant imperial consequences, ultimately destroying the empires of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans, and aggrandizing the territorial holdings of Britain and France. The very fact that it was fought by global empires meant that the war produced global battlefields and global war aims. In many respects, the years 1914–18 – or the broader timespan of 1911–23, framed by the Italian invasion of Libya and the Treaty of Lausanne – were a hinge moment in world history.

Yet, as Hew Strachan has argued, and Jarboe and Fogarty reiterate, the European and global dimensions of the First World War were interlinked.¹³ Europe was the managerial hub of the colonial great powers and was the economic centre of global trade; any war that affected Europe was bound to have global ramifications. This was a point that contemporaries were aware of, having been forcefully argued in the British journalist Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1909), a pan-European publishing sensation which gained popular currency in the run-up to the outbreak of hostilities.¹⁴ The economic issue mattered particularly from a British imperial perspective. London was the centre of global finance in 1914, largely due to the gold standard, and as such all states that traded with Britain or made use of its banking sector were tangentially drawn into the war. Some governments may have believed they were neutral, but the concept in 1914–18 was a relative rather than an absolute one.

Britain’s entry into the war, more so than that of any other state, meant that finance and trade at a global level would be affected. The way Britain chose to wage the war also ensured that the conflict took on a globalizing and totalizing logic. From the outset the most powerful asset available to Britain was the Royal Navy, which ensured that the vast resources of the Empire could be mobilized and brought safely to Europe to conduct a major continental war. This, however, would take time, and helps explain Kitchener’s assumption, when asked by the cabinet about the expected length of the war, that hostilities would continue for at least three years before such material and manpower advantages could be brought to bear. From the start the Royal Navy was also used to mount a blockade of commercial shipping to and from Germany, ensuring that glob...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The First World War as a global war
• 3. Sir Charles Lucas and The Empire at War
• Part I: War on Imperial Frontiers
• Part II: Home Fronts
• Part III: Soldiers and Fighting Fronts
• Index