World War I

A Short History

Tammy M. Proctor

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118951903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

A lively, engaging history of The Great War written for a new generation of readers

In recent years, scholarship on World War I has turned from a fairly narrow focus on military tactics, weaponry, and diplomacy to incorporate considerations of empire, globalism, and social and cultural history. This concise history of the first modern, global war helps to further broaden the focus typically provided in World War I surveys by challenging popular myths and stereotypes to provide a new, engaging account of The Great War.

The conventional World War I narrative that has evolved over the past century is that of an inevitable but useless war, where men were needlessly slaughtered due to poor decisions by hidebound officers. This characterization developed out of a narrow focus on the Western Front promulgated mainly by British historians. In this book, Professor Proctor provides a broader, more multifaceted historical narrative including perspectives from other fronts and spheres of interest and a wider range of participants. She also draws on recent scholarship to consider the gendered aspect of war and the ways in which social class, religion, and cultural factors shaped experiences and memories of the war.

• Structured chronologically to help convey a sense of how the conflict evolved
• Each chapter considers a key interpretive question, encouraging readers to examine the extent to which the war was total, modern, and global
• Challenges outdated stereotypes created through a focus on the Western Front
• Considers the war in light of recent scholarship on empire, global history, gender, and culture
• Explores ways in which the war and the terms of peace shaped the course of the 20 th century

World War I: A Short History is sure to become required reading in undergraduate survey courses on WWI, as well as courses in military history, the 20 th century world, or the era of the World Wars.

1
Why and How Did War Break Out in Summer 1914?

Figure 1.1 The war began with an assassination in Sarajevo, but the first fighting of the war occurred in Belgrade, Serbia. In this photo Serb children “play soldier” in their wartime nation.

Source: Imperial War Museum.

Who Started the War?

This question is at the heart of one of the biggest debates in modern history, one which has been raging almost since World War I began more than 100 years ago. The question of war blame sparks emotion, nationalism, and shame, but it is not the most important way to understand the war. Instead, scholars and students of history should focus on a different question about the war’s origins, namely: How and why was a global, total, modern war possible in 1914? Rather than considering who is responsible for the war’s outbreak, students must think about how a local assassination turned into a global conflict, and they must imagine “the journeys travelled by the key decision‐makers.”

Perhaps the single most important thing to remember about the world in 1914 is that it was full of nation‐states and nations seeking to become states. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution gave rise to understandings of a “nation” as an entity composed of people who belonged together and who shared a sense of identity. In turn, these ideas helped create radical notions that power belonged to the people and that political decision‐making should reflect the common good. Of course this raised a central question, namely what makes a group of people belong to each other? In response to that question, men and women sought to understand their lives in relationship to the markers of their identities: language, culture, religion, ethnicity. People differentiated between the state where they were official subjects and the nation to which they truly belonged. For instance, a Czech speaker might live in the Habsburg Empire but secretly dream of a Czech nation‐state. In other words, nationalism arose to challenge the authorities of states and empires, and by 1914, nationalism was undermining many of the traditional powers in Europe and around the world.

This new understanding of a nation defined citizens as people with responsibilities to those who shared their “nation,” which meant that the privileges of political participation came with the need for defense of those principles. By 1914, true nation‐states had citizen armies to fight wars, and most early twentieth‐century states conscripted or drafted these citizens to fight when the need arose. Multinational empires understood the simmering tensions of nationalism within their midst, and sometimes these states only called up citizens they thought might be loyal. Other states relied on voluntary enlistment but still framed their call to arms as a national duty and stigmatized those men who refused to fight.

Nationalism was not the only defining factor for the political powers of 1914, most of whom were empires of either land or sea. Identities transformed through such imperial conquest as well. A nationalist leader such as Mohandis Gandhi (1869–1948) built his ideology through contact not only with his place of birth in India, but through his imperial education in Britain and his early work experience in South Africa. In other imperial settings, people faced the creation of new national or ethnic identities based on the classification and boundaries designed by imperialist officials. In South Africa, for instance, officials created legislation that marginalized leaders, expropriated land, and renamed societies such as the Zulu or the Basotho, lumping them together despite historic enmity. Even those states that were not directly under imperial control, such as China or Mexico, often saw their choices regarding trade and foreign policy severely limited by the intrusions of great powers.

