By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Reassessing the First War part two

In 1914, as seen in part one, it was generally acknowledged that a country could remain neutral as long as its government maintained a good relationship with the belligerents. That is to say, neutrality was sustainable as long as the country was not invaded (when it automatically became a belligerent) and as long as any violation of the legal and political requirements of neutral states in time of war was policed by the neutral government and was validated by the belligerents. 

None of the governments that went to war in July and early August 1914 were eager to engage in a drawn-out conflagration. None of them had planned for such a scenario. No strategic plans even existed for warfare between the imperial rivals in Africa, for example.1 Instead, they pinned their short-war ambitions to a small number of decisive military victories in Europe. Ideally, the continental war would last a matter of weeks, at most a few months.2

Yet, the First World War had profound global importance. It led to the collapse of four of the world’s most powerful empires, namely Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottomans. It almost bankrupted the French and British empires. It occasioned the Russian revolutions of 1917 and brought the Soviet Union into being. It confirmed that the United States and Japan had become powerful industrial and imperial states.

The war was carried on the winds of global commerce, finance, and information exchange and was won by those who most effectively mobilized the available human and material resources. As a result, neutral and belligerent civilians were both victims and instruments of this total global war. They certainly counted among its tens of millions of casualties.3 

Britainentry into the war presented the world with a profoundly transformative reality. At one level, they were all confronted with the impact of the global economic crisis occasioned by Britain’s decision. How to manage that crisis was their most immediate concern. At another level, they were also confronted with the prospect that new military fronts might open up in Africa and the Asia-Pacific as enemy colonies mobilized their imperial forces against each other. 

Before the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, many ministers threatened to tender their resignations if Britain went to war to defend France. After the invasion on the night of 3–4 August, only two held to that threat. The others were convinced that a continental war involving Germany was too great a menace to British interests.4 From this perspective, Britain’s belligerency was imperative and focussed entirely on containing German power, although it certainly helped that the German invasion also transgressed some powerful public norms about war. 

Britainentry into the war (especially the US following) registered a decisive shift towards all experience levels. On 7 August, for example, the Colombian newspaper La Linterna described the expansion of warfare as a horrendous catastrophe that can only end with the definitive destruction of Europe, or perhaps the total ruin of the old western civilization. By 20 August, it was clear that the war could not be contained within Europe. La Linterna registered this shift and its potential impact as follows: we are on the eve of a terrible economic crisis that can only have fatal results.5 What might happen next, however, remained unclear: the fog of war emitted a haze of unpredictability. What did happen next was a violent reshaping of the global economy and the world of war. Over the next few months, as a military stalemate developed between the European belligerents, a short-war ambition turned into a long-war reality. While most contemporaries clung on to the hope that the war would come to a speedy conclusion, the fact that the world’s foremost economic and naval power was now at war effectively ensured that the war would not be over by Christmas.

The rather ill-conceived desire for a short war that could quickly remove the German invaders from France and Belgium was paramount for these politicians. In their public rhetoric, they indeed expressed their faith that the war ‘would be over by Christmas.’ Of course, the possibility that the conflict might evolve into a protracted affair was a risk they willingly took, much as the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian leaderships had also done in the preceding days. Still, while these men might have imagined the prospect of an all-out war between Europe’s industrial powers at heart, they also expected that the war would not radicalize in that way. None of the governments that went to war in July and early August 1914 were eager to engage in a drawn-out conflagration. None of them had planned for such a scenario. No strategic plans even existed for warfare between the imperial rivals in Africa; for example, Instead, they pinned their short-war ambitions to a small number of decisive military victories in Europe. Ideally, the continental war would last a matter of weeks, at most a few months.6

Britain’s century of neutrality between 1815 and 1914 had enabled its empire to bourgeon. By 1900, the British crown ruled more than 446 million subjects.7 On the night of 4 August 1914, all 446 million-plus officially went to war. So too did the Royal Navy. And because the British Empire went to war, so did the outposts of the French and German empires, drawing in several more imperial subjects formally into the war. As of 4 August 1914, the world’s seas and oceans became potential warzones too. If Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium concerned neutrals on a conceptual level, Britain’s declaration of war sent the global economy into a tailspin, taking almost everyone along with it. After 4 August 1914, the entire world economy was at war.8

