Lord Beaverbrook's Fabrications in Politicians and the War, 1914–1916

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
First World War ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Commons ◽  
First World

In spite of occasional protests Lord Beaverbrook's narrative of British domestic politics during the first world war seems to retain the authority of a primary source. This is particularly true of the passages in Politicians and the war, 1914–1916 which cover the events in which he, then Sir Max Aitken, claimed to have taken an influential part. Mr A. J. P. Taylor in his appraisal of Beaverbrook's second volume covering the fall of Asquith in 1916 declares: ‘ It provides essential testimony for events during a great political crisis — perhaps the most detailed account of such a crisis ever written from the inside... The narrative is carried along by rare zest and wit, yet with the detached impartiality of the true scholar. ‘ Beaverbrook's apparent advantages might well seem conclusive. He was a contemporary agent as well as observer, summed up in his jaunty ‘ I was there!’. He was supposed to have enjoyed the complete confidence of Bonar Law, to have run a newspaper and to have kept a diary. An M.P. and virtual parliamentary private secretary to Bonar Law, whose rise to the Commons party leadership he appeared to have engineered, Aitken could be presumed to be politically on the ‘inside’. A tycoon of Canadian business ‘mergers’ and a self-made millionaire at a young age, he was esteemed by Law to be one of the cleverest men he knew.

scholarly journals Regent Alexander Karadjordjevic in the First World War

Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 191-217
Author(s):  
Dragan Bakic
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
First World War ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Political Factor ◽  
World War ◽  
Chief Of Staff ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Commander In Chief ◽  
First World

This paper analyses the role played by Regent Alexander Karadjordjevic in Serbia?s politics and military effort during the First World War. He assumed the position of an heir-apparent somewhat suddenly in 1909, and then regency, after a political crisis that made his father King Peter I transfer his royal powers to Prince Alexander just days before the outbreak of the war. At the age of twenty-six, Alexander was going to lead his people and army through unprecedented horrors. The young Regent proved to be a proper soldier, who suffered personally, along with his troops, the agonising retreat through Albania in late 1915 and early 1916, and spared no effort to ensure the supplies for the exhausted rank and file of the army. He also proved to be a ruler of great personal ambitions and lack of regard for constitutional boundaries of his position. Alexander tried to be not just a formal commander-in-chief of his army, but also to take over operational command; he would eventually manage to appoint officers to his liking to the positions of the Chief of Staff and Army Minister. He also wanted to remove Nikola Pasic from premiership and facilitate the formation of a cabinet amenable to his wishes, but he did not proceed with this, as the Entente Powers supported the Prime Minister. Instead, Alexander joined forces with Pasic to eliminate the Black Hand organization, a group of officers hostile both to him and the Prime Minister, in the well-known show trial in Salonika in 1917. The victories of the Serbian army in 1918 at the Salonika front led to the liberation of Serbia and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), while Alexander emerged as the most powerful political factor in the new state.

War and Punishment; The Causes of War Termination and the First World War. By Hein E. Goemans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 355p. $49.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 517-518
Author(s):  
D. Scott Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Termination ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Causes Of War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Political Environments ◽  
First World

Hein Goemans develops and tests a rationalist model of war termination that incorporates domestic politics, focusing on leader tenure and survival in expected postwar political environments. The book is one of a growing number of works that look beyond the initiation of conflict to its conclusion, examine the dynamics of conflict over time, and incorporate domestic political factors through a multimethod analysis.

scholarly journals Organization of the Police of the Russian Empire during the First World War

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Александр Касьянов ◽  
Aleksandr Kasyanov ◽  
Андрей Удальцов ◽  
Andrei Udaltsov ◽  
Елена Новопавловская ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
First World

The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the work of the police of the Russian Empire in the period of acute domestic political crisis. Analysis of the experience of police reorganization and evaluation of the effectiveness of the reforms in the period under review are undoubtedly important for both historical and legal science and practical activities of modern internal Affairs bodies, since the quality and results of such work depend on the state of public order. The aim of the study is to study on the basis of historical, structural, functional and other methods of scientific knowledge of the organizational structure of the police, its changes in wartime. On the basis of the obtained results it is concluded that the task of the wartime activities of the police in the present historical period has been significantly transformed, however, taken measures to strengthen the police force proved insufficient to radically change its work, in consequence of which she was unable properly to combat rising crime, to counter the growing disorganization of society.

Anti-Alienism and the Primrose League: The Externalization of the Postwar Crisis in Great Britain 1918-32

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (02) ◽  
pp. 243-269
Author(s):  
Matthew Hendley
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
First World War ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
Iron And Steel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
First World ◽  
General Strike

Anti-alienism has frequently been the dark underside of organized patriotic movements in twentieth-century Britain. Love of nation has all too frequently been accompanied by an abstract fear of foreigners or a concrete dislike of alien immigrants residing in Britain. Numerous patriotic leagues have used xenophobia and the supposed threat posed by aliens to define themselves and their Conservative creed. Aliens symbolized “the other,” which held values antithetical to members of the patriotic leagues. These currents have usually become even more pronounced in times of tension and crisis. From the end of the First World War through the 1920s, Britain suffered an enormous economic, social, and political crisis. British unemployment never fell below one million as traditional industries such as coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, and textiles declined. Electoral reform in 1918 and 1928 quadrupled the size of the electorate, and the British party system fractured with the Liberals divided and Labour becoming the alternative party of government. Industrial unrest was rampant, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. The example of the Russian Revolution inspired many on the Left and appalled their opponents on the Right, while many British Conservatives felt that fundamental aspects of the existing system of capitalism and parliamentary democracy were under challenge.

