Colonialism and Contested Cultures of Victory in the French Empire of the 1920s

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 759-779
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett

More than any other belligerent power, France relied heavily on the contribution of her colonies during the First World War. Thus, the triumph over the Central Powers and the culture(s) of victory which emerged from it were undeniably ‘imperial’. But what did this mean for the postwar Empire? This article explores the extent to which victory was a disruptive force in France's Empire. It examines how actors of all ideological, social and ethnic backgrounds from across France's colonies articulated their own visions of how victory in the First World War should shape the future of the Empire. It considers their attempts to place the war into their broader narratives of the Empire, past, present and future and thus impose their own ideas of what a just postwar imperial order should look like. Drawing on examples from across the Empire, it underlines the extent to which victory in the First World War gave rise to competing and often opposing demands for a new settlement among colonial administrators, colonial citizens and colonial subjects. In doing so, it teases out the contradictory role played by imperial cultures of victory in simultaneously facilitating contestation of the colonial system and limiting the radicalism of such challenges to Empire.

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (8) ◽  
pp. 274-275
Author(s):  
Wyn Beasley

Arthur Porritt, whose adventures, accolades and achievements spanned the globe, was both a surgeon himself and the son of a surgeon. His father, Ernest Edward Porritt, qualified in Edinburgh, became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1898, and practised in Wanganui in new zealand, where Arthur was born on 10 August 1900. His mother, Ivy McKenzie, died in 1914, when Arthur was in his first year at Wanganui Collegiate School; and when his father shortly went overseas to serve in the First World War, the boy became a boarder. The future Olympian distinguished himself as athletics champion, a member of the First XV and a prefect; and for a year after leaving school himself, he taught at a boys' school.


2006 ◽  
Vol 134 (Suppl. 2) ◽  
pp. 162-166
Author(s):  
Vukasin Antic ◽  
Zarko Vukovic

Disputes, divisions and even conflicts, so frequent in Serbia, have not bypassed physicians-members of the Serbian Medical Society; ones of the most important occurred at the crossroad of the 19th and 20th centuries related to foundation of the School of Medicine in Belgrade. The most prominent and persistent advocate of foundation of the School of Medicine was Dr. Milan Jovanovic Batut. In 1899, he presented the paper ?The Medical School of the Serbian University?. Batut`s effort was worth serious attention but did not produce fruit. On the contrary, Dr. Mihailo Petrovic criticized Batut by opening the discussion ?Is the Medical School in Serbia the most acute sanitary necessity or not?? in the Serbian Archives, in 1900. However, such an attitude led to intervention of Dr. Djoka Nikolic, who defended Batut`s views. He published his article in Janko Veselinovic`s magazine ?The Star?. Since then up to 1904, all discussions about Medical School had stopped. It was not even mentioned during the First Congress of Serbian Physicians and Scientists. Nevertheless, at the very end of the gathering, a professor from Prague, Dr. Jaromil Hvala claimed that ?the First Serbian Congress had prepared the material for the future Medical School?, thus sending a message to the attendants of what importance for Serbia its foundation would have been. But the President of both the Congress and the Serbian Medical Society, as well as the editor of the Serbian Archives, Dr. Jovan Danic announced that ?the First Congress of Serbian Physicians and Scientists had finished its work?. It was evident that Danic belonged to those medical circles which jealously guarded special privileges of doctors and other eminent persons who had very serious doctrinal disagreements on the foundation of the Medical School. All that seemed to have grown into clash, which finally resulted in the fact that Serbia got Higher Medical School within the University of Belgrade with a great delay, only after the First World War.


Author(s):  
Davide Turcato

Is anti-militarism an essential or disposable feature of anarchism? The question can be addressed by examining the controversy over intervention in the First World War, in which Malatesta argued that anarchists were to “stand aside to save at least their principles—which means to save the future.” Tellingly, his arguments were the same by which he supported his anti-parliamentarianism. This shows how foundational those arguments were for his anarchism. They concerned the principle of coherence between ends and means, which in turn proceeded from awareness of the heterogony of ends and its twin sides: the unintended consequences of intentional action and the displacement of goals. Malatesta’s perspective ultimately rested on his methodological individualism, which took the form of voluntarism in the prescriptive domain. Malatesta’s foresight is best appreciated in retrospect, for his seeming defeatist attitude truly saved the future: it allowed anarchism to preserve its aims intact by keeping its means coherent with them.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Dowden

Absorbed in living, 1913 Vienna did not see the First World War coming and could not have. Vienna was a world experimenting with competing concepts of truth, but not of foretelling the future. One model emphasizes the inward, hidden character of truth, as in psychoanalysis. The other emphasizes the outward even superficial nature of truth.