From the British Empire’s control of a quarter of the globe by 1914 to the Russian Empire’s massive contiguous land empire, a few states controlled the destinies of many of the world’s people. Imperialism created unequal relationships that helped shape not only the Great War but especially its aftermath. Map 1.1 shows a snapshot of the world in 1914 as a guide. When colonies and dependencies form part of the figures, small European states such as Britain counted massive populations and land areas in their total numbers. Appendix 1.1 at the end of this chapter provides a brief comparison of the main empires of 1914 and sets the stage for discussion of the war.

As a way of understanding the powerful states, their allies, their enemies, and those marginalized by these imperial politics, let’s embark on a grand tour of the world in 1914.

A Grand Tour of 1914

A traveler wanting to circumnavigate the world in spring 1914 would probably use many of the same conveyances that the fictional character Phileas Fogg utilized forty years earlier in Jules Verne’s popular novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Horse‐drawn vehicles, steamships, coal‐fueled steam railways, and small boats still featured prominently in the lives of travelers in the early twentieth century. However, newer contraptions had also made an appearance on the scene—streetcars, subways, and automobiles, as well as airplanes and zeppelins. To traverse the empires of the world, a traveler moved between the conveyances of the past and the machines of the future, from hiking in rugged terrain with animal pack trains to whizzing through urban streets in an automobile. A traveler had to be prepared for extremes of heat and cold and for long delays. This global journey might begin with a boat ride down the Thames River.

United Kingdom

London in 1914 was a metropole that served as a shipping, insurance, and banking capital for the largest overseas empire in the world. From a dock at Westminster pier near the Houses of Parliament, political hub and legislature of one of the world’s most successful constitutional monarchies, our traveler (imagine that it is Phileas Fogg repeating his journey) would float past teeming wharves full of imperial commerce toward the maritime center of Greenwich, a sleepy suburb just east of the City of London. The British metropolis marked time for the globe in 1914. Since 1884 Greenwich had served as the divider between east and west, the home of the Prime Meridian, the standard for Greenwich Mean Time, and the location of 0° longitude. Shipping charts, international time standards, rail timetables, and astronomical calculations revolved around this suburb of London and its Royal Observatory perched on a hill above the river. The observant traveler might also spend a little time walking under the River Thames in the state‐of‐the‐art foot tunnel that opened in 1902, little imagining that this space would serve as a bomb shelter for civilians during the war to come.

Embarking again downriver, passengers might glimpse the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, which would employ nearly 40 000 munitions works by 1917. As the riverboat headed toward the English coast, Fogg might take note of volunteers training in military maneuvers in a nearby field, as part of their service in the Territorial Force. With no widespread system of conscription, Britain’s small professional army relied upon the idea that if a war came, lightly trained volunteers would step up to contribute. The last major town the passengers might notice before heading into the marshy expanse leading to the English Channel would be Tilbury on the north shore, a fort town that became a gathering place for horses destined for war service in Europe. Fogg and his companions could have still traveled further down the river in the spring of 1914, but during the war a bridge of boats blocked access at Tilbury and allowed for passage of troops across the river.

Travelers had a decision to make at this point about their next destination. For those people wanting to cross the Channel to Europe in 1914, boats left from several smaller ports on Britain’s east coast. Britain was a nation of ports, with a rich naval and shipbuilding history. If Fogg had instead sought passage across the Atlantic, he might have traveled by train to the larger ports such as Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, Bristol, Plymouth, Southampton, or Newcastle to board a large liner, such as the RMS Lusitania, one of the Cunard line’s most luxurious and speedy passenger ships that had been sailing the Atlantic for seven years. Ireland’s ports, which not only served as conduits for passengers and goods arriving from around the world, were also a possible point of embarkation. In fact some of the newest and best liners were assembled in shipbuilding centers such as Belfast. With a successful test of Marconi’s wireless in 1898 on the northern Irish coast, ship‐to‐shore and ship‐to‐ship communication became a reality as well. The ships docking in Belfast and Liverpool came from ports all over the globe, carrying beef from Argentina, gold from South Africa, grain from the Un...