The Great War

An Imperial History

John Morrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134957064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Great War is a landmark history that firmly places the First World War in the context of imperialism. Set to overturn conventional accounts of what happened during this, the first truly international conflict, it extends the study of the First World War beyond the confines of Europe and the Western Front.

By recounting the experiences of people from the colonies especially those brought into the war effort either as volunteers or through conscription, John Morrow's magisterial work also unveils the impact of the war in Asia, India and Africa.

From the origins of World WarOne to its bloody (and largely unknown) aftermath, The Great War is distinguished by its long chronological coverage, first person battle and home front accounts, its pan European and global emphasis and the integration of cultural considerations with political.

11

The Origins of War, 1871–1914

Europe, imperialism, and power rivalries, 1871–1905

“Exterminate all the brutes.”

Kurtz in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness¹

“There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Mark Twain, Following the Equator and Anti-imperialist Essays²

As the twentieth century opened, Europe, particularly the great powers at its heart – Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia – stood at the crest of its power, figuratively at the center of the world. During the nineteenth century its population had risen from 190 million inhabitants in 1815 to 460 million in 1914; its share of the world’s population, from 20 to 27 percent. European industrial and technological supremacy, combined with its rising population, enabled its states to dominate much of the globe by 1914.

Historians have occasionally attempted to generalize about Europe before 1914. Eric Hobsbawm refers to it as “bourgeois,” or dominated by the middle class riding the wave of industrialization and urbanization. In contrast, Arno Mayer has asserted that Europe remained under the political, social, and cultural control of the aristocracy of the ancien régime, which a sea of modernity had not swept away. In fact, the diversity evident across Europe renders either generalization suspect. George Lichtheim’s description of Europe as a geographical entity inhabited by peoples whose only commonality was their “mutual detestation and their readiness to go to war against one another” seems more apt than the first two class-bound interpretations.³

2Traversing Europe from west to east, one passed from densely populated and industrialized states such as Britain and Germany, and a France heavily industrialized in its northeast and predominantly rural elsewhere, to states such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, overwhelmingly rural and agrarian with pockets of industrialization around major cities or in mining areas. Britain reigned as the world’s commercial, financial, industrial, maritime, and imperial pace-setter, the center of the globe in all of these realms. The island kingdom dominated an empire of 444 million people and 12.7 million square miles of territory. A plutocracy of an intertwined, intermarried wealthy aristocracy and middle class ruled this kingdom. More than 50 percent of its population of some 45 million people inhabited cities and towns, and peasants or yeomen farmers, had long disappeared from the rural landscape.

Across the English Channel lay France, whose population was stagnating at some 39 million inhabitants. France’s northeastern corridor to the east of Paris was a grim industrial and mining region, but middle-class peasant farmers dominated the rest of the country and the Parliament, a result of the French Revolution. However, France’s industrial expertise proved formidable. By 1914 it led the world in the new aviation industry and its automobile industry ranked second – a distant second of course – only to that of the United States. Furthermore, it ranked second only to Britain in the extent of its overseas empire.

France’s stagnating population contrasted sharply with its eastern neighbor, the German Empire, 70 million people strong and growing fast. Germany was overtaking Britain in certain realms of industrial production, such as iron and steel. Germany had further established a clear ascendancy in the new science and technology-driven chemical and electrical industries due to the superiority of its educational system and its connections with industry. Germany’s aristocracy observed the distinctions separating it from the middle class more stringently than did Britain’s, although wealthy industrialists such as the Krupp family bought patents of aristocracy. The Krupps ruled their domain – the armaments and armor manufacturing city of Essen in the Ruhr – in much the same fashion as a Prussian junker ruled his estates.

In Europe east of the Elbe River, the unofficial boundary between western and eastern Germany and western and eastern Europe as well, society remained aristocratic, rural, and agrarian. Aristocratic landlords ruled their estates and the peasants who inhabited and worked them much as they had for centuries. Prominent but isolated pockets of industrialization existed – in Silesia and Berlin in Prussia, in Bohemia and around Vienna and Wiener Neustadt in Austria-Hungary, and around St. Petersburg and Moscow and in the mining regions in Russia. The further east one went, the punier the middle class became. Russian industrialization was so recent and the middle class so tiny that workers toiled in gigantic factories with relatively few 3foremen to supervise them. Such conditions rendered this first-generation working class perfect fodder for strikes and revolution, as the events of the Russian Revolution of 1905 demonstrated.

Of the major European states, only France was a republic, where Parliament governed and the president wielded essentially ceremonial and personal power. The other states were monarchies, with constitutional regimes which enabled popular participation in government to varying extents. England, and tiny Belgium, were constitutional monarchies where the monarchy retained few real powers and Parliament essentially governed. The Kingdom of Italy, unified only in 1870, was also a constitutional monarchy, though with a less developed party system than the others.