How essential the impact of Britain’s war declaration was as a globally transformative moment is ably illustrated by Kathryn Meyer’s fascinating history of the Chinese treaty port of Shanghai.9

In 1914, Shanghai was a ‘city of strangers,’ a critical international port of trade and commerce that thrived in the nineteenth-century age of open seas and open commerce. Both Britain and the United States had acquired official concessions from China to run parts of the port. At the same time, the city’s administration was split between various local, imperial Chinese, and foreign interests. Wealthy merchant families primarily ran Shanghai, but the transnational Chamber of Commerce that represented the city’s various mercantile, industrial, and banking interests also wielded a considerable amount of power. With Britain’s declaration of war, this transnational commercial zone could no longer sustain its networks of interdependence.

The war hit locals and foreigners alike hard and fast. Firstly, British and German ships left the port, escaping to the safer havens of Weihaiwei (a British concession) and Tsingtao (a German concession). All other vessels delayed their departure. Most of them were unsure of global shipping conditions or were unable to acquire affordable maritime insurance. They feared seizure by a belligerent and were uncertain of their destinations’ security and the economic stability of any markets for their wares. Almost no new ships arrived in port for weeks. Unemployment skyrocketed. Because there were no ships, laborers were not needed to unload them. The local silk and tea industries came to a standstill as there were no foreign buyers for these luxury items. They were stockpiled up in the port. Inflation hit on imported goods but also staples like rice.

Money became scarce, gold and silver prices shot up, and gold shops closed. International business came to a standstill. The Shanghai stock market shut down and never reopened. Shanghai’s telegraph stations refused to transmit coded messages to protect China’s official neutrality declared on 6 August. The transnational Chamber of Commerce, including its neutral Chinese, Japanese and American, and belligerent British, French, and German representatives, met to discuss suitable and cooperative solutions on 8 August. Their negotiations failed, and the Chamber dissolved.10

Everyone in Shanghai hoped for a short war. They recognized a short-term economic crisis as manageable; a long-term one was not. Only in early 1915, as the short-war illusion dissipated, did the formally neutral port of Shanghai entrench its commercial activities along belligerent lines. By late 1915, the British and Americans set up their nation-specific Chambers of Commerce. Germans in Shanghai could no longer bank with British firms or purchase insurance from them. Joint-stock companies wound up their business.11

Over the ensuing war years, the Japanese and American presence in Shanghai increased, and China asserted more sovereign and economic power over the port’s future, in part ennobled by a ‘new and patriotic language of trade.’ Like many other non-European and neutral societies, China gained economically from supplying the war needs of the European belligerents and from the removal of foreign competitors in its regional economy. All of these opportunities only became apparent; however, once the long-war reality set in.12

 

No civilian community anywhere was safe

Shanghai’s story was replicated all around the world. In Europe, stock market jitters first appeared with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July and entrenched when it declared war on 28 July. By 1 August, most European stock markets were closed. So was Wall Street. Tokyo followed suit. Panic ensued. As the middle classes worldwide recognized the financial dangers of a global war, they attempted to empty their bank accounts. Gold, silver, and copper disappeared from circulation as everyone hoarded what was acknowledged as a more valuable species of exchange. Governments closed their treasuries, and banks shut their doors, fearing depletion of their reserves.13 Emergency paper money was issued to cover basic transactions, often for the smallest denominations. The aim was to avoid economic collapse and disaffection among populations. Prices soared while markets and shops emptied of wares. There was no clarity on when new supplies would arrive. Nervousness and anxiety permeated the globe. For example, in Peru’s isolated Canete valley, a three- or four-day horseback journey from Lima, the prefect called local merchants an emergency meeting on 10 August to avoid food shortages and rioting. Meanwhile, banks and factories closed in the Peruvian cities, unemployment spread, and food prices mounted.14

The Japanese government felt compelled to subsidize the local silk industry to lose its profits.15 Cotton farmers in the southern United States would recoup their 1914 losses once trade with Britain, France, and the European neutrals could resume. Still, in August 1914, they were only fearful of a complete collapse of their industry.16

Shanghai’s cotton weavers sourced new cotton supplies from the Chinese mainland in 1915, illustrating how enterprising individuals could and did profit from the changing economic landscape of war.17 In August 1914, as African cash crops accumulated on docks, locals outed their frustrations by rioting and looting. For example, social unrest permeated British-controlled Nigeria once it became clear that palm oil and palm kernels could no longer be traded with their main pre-war markets in Germany. Colonial authorities across the continent were duly concerned. But given that imports of European manufactured goods also ground to a halt– a more permanent development – long-term inflationary pressures were guaranteed. Although they could not know this at the time, this war for resources would only radicalize after 1914, accentuating the strains on workers and their families alike.