1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Taha J. Al 'Alwani

The Polemics of IjtihadFrom the second hijri century until the present day, the reality, the essence,the rules, the conditions, the premises, the means, and the scope of ijtihadhave remained a source of debate engaging some of the Islamic world's greatesttheologians, scholars of al usul, and fuqaha': This debate has also been enrichedby proponents of the view that the door of ijtihad was closed and that thefiqh left by the Four Imams obviated the need for any further ijtihad, aswell as by those who claimed that this door was still open and that the existingfiqh was not sufficient to guide the contemporary Muslim world.In our own times, attention is now focused on the suitability of the Shari'ahas an order and a way of life. This new topic of debate, before unknownamong Muslims, emerged after the crushmg defeats experienced by the Muslimummah after the First World War, such as the dismantling of the khihfahand the creation of artificial states ruled from Europe. Many Muslims blamedIslam and its institutions for their defeat, and soon began to emulate theirconquerors. Others, however, had a quite different view: the Muslim ummahexperienced these disasters because it had become alienated from the eternaltruths of Islam. Thus, what was required was a return to the true Islam andnot its wholesale rejection in favor of alien institutions and ideologies. Onefundamental part of this return would have to be the use of ijtihad, for howelse could Muslims incorporate Islamic principles into situations with whichthey had never had to deal?Muslims who hold the latter view are aware of the fact that they mustmeet their opponents in the realm of ideas, for it is here that the future courseof the ummah will be decided. To be successful, much energy must beexpended in scholarship and conceptual thinking, in seeking to understandhumanity's place in the divine scheme of existence and what is expected ofit, and how this knowledge might be applied by Muslims as they struggle ...


1966 ◽  
Vol 70 (661) ◽  
pp. 95-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Garner

The Early experimental work at the Royal Aircraft Factory, South Farnborough (as it was called then) has been described by a number of people. There was no organisation in the First World War, as there was in the Second, for the use of scientific man power. The gravitation of scientists to the Royal Aircraft Factory can, I imagine, only be explained by the attraction of working in an unexplored field. The results of the impact of this remarkable group on the future of aeronautics in this country were enormous.My own relatively late appearance at Farnborough, towards the end of 1916, was the result of a series of accidents.


2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-365
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BRIGHT JONES

Just before the First World War, German agricultural economists and social-welfare experts constructed a new social category – rural female youth, whose mobility provoked growing alarm. Framing rural flight in terms of gender and generation allowed experts to focus on its demographic, economic, and moral threats, and rural female youth became a target for reform. These debates presaged a wave of popular anxiety over rural female youth that expanded dramatically during the Weimar Republic. However, prewar court testimonies of runaway maids in rural Saxony suggest that some rural girls understood their mobility in terms of ‘getting ahead’, and resisted efforts to restrict their occupational, social, and spatial horizons.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-157
Author(s):  
Justyna Jajszczok

The aim of the article is to compare and contrast two examples of the short-lived conservative literary genre of future-war fiction (also known as invasion literature) popular in Britain between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The analysed texts, “The Battle of Dorking” of 1871 and The Swoop! of 1909, are examined as manifestations of two camps with which commentators of projected future seem to identify: the camp comprising of people expressing genuine fears and future anxieties, and the camp of people mocking and dismissing these apprehensions. The article explores their social and political impacts and their potential legacy.


Slovenica ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Lyubov Kirilina

The ruling circles of the Russian Empire began to show interest in Slovenes only during the First World War, and they were interested in them only in the context of common problems concerning the future of Primorye (fi rst of all, Trieste). In the article, based on the materials of Russian archives and historical studies, are revealed some plans of Russian government circles, including the fate of Slovenes, as well as attempts by Slovene patriots to provoke the interest of the Russian government towards their people and thus infl uence its policy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Jan Zieliński

Machine Gun Jesus. A gloss between literature, theology and art history In order to explain a mysterious sentence in an article by Jerzy Stempowski on Józef Wittlin’s novel (published in the present issue of “CL”) about a sermon on Jesus at a German machine gun, the author makes a survey of several sermons delivered and published in protestant Switzerland during the First World War (including one by the future famous theologian Karl Barth). Another possible source for this phrase by Stempowski is an article published in 1930 in “Berliner Tageblatt” during a lawsuit for blasphemy against the painter George Grosz, the author of a drawing representing Jesus on the Cross with a gas mask. The gloss ends with some remarks on the later use of the terms “Machine Gun Jesus” or “God’s Machine Gun” (Johannes Leppich, Billy Graham, Ryszard Kapuściński, Sam Childers).


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