scholarly journals World War I and the Rise of African Nationalism: Nigerian Veterans as Catalysts of Change

1982 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
James K. Matthews

The enlistment and conscription of combatants and non-combatants in Nigeria during World War I represented an unprecedented mobilisation of the country's labour force. In September 1914, the Nigeria Regiment supplied shock troops for the Cameroons Expeditionary Force, and in December 1917 the Nigeria Overseas Contingent entered the campaign in Tanganyika. By September 1919, when Nigeria's military recruitment drive ended, 17,000 combatants, 2,000 enlisted carriers, and some 35,000 non-enlisted carriers had participated in the Southern Caméroons and German East Africa campaigns. In addition, the British recruited thousands of Nigerians for military service along Nigeria's northern and eastern borders, and for related duties inside the country.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 2158-2161

Development features of peasant household of some Russian provinces during World War I are described in the paper. World War I had a great impact on Russian agriculture. Military recruitment, requisition of horses and cattle, lack of agricultural tools, machines and fertilizers, transport difficulties had a negative impact on agriculture. About 7.5 million people were taken from agriculture in the first year of war. About 6 million of people were called on military service in the second and third year. As a result, a large number of households were without male work power. Women, old men and teenagers had a major role in agriculture due to a lack of male work power. Agriculture lost a great number of horses. They were taken into the army. 3167 thousand of horses were in the army according to records for September 1, 1917. This is 10% of all livestock of horses in the country. A large number of cattle were confiscated during the war. This had a great impact on agriculture of the southern and western provinces. A great requisition was in middle-class households and in poor households. However, despite a number of negative economic factors connected with the war, country economy had necessary human resources, material and technical resources, showing steady increase in work productivity and crop yield. Political events of critical period in the history of Russia in the beginning of the 20th century showed that the country was dependent on the peasantry. It was because the peasantry was the majority of population. Rural and army support played a great role in a victory of the Left in revolutionary events of 1917 and the subsequent Civil war. Agrarian revolution showed that Russian peasantry resolved complex problems of agrarian development by confiscatory and distributive actions. It was called «Black Repartition» in Russia.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Michael Pesek

This article describes the little-known history of military labor and transport during the East African campaign of World War I. Based on sources from German, Belgian, and British archives and publications, it considers the issue of military transport and supply in the thick of war. Traditional histories of World War I tend to be those of battles, but what follows is a history of roads and footpaths. More than a million Africans served as porters for the troops. Many paid with their lives. The organization of military labor was a huge task for the colonial and military bureaucracies for which they were hardly prepared. However, the need to organize military transport eventually initiated a process of modernization of the colonial state in the Belgian Congo and British East Africa. This process was not without backlash or failure. The Germans lost their well-developed military transport infrastructure during the Allied offensive of 1916. The British and Belgians went to war with the question of transport unresolved. They were unable to recruit enough Africans for military labor, a situation made worse by failures in the supplies by porters of food and medical care. One of the main factors that contributed to the success of German forces was the Allies' failure in the “war of legs.”


Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich

This chapter provides the biographical and historical context necessary for understanding Fraenkel and his time. The analysis is organized into three sections: his early years, the Weimar Years, and the Nazi years. In the first section, I trace Fraenkel’s upbringing in a secular household influenced by the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah; explore the origins of his life-long predilection for social democracy; and recount the intellectual effects of his military service in World War I. In the second section, I reconstruct Fraenkel’s education and socialization as a young lawyer and interpret Fraenkel’s most important Weimar-era writings. I explicate the roles they played in preparing the ground for the writing of The Dual State. In the third section, finally, I commence my analysis of Fraenkel’s Nazi-era thought and conduct up until his escape to freedom in 1938.


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
Dorothea McEwan

Abstract This article attempts to throw a light on Warburg’s little-known engagement in political caricature during World War I. Though deemed unfit for military service, Warburg was eager to contribute to the German war effort. Perceiving Allied war propaganda as anti-German lies, he recorded what he considered its half-truths and falsehoods in his Kriegskartothek, or war archive. But Warburg, as indicated by his involvement with the short-lived La Guerra del 1914: Rivista illustrata in the early stages of the war, kept looking for a more active role in influencing public opinion: From privately commenting on the output of the Allied press, he went on to offering his own ideas for political caricatures to leading artists like Olaf Gulbransson and Max Slevogt, and to well-established satirical journals such as Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch.


Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.


Author(s):  
Robert W. Baloh

As the conflict in Adam Politzer’s clinic heated up and with the approach of World War I, Robert Bárány volunteered for service in the army medical corps, in keeping with his pacifist ideas. Although he could have been excused from military service because of his ankylosed knee, Bárány was swept up in the wave of patriotism prevalent in Vienna. He was immediately assigned as an army surgeon to a hospital in the fortress of Przemysl near the Russian border. Przemysl was eventually overrun by Russian troops, and Bárány was transported along with more than 100,000 other prisoners in cattle cars across the Russian steppe to Turkistan. It was during his stay in Russia that Bárány received the exciting news from the Swedish minister in St. Petersburg that he had been awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the caloric reaction.


Author(s):  
Mia Fuller

Italian colonial architecture began with styles directly transplanted from Italy to Eritrea—Italy’s first African colonial territory—in the 1890s. By the late 1920s, when Italy also held Libya and Italian Somalia, it had already created a substantial set of buildings (cathedrals and banks, for instance) in any number of unmodified Italian styles ranging from the classical to the neo-medieval and neo-Renaissance. Moorish (or “Oriental”) effects were also abundant, in another transplant from Europe, where they were extremely popular. Following the rise of design innovations after World War I, though, at the end of the 1920s, Italian Modernist architects—particularly the theoretically inclined Rationalists—began to protest. In conjunction with the fascist regime’s heavy investment in farming settlements, prestigious city centers, and new housing, architecture proliferated further, increasingly incorporating Rationalist design, which was the most thoughtfully syncretistic, aiming as it did to reflect particular sites while remaining Modernist. After Ethiopia was occupied in 1936, designers’ emphasis gravitated from the particulars of design theory to the wider canvas of city planning, which was driven by new ideas of racial segregation for colonial prestige and control.


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