At no time between 1815 and 1914 were there so many great power belligerents or so many powerful navies at war with each other. While the rights and expectations of neutrals were more clearly defined by international law in 1914 than ever before, the changing ratio of neutrals-to-belligerents expanded the uncertainty. Only the United States, the Ottoman empire, and Japan were left as great neutral powers on 5 August. Of the three, only the United States would remain a great neutral power by the end of the year. In this light, Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium signaled further uncertainty for the security of the world’s many more minor and weaker neutral states and their imperial outposts.

Britain also declared all-out warfare on German and Austro-Hungarian trade, blockading Germany’s ports from afar and seizing all merchant vessels flying a German or Austro-Hungarian flag. The German merchant marine disappeared from the world’s oceans within days. Most of it would eventually be reflagged by enterprising neutral companies.18

The German leadership, for its part, had planned more effectively for a war with Britain, even if it had not expected the British to go to war. While Germany’s armies invaded neutral Belgium, it avoided an invasion of its other western neutral neighbor, the Netherlands, to maximize its access to the substantial Dutch network of global trade. The Netherlands and the other border neutrals in Scandinavia and Switzerland would offer Germany an economic ‘windpipe’ through which it could breathe, as General von Moltke planned when he revised the Schlieffen Plan in 1909.19 Throughout the war, these same border neutrals were considered the bane of the Allied blockade. But on 4–5 August 1914, these neutrals were as economically and psychologically distressed as the rest of the world.

Beyond the seas, Europe’s colonial empires also went to war on 5 August. Most nineteenth-century conflicts between the European states purposely avoided spill-over into their colonial empires.

But as a belligerent, the British empire was too formidable not to take the war to its much weaker German imperial rival. The opportunity to eradicate and acquire the German empire presented an enticing prospect for the British and French governments, upon which they quickly capitalized. New Zealand soldiers were asked to invade the islands of German Samoa, which they completed on 29 August, without loss of life. An Australian force acquired German New Guinea on 11 September.20 In Africa, German Togoland fell on 26 August to a combined French-British force. Cameroon’s German ports were occupied in September, while German South-West Africa was invaded by South Africans that same month too. It submitted to British control in the middle of 1915.21

The African continent remained at war until 1918, costing millions of people their lives and livelihoods, particularly in southeast Africa. The military campaigns pitting the predominantly African army of the German Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck against British- and (later) Portuguese-led forces decimated local communities in a prolonged war of attrition. Central Africa too sustained long-term military campaigns between Belgian and German troops, with a decisive impact on locals.

In Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, more than 18 million men took up arms in late July and early August 1914. Millions more volunteered for military service over the coming months; others were forcibly conscripted. Aside from the emotional shock mobilization engendered in these families and communities, let alone the cataclysm of violence many of them would soon experience, the removal of so many men from the civilian workforce had a decisive impact. It also militarized familial and communal settings. Uniforms and military declarations dominated civilian life in many communities after August 1914. The white British Dominions were particularly enthusiastic in mobilizing for the war. While Ireland and South Africa posed some issues, not least when a group of opportunistic Afrikaners under the leadership of Niklaas’ Siener’ van Rensberg attempted to take over the government (a rebellion that was quickly repressed by the local authorities), even here, the call for a war against ‘barbaric’ Germany was well supported.22 Among non-white subjects of the British and French empires, the mobilization for war was generally received with more circumspection and recognition that the war offered opportunities to advance a range of political ambitions, be they in support of or against the Anglo-European imperial authorities.