The further east one traveled, the more authoritarian the regimes became. In the German Empire, the Prussian Hohenzollern monarch, prime minister, and army command were also the German emperor, chancellor, and army command. A German Parliament (Reichstag) elected by universal male suffrage and an upper house (Bundesrat) comprising representatives of the empire’s seventeen monarchical regimes completed the governmental apparatus. Yet the Reichstag, or glee club as some cynics referred to it, voted the budget only every seven years and primarily debated issues. The Social Democratic Party was the largest party in the Parliament, but the institution was in truth merely a constitutional fig-leaf. The emperor chose his chancellor and his power rested, as it had for the nearly three centuries of Prussia’s existence, on the army and its officer corps, which the aristocracy still controlled.

In the dual monarchy Austria-Hungary, Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, who had reigned since the revolution of 1848, relied upon the imperial army and bureaucracy to hold together a sprawling realm of more than a hundred different nationalities and ethnic groups. The two parliaments were more – in German-dominated Austria – or less – in Magyar-dominated Hungary – based on popular suffrage. As one might imagine, dealing with one parliament was difficult enough; with two, a nightmare. Nevertheless, the unwieldy system creaked, or muddled, into the new century.

The Romanov dynasty in the person of Tsar Nicholas II, an autocrat, ruled the gigantic Russian Empire, sprawling across the continental heartland of Europe and Asia, swarming with nationalities. Tsar Nicholas had granted his people a representative assembly, or Duma, after an abortive revolution in 1905, but then rescinded most of what little power it had in the years to 1914. The tsar’s authority, like that of his German and Austro-Hungarian fellow rulers, rested primarily on his army and its aristocratic officer corps. The imperial army’s potentially gigantic reserves of manpower, embodied in the stolid Russian peasant, only some fifty years out of serfdom by 1914, established Russia as a great power.

The last power, often forgotten because of its decline during the 4nineteenth century, was another empire that spanned Europe and Asia, this time southern Europe and Asia Minor: the Ottoman Empire, the so-called “Sick Man of Europe.” However, it would be premature to declare the sick man dead, especially because a coup by the so-called “Young Turks” in 1908 had reinvigorated the ruling Ottoman elite.

The Ottomans’ decline did have a destabilizing effect on southeastern Europe. As the independent states Bulgaria, Rumania, and Serbia expelled and replaced their former overlords, the Ottoman Turks, the Balkans became a tinder-box. The Balkan states’ aspirations for further land and people, which invariably belonged to one another or to Austria-Hungary, conflicted with the strivings toward dominance in the Balkans of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, the former to become the patron of the Orthodox Slavs there, the latter to protect its integrity and maintain control over the Slavic peoples within its borders.

Discussion of the origins of the First World War should begin with the formation of the state which historians hold responsible for the war. In 1871 the Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy’s formidable Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck and army under the leadership of its Chief of the General Staff Gen. Helmuth von Moltke created the German Empire. In the 1860s Bismarck’s expert diplomacy isolated Prussia’s enemies, enabling the Prussian Army to win three wars quickly – against Denmark in 1864, against Austria in 1866, and against France in 1870–71. The unexpected and rapid appearance of this new industrial and military power in central Europe gave rise to a historical “German problem” because of its potential for destabilizing the balance of power in Europe.

In fact, the formation of the empire did not really create a “German problem.” For centuries wars had accomplished or accompanied the rise and fall of powers in the European system, many more catastrophic than the German wars of unification. Bismarck had actually ended the Franco–Prussian War before the Prussian Army could destroy France as Moltke desired. The “Iron Chancellor,” who would remain in charge of German policy from 1871 until 1890, was quite content with his creation, and Germany became the new fulcrum of the balance of power, the “balancer” in European international relationships. Bismarck kept defeated France in diplomatic isolation and allied with both Russia and Austria-Hungary, thereby checking their clashing interests in the Balkans, for which he cared not a whit, thus preserving both his new state and the peace in Europe. His focus on Europe and disinterest in naval and colonial affairs, increasingly rare by the 1880s, unfortunately accustomed the British, in their isolation from continental concerns and preoccupation with empire, to circumstances that could not endure. The world of the late nineteenth century was swiftly 5changing, not just in its rapid industrialization and urbanization, but also in its culture and international structure.

The second half of the nineteenth century was the time of “realist” or “scientific” doctrines, or at least doctrines that purported to be scientific. The nationalism, or devotion to the nation and to the sovereign state of that nation, of the third quarter of the nineteenth century had acquired “scientific” characteristics, exemplified by social Darwinism and “scientific” racism. These qualities transformed the liberal nationalism of the first half of the century, which had espoused the equality of different nationalities and their right to national self-determination, into a conservative doctrine proclaiming a hierarchy of nationalities and the superiority of one nation state to another. In the process nationalism became exclusive and chauvinist.

