Fighting for the Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-42
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Cook

Abstract While the Canadian Corps earned a reputation as one of the finest fighting formations on the Western Front during the First World War, and had an efficient publicity machine under the guiding hand of Lord Beaverbrook to propagate their deeds, the Canadian government was slow to codify this reputation in postwar historical texts. The Official History was delayed for nearly two decades and veterans were bitterly disappointed in being denied a comprehensive account of their battles. As a result, regiments took it upon themselves to craft their own histories. Although now largely ignored by historians, this genre of historical writing documented the actions of the unit during the war and served as a tool to commemorate fallen comrades. The regimental histories are important texts within the canon of Canadian military historiography, offering matchless insight into the events and social history of the Great War, as well as into the post-war efforts of combatants and their families to find meaning for this cataclysmic event.


Balcanica ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 357-390
Author(s):  
Milovan Pisarri

Since sufferings of civilian populations during the First World War in Europe, especially war crimes perpetrated against civilians, have - unlike the political and military history of the Great War - only recently become an object of scholarly interest, there still are considerable gaps in our knowledge, the Balkans being a salient example. Therefore, suggesting a methodology that involves a comparative approach, the use of all available sources, cooperation among scholars from different countries and attention to the historical background, the paper seeks to open some questions and start filling lacunae in our knowledge of the war crimes perpetrated against Serb civilians as part of the policy of Bulgarization in the portions of Serbia under Bulgarian military occupation.


Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee

The First World War came at a crucial time when British women's suffrage campaigns were gathering momentum throughout the country. The culmination of the movement during these years, in spite of various social and political differences, enhanced female solidarity and political consciousness to a considerable degree. Hectic political activism also witnessed a phenomenal rise and propagation of an exclusive and extraordinary women's culture. The onset of the Great War however, struck a fatal blow to such an unprecedented female camaraderie and political conviction. My proposed chapter traces and gathers evidences in women's verse written during this time period extending from the pre-war years of the suffrage movement to the early years of the post-war demobilisation correlating them with some of the major developments in women's socio-political history of the period.


2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mcguire

Born to privilege in Boston, Frances Webster, like her peers volunteered overseas with the American Red Cross as a nurse's aide. Where the activities of other Americans during the First World War is characterized as a “culture of coercive volunterism,” Webster's reflected a more complex mixture of altruism and tourism. Her history of participation in the First World War suggests historians need more multifaceted frameworks to explain Americans' First World War service.


Author(s):  
O. S. Nagornaia ◽  
◽  
Y. A. Golubinov ◽  

A lacuna that clearly needs to be filled and remains among various topics of the ecological history of the First World War is the Eastern front theme. The authors of this historiographical essay attempt to analyze various papers and monographs on the ecological history of the First World War, such as works on ecological history and history of technologies, works on socio- and cultural-ecological aspects of the Great War, as well as publications on the experience of military occupation at the Eastern Front and its impact on the ecosystems of different regions. A critical analysis of the achievements and limitations of modern historiography allow the authors to emphasize thematic fields of perspective research. The authors notice that the Eastern front is still obscure and largely ignored by English-speaking scholars. The historiography includes a wide variety of thematic fields. Most of them are related to environmental changes in West European war theatre, as well as in colonial landscapes. Such a view deforms the general picture of the Great War. So, the reconstruction of the military impact on the landscapes of the Eastern front, attempts to economically organize the war space by different armies on the same territories, as well as the transformations of local population's management practice, seem to correct the idea of the universality of the Western front processes and phenomena.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document