Some Maori, for example, saw a possibility in loyally serving King and empire to gain greater political recognition as full citizens of Aotearoa, New Zealand.23 Some Australian Aborigines, Polynesian, Caribbean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Algerian, and Canada’s First Nation communities mobilized to support their empire’s war effort for similar reasons: the promise of more excellent political representation and racial equality, and recognition within the kingdom and local polity.24 In India, too, numerous elites argued in favor of war to advance their status as loyal imperial subjects worthy of greater self-governance and possible Dominion status.25 The opening months of war thus reflected the equivalence of Burgfrieden and expressions of national honor in several colonial outposts. Support for an embattled empire would (so these supporters thought) only lead to political advantages within the empire once the war finished. Their loyalty to the empire seemed well-founded, particularly when they were endorsed by supportive appeals from the imperial authorities themselves. That motivation remained for many months, sometimes years. Much of it would not survive the whole war.26

Other indigenous and colonized communities who looked to advance their pre-existing anti-imperial agendas were equally alert to the geostrategic opportunities presented by the outbreak of global war. Many south-east Asians had a nuanced understanding of the war’s global implications and geostrategic parameters. Whether they were formally neutral (as was the case for China, Siam, and the Dutch East Indies) or formed part of a belligerent empire (as was the case for Singapore, Malaysia, and French Indo-China), the global war influenced how these communities considered and reconfigured their political and economic interests after 4 August. As the historian Heather Streets-Salter highlights, many anti-French and anti-British revolutionaries in Southeast Asia successfully lobbied for German government support to fund and resource their resistance activities against their common enemy. They often did so from neutral territories. These activities helped destabilize the British and French wartime empires in due measure.27

Many communities in Africa and the Middle East also understood how the war altered their futures. As early as August 1914, Tutsi tribes in German-controlled Rwanda raided their Hutu neighbors in the Belgian-held Congo, utilizing the imperial governments’ belligerency as part of their rationale.28 This local war escalated so that by 1916 a Belgian-led Force Majeure from the Congo, peopled mainly by local soldiers, invaded German Rwanda and Burundi and successfully seized Tabora in September. The Belgian government formally extended a protectorate over Rwanda on 6 April 1917.51 For many African and Middle Eastern communities, the world’s war thus became part and parcel of their local and imperial rivalries. Similarly, after the Ottoman entry into the war, several Kurdish communities mobilized in support of the empire, helping to occupy Russian-controlled Azerbaijan and raiding and razing local Nestorian Christian communities, who supported their co-religionist Russians and attacked the Muslim Kurds in turn.

However, for the Persian (Iranian) government, the outbreak of war was disastrous. Aiming to protect Persia’s sovereign independence, it declared formal neutrality. But since a belligerent Russia occupied the northern reaches of Persia and a hostile Britain administered the southern region, remaining non-belligerent proved impossible. Both powers eyed up Persia’s oil reserves. Meanwhile, for the Swedish police troops already serving in Persia as neutral peacekeepers (they were there to train police officers, aid with tax collection, and combat brigandage), the dangers were deemed too great. After declaring Sweden’s neutrality in the war, its government recalled the entire force back to Sweden. Persia became a key waterfront. Representatives of the great power belligerents repeatedly negotiated with local communities, including Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Azerbaijani, and Muslim groups, for their support in an attempt to destabilize their enemies’ interests.29 These deals prevented the Persian government from sustaining effective rule and had long-term legacies for the stability and political cohesion of the region after 1918. Persia, then, was the third neutral state (after Belgium and Luxembourg) to fall victim to the great powers’ war. It was not the last.

Britain’s war declaration presented the Japanese government with a tantalizing prospect. With much of Europe at war, virtually all of Japan’s imperial rivals in the Asia-Pacific region (aside from the United States) were pre-occupied. Given that Japan could legitimately call upon its formal alliance with Britain to go to war with Germany, it faced the possibility of expanding its Asia-Pacific empire without much opposition. Japan declared war on Germany on 27 August 1914. It attacked and occupied the German-Chinese treaty port of Tsingtao, which fell on 7 November, and acquired the Marshall, Mariana, and the Caroline Islands, and the Jaluitt Atoll by the end of the year. The Japanese Navy further patrolled the Pacific and Indian Oceans, hounding what was left of the German navy out of these seas, convoying British and French troopships, and securing these waters for the safe passage of merchants vessels. The regional Asia-Pacific economy primarily grew during the war because of Japan’s protective role. While the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, Baltic, and Black Seas would become increasingly treacherous to navigate, the Pacific and Indian Oceans remained relatively safe zones for shipping. That Japan was the ultimate beneficiary of these developments was almost inevitable. The longer Europe’s war lasted, the greater Japan’s economic gains.

