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.

Life conditions of Turkish prisoners on nargin island during the first world war

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (08) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Джамиля Яшар гызы Рустамова ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Caspian Sea ◽  
First World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Caspian Sea ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
First World

The article is dedicated to the matter of Turkish prisoners on the Nargin Island in the Caspian Sea during the First World War. According to approximate computations, there were about 50-60 thousand people of Turkish captives in Russia. Some of them were sent to Baku because of the close location to the Caucasus Front and from there they were sent to the Nargin Island in the Caspian Sea. As time showed it was not the right choise. The Island had no decent conditions for living and turned the life of prisoners into the hell camp. Hastily built barracks contravene meet elementary standards, were poorly heated and by the end of the war they were not heated at all, water supply was unsatisfactory, sometimes water was not brought to the prisoner's several days. Bread was given in 100 grams per person per day, and then this rate redused by half. Knowing the plight of the prisoners, many citizens of Baku as well as the Baku Muslim Charitable Society and other charitable societies provided moral and material support to prisoners, they often went to the camp, brought food, clothes, medicines Key words: World War I, prisoners of war, Nargin Island, refugees, incarceration conditions, starvation, charity

scholarly journals British Right-Wing Anti-semitism, 1918-1930.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Oliver Brown
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
First World

This thesis investigates the prevalence of anti-Semitism in the British right-wing between the years of 1918 and 1930. It aims to redress the imbalance of studies on interwar British right-wing anti-Semitism that are skewed towards the 1930s, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. This thesis is the first to focus exclusively on the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the rest of the 1920s, to demonstrate how interwar British right-wing anti-Semitism was not an isolated product of the 1930s. This work shows that anti-Semitism was endemic throughout much of the right-wing in early interwar Britain but became pushed further away from the mainstream as the decade progressed. This thesis adopts a comparative approach of comparing the actions and ideology of different sections of the British right-wing. The three sections that it is investigating are the “mainstream”, the “anti-alien/anti-Bolshevik” right and the “Jewish-obsessive” fringe. This comparative approach illustrates the types of anti-Semitism that were widespread throughout the British right-wing. Furthermore, it demonstrates which variants of anti-Semitism remained on the fringes. This thesis will steer away from only focusing on the virulently anti-Semitic, fringe organisations. The overemphasis on peripheral figures and openly fascistic groups when historians have glanced back at the 1920s helped lead to an exaggerated view that Britain was a tolerant haven in historiographical pieces, at least up until the 1980s. This thesis is using a wide range of primary sources, that are representative of the different sections of the British right-wing.

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.

The Nationalization of the Masses

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick ◽  
Nicholas Doumanis
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Masses ◽  
First World

Europe was a continent of nation states by the mid-twentieth century. But it was not always thus. The patchwork quilt of nation states and the nationalism that coloured them in were forged by massive social and political shifts that had been gathering momentum since the late nineteenth century. Viewing nations and nationalism as constructs of modern, global capitalism, often legitimated by national mythologies old and new, this chapter surveys the forces at work: from above and below, from centre and periphery. The First World War raised nationalism to white heat, and as multi-ethnic empires faltered, myriad subaltern nationalisms erupted, demanding ‘self-determination’, the watchword of the post-war peace settlements. But the war also unleashed internationalist class challenges to belligerent nationalism, culminating in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Thereafter, European nationalism assumed its most truculent guise: fascism and military dictatorships warring against class in the name of ethnic, national, and biological purity.

‘The first of the small nations’: the significance of central European small states in Irish nationalist political rhetoric, 1918–22

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (165) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Lili Zách
Keyword(s):  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
First World War ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Small States ◽  
World War ◽  
Central European ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
First World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractOffering new insights into Irish links with the wider world, this article explores and contextualises Irish nationalist perceptions of and links with central European small states in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The belief that any small nation like Ireland, oppressed by a dominant neighbour, had the right to self-determination was of key importance in nationalist political rhetoric during the revolutionary years. Given the similarity of circumstances among newly independent small states, Irish commentators were aware of the struggles Ireland shared with the successors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Personal encounters on the continent, as well as news regarding small nations in central Europe, shaped Irish opinions of the region. Certainly, the images presented by Irish commentators reflected their own political agendas and were therefore often deliberately idealistic. Nonetheless, they served a specific purpose as they were meant to further Ireland's interest on the international stage. Looking beyond Ireland for lessons and examples to follow became a frequent part of Irish nationalist political rhetoric. By directing scholarly attention to a hitherto less explored aspect of Irish historiography, this article aims to highlight the complexity of Ireland's connection with the continent within the framework of small nations, from a transnational perspective.

The British Army and Internal Security 1919–1939

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Jeffery
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
First World War ◽  
Military Policy ◽  
World War ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Civil Disorder ◽  
First World ◽  
General Strike ◽  
Made In

Systematic military policy-making towards internal security in Great Britain dates from the period immediately following the First World War. It was stimulated above all by widespread fears of possible revolution, sharpened by a belief in the collective incapacity of police forces to deal with civil disorder. Many, although by no means all, politicians and senior officials felt that the labour militancy of the 1920s was simply the harbinger of ‘red’ revolt, and preparations were made accordingly. Following the trade unions’ defeat in the general strike of 1926 fears of revolution subsided, although the War Office continued to revise the plans it had made in the early 1920s. Throughout the entire inter-war period, nevertheless, the general staff displayed an extreme reluctance to commit the army to internal security duties. Almost without exception, it seems, military men shared Lord Ironside’s opinion that ‘for a soldier there is no more distasteful duty than that of aiding the Civil Power’.

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.

Institutional reversals and economic growth: Palestine 1516–1948

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW SCHEIN
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Private Property ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The People ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
First World

Abstract:This study examines the type and quality of institutions in Palestine and the correlation between the institutions and economic growth in Palestine from 1516 to 1948. Initially in the 16th century, with the Ottoman conquest of the area, institutions in Palestine involved de facto private user-rights. The level of expropriation by elites was low, and this enabled the people to develop the lands that they had acquired the right to cultivate. In the 17th and 18th centuries, with the exception of the Galilee in the middle of the 18th century, institutions became extractive due to tax farming, rapacious governors and Bedouin raids. From the middle of the 19th century until 1948, there was a second reversal back to private property institutions, first slowly until the First World War, and then more rapidly under the British Mandate after the First World War. When there were private property institutions the economy prospered, while when there were extractive institutions, the economy stagnated.

Archaeology and contemporaneousness

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-31
Author(s):  
Laurent Olivier
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
World War ◽  
Morphological Attributes ◽  
Archaeological Object ◽  
20Th Century History ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology. For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.

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