Social Darwinism left a legacy for theories of war and human aggression that interpreted war as a biological necessity and response to evolutionary pressures. Humans were pugnacious and competitive. Proponents literal-mindedly and often inappropriately applied the metaphors of relentless “struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest,” and “law of the jungle” to human conflict. Historian Paul Crook demonstrates that Darwinism equally supported such opposing ideas as “peace biology.”⁴ Yet the tenor of the times meant that on balance Darwinism buttressed bellicosity.

Ironically, while Darwin had propounded the mutability of species, scientific racism asserted not only the fixed characteristics and hierarchy of so-called races but also the importance of preventing miscegenation. The fear of inferior races either inbreeding with their betters or somehow conquering them proved rampant. Concerns for improvement of the race led to the rise of eugenics and proposals for weeding out its “weaker” members. The rise of “scientific” racism has proven an incredibly tenacious belief despite the absence of scientific evidence supporting it. At the turn of the twentieth century it rendered national differences more exaggerated and supremacist than had the liberal nationalism of the early nineteenth century, which had propounded the ideal of national self-determination. The nationalism of the late nineteenth century had become conservative, racist, and xenophobic.

Conservatism required a ruling class or elite. In the clearly defined hierarchy of traditional society, the aristocracy reigned over middle classes and then peasants at the bottom, and all “knew their place.” Women also knew their place in a patriarchal society, the few suffragettes of western Europe notwithstanding. Well-to-do women did not work, while working-class women did, either in domestic service or textile manufacture. The new working class, hated and feared by all the others, in part because the purportedly “scientific” socialism of Marx and Engels predicted that it would revolutionize society and make the other classes disappear, was unintegrated into the European society of the late nineteenth century. Another group of 6“outsiders,” defined not by class but by race and religion, posed an even greater threat in a racist era – Jews.

Anti-Semitism manifested itself across the face of Europe. The Dreyfus affair in the France of the 1890s, in which the only Jewish officer on the French General Staff found himself condemned for spying and sentenced to Devil’s Island on the flimsiest of evidence, was perhaps the most notorious single example of anti-Semitism. The army high command, backed by a rabidly racist rightist Parisian newspaper and Parisian mob, refused to exonerate Dreyfus long after evidence had proven him innocent. The civilian government ultimately pardoned Dreyfus and reinstated him in the army. In Russia anti-Jewish legislation had increased under Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, and the government instigated and participated in widespread and bloody pogroms against Jews from 1903 to 1906. By the turn of the century, universities in Germany and Austria-Hungary were hotbeds of anti-Semitism. In Vienna, where the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party reigned and the citizens elected political anti-Semite Karl Lueger mayor of Vienna five times, anti-Semitic Pan-Germanism was immensely popular with university students. Such rampant anti-Semitism epitomized the xenophobic and illiberal epoch.

Anti-Semitism prevailed not only in Europe, but also in the Herrenvolk or white supremacist democracies, such as the United States, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, that had sprung from it. In the United States, for example, famed automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was a rabid anti-Semite who freely disseminated copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document allegedly proving Jewish plans for world domination. The so-called “white” races defined Jews and blacks as inferior and dangerous, to bar, subjugate, subordinate, banish, or exterminate. Such racism led to Kaiser Wilhelm’s warning against the “yellow peril” after Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, a sentiment readily echoed and acted upon across the western world. The United States and Canada, for example, sought to ban Asian immigration. The Japanese perception of a “white” peril in Asia reflected their concern with European and American penetration of China. The end of the nineteenth century was thus a rabidly racist era that set the tone for and planted the roots of twentieth-century war and genocide.

In the 1880s a new epoch began, the era of “new imperialism,” in which primarily European powers expanded their power and dominion exponentially over the globe. The reasons and justifications varied: economic, such as the pursuit of wealth and markets; geopolitical, or the strategic value of certain territories; and political and ideological, in the push to increase national prestige. European states, endowed with “surplus” population, superior technology, and naval power, conquered and then colonized the rest of the globe, particularly in Africa and Asia. Although many of the colonies brought no economic advantage, such as additional markets or raw materials 7for the capitalist economies of the colonizing powers to exploit, the exploiters and contemporary observers often persisted in perceiving the drive for colonies in terms of economic advantage. Great Britain and France led in this conquest of new empires, while even lesser European states such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal participated in the grab for power. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States in the Americas and in the Pacific, and Japan on the Asian continent had joined the race for empire.

This new imperialism grew from, and in turn enhanced, racist nationalism prevalent in Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The conquered and subject peoples became evidence of the racial and moral superiority of the European conqueror...