scholarly journals The Guesdists and the Small Farmer: Early Erosion of French Marxism

1961 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-225
Author(s):  
Carl Landauer
Keyword(s):  
Labor Unions ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Small Farmer ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
First World

The internal conflicts of the socialist movement before 1914 grew out of the antagonism between orthodox Marxists and reformist Socialists, or were at least closely related to that antagonism, as for instance the conflict between the labor unions and the party leadership in Germany in 1905–6. This running battle of pre-war days, which set the scene for the splitting of the movement during the first World War, reached its most spectacular expression in Germany in Bebel's attack on the Revisionists at the Dresden party convention of 1903. But the conflict unfolded first in France, and it was in France rather than in Germany that the fundamental issues were posited most clearly. In 1882, nine years before Georg von Vollmar in his “Eldorado” addresses in Munich started the revolt of the German Revisionists and fourteen years before Eduard Bernstein in his “Evolutionary Socialism” published the first comprehensive exposition of Revisionist ideas, Paul Brousse broke with the Marxist leaders, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, whom he forced out of the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France, thus transforming the latter into a Possibilist party, whereas the expelled Marxists formed the Parti ouvrier. Even the debates at Dresden – and subsequently at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam – developed from a French issue – namely, the acceptance of a position in a liberal cabinet by the French reformist, Alexandre Millerand.

scholarly journals Culture and Colonialism: The 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in Egypt

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Karma Sami ◽  
Monika Smialkowska
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
Complex Response ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
First World

AbstractThe 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 1916 coincided with an unprecedented political crisis across the globe. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought to the fore the ambitions of the established and would-be colonial powers, conflicts between and within existing nation states, and disenfranchised groups’ aspirations for self-determination. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how the 1916 Shakespearean commemorations in countries such as Britain, Germany, Ireland, and the USA registered these political upheavals. However, research into the Shakespeare Tercentenary has so far neglected Egypt’s complex response to the occasion. Amidst developing political tensions, which were to culminate in the Revolution of 1919, Egyptian intellectuals nevertheless chose to commemorate Shakespeare’s Tercentenary. These commemorations, however, were marked by ambivalence: while expressing admiration for Shakespeare, Egyptian commentators questioned the appropriateness of celebrating an English writer instead of promoting Egypt’s, and the Arabs’, own national literature. This chapter examines the manifestations of these conflicting feelings, ranging from the heated press debates surrounding the occasion, through Cairo University’s celebrations, to tributes published by individual intellectuals, such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Mohammed Hafiz Ibrahim. In doing so, the chapter explores the ambiguities created by celebrating a cultural anniversary at a historical moment fraught with acute colonial tensions.

scholarly journals Transformations of the Language of Diplomatic Correspondence between the Entente Countries and Germany before The First World War

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-397
Author(s):  
Yevgeniy Yu. Medvedev ◽  
Lauzin Duborgel Ntsiwou Batiako
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
World War ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Special Degree ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Everyday Communication ◽  
First World

The spheres of official communication, which include public administration, legal proceedings, legislation, etc., are regulated, in contrast to everyday communication. Activities in each of these spheres are subject to precisely defined, strictly established rules that regulate and legitimize it. The diplomatic language is characterized by a special degree of regulation. “The weight of a word” in international politics is extremely heavy, since the fate of entire states and peoples may depend on successful or unsuccessful communication between diplomats. The strict standardization of the diplomatic language should serve as a kind of deterrent against the growth of tension in international relations. The goal of this study is to identify the degree of susceptibility of the diplomatic correspondence language to transformations in the political crisis context (during wartime). The research material is based on the texts from the Orange book, a collection of diplomatic correspondence between warring countries before the outbreak of the First World War. The application of the contextual analysis method made it possible to determine the vector of changes in the diplomatic correspondence language caused by the political crisis: from restraint, emotionlessness, tact and politeness accepted in the diplomatic sphere to ultimatumness, categoricalness, manifestation of emotions and deviation from the principle of objective reflection of events.

scholarly journals POSTAL CORRESPONDENCE OF AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN AND GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR OF THE OMSK MILITARY DISTRICT AS A SOURCE FOR STUDYING THE CONDITIONS OF THEIR DETENTION IN CAPTIVITY

Rusin ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 97-119
Author(s):  
B.K. Dulatov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Source ◽  
First World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Social Adaptation ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World

Drawing on the archives, the author analyses the reports of military censorship commission members, whose official function was to systematise and analyse the personal correspondence of Austro-Hungarian and German prisoners of the First World War. The letters of soldiers and officers to their families and friends are reflective of the captivity hardships they had to face in the Russian camps. Of particular scientific interest is the information about their daily life, political stance, contacts with the locals and social adaptation. The author describes different attitudes of the prisoners of war to their conditions and new social status, focusing on a range of emotions of the individual prinsoners of war reported about by the military censors. Written personal correspondence is a unique primary source for studying the past. Thus, the analysis of archival documents provides the information about different reactions of prisoners of war to the same historical event. Such a variety of opinions contributes to the comparative analysis aimed at establishing the truth. New archival documents introduced by the author into the academic circulation supplement the data about the conditions of prisoners of the First World War, namely those dispersed in the Omsk military district in the summer of 1917.

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