In China, the shift to global warfare on 4–5 August 1914 registered as weiji (great crisis, literally ‘danger opportunity’). The loss of European imperial agency in the region meant that only the American government was left to protect the ‘open-door policy that had dominated Chinese foreign and economic relations throughout the previous two decades. Japan’s invasion of Tsingtao frightened the Chinese. Their fears were fully realized when Japan capitalized on its position of power by issuing a set of twenty-one demands expanding Japanese control over Tsingtao, Manchuria, and Chinese economic affairs for the foreseeable future. The twenty-one demands signed by China in March 1915 are considered one of China’s ignoble moments. For the United States, too, Japanese belligerency and expansionism during the war heightened the rivalry between these two major Pacific powers. Meanwhile, Japan’s notion might threaten other Asia-Pacific communities that permeated the region. Still, as the historian Xu Guoqi shows, the changing landscape of imperial order in the Asia-Pacific region was also an opportunity for the Chinese to reassert themselves into the international diplomatic order.30 

If Japan’s war declaration was unimaginable without Britain’s entry into the war, so too was the Ottoman empire. Until Britain joined the war, the Young Turk government could imagine itself as a neutral power situated on the periphery of a European continental war. With Britain’s entry into the war, the geostrategic threats to the empire mushroomed, as did the possibility that the victors (on either side) would not hesitate to dismember the empire at the conflict’s conclusion. Since Russia presented the most significant threat, a war was fought on the Allies’ side. War on the side of the Central Powers offered a wealth of opportunities, not least the possibility to expand and Turkify the empire.31 From early August 1914, the Ottoman government negotiated an alliance with the Central Powers, promising military aid against Russia at the earliest opportunity. It took until late October to fulfill this secret promise.32 On attacking the Russian fleet in the Black Sea on 29 October, the vast Ottoman empire with its immensely diverse population went to war. It opened up new military fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and Persia made the Suez Canal less safe and cut Russia off from the Mediterranean Sea.33

Even if opportunism drove its decision to enter the war, the Ottoman government publicly presented the war as a defensive enterprise.34 Much like Christianity was mobilized as a rationale for war, and in the defense of ‘civilization’ in Europe, the Ottoman sultan declared jihad (holy war) on all Christians in early November. Jihad had numerous faces aimed at mobilizing Muslim subjects of the Ottoman sultan in a ‘just’ and ‘necessary’ war and inspiring Muslim subjects of enemy empires to incite anti-imperial rebellion from below. Jihad confronted all the Christian powers, including the neutral Netherlands, whose East Indian colonies counted millions of Muslims. With good reason, the British and French colonial authorities worried about the potential impact of jihad on a colonial rebellion among their Islamic subjects. Across Africa, south and south-east Asia, Muslims were inspired by the jihad to reassess their relationships to the local imperial authority and the broader world at war.

There is much historiographical debate about the success of the 1914 jihad declaration.35 At one level, jihad legitimated certain wartime actions, not least the systematic targeting of Christian populations within the Ottoman realm. Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East, which were shaky at the best of times, drastically declined after August 1914.36 There is also evidence to suggest that for some Muslims, the call to battle helped to solidify their support for the Ottoman war effort. But jihad also validated a massive Turkification enterprise throughout the empire. Because only loyal subjects to the empire could be trusted and pre-empt the creation of ‘fifth-column guerilla forces, the Ottoman government ordered the massive displacement of ‘suspect’ civilians, including millions of Christians. Through 1915, these Christians would be systematically eliminated by the Ottoman government in a distinctly genocidal campaign. However, identifying the ‘enemy within’ was a common strategy utilized in all belligerent societies and one that reflected widespread colonial imperial practices before the war.

In the war’s opening months, the giddy heights of the short-war ambition were reached. Thus, Japanese hopes for a sizeable Asian empire and recognition of their great power status and the Chinese government’s wish to reinsert itself in the international arena were equally prominent ambitions in the war’s opening months. So too were Vietnamese hopes for independence and many indigenous communities’ desires to achieve political recognition for their wartime military service, Indian and Irish hopes for Home Rule, and even some suffragettes to earn the vote for women. The expectation that wartime service and support could lead to post-war gain were all too common in the 1914 war months.

In Europe, stock market jitters first appeared with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July and escalated when it declared war on 28 July. By 1 August, most European stock markets were closed, and Tokyo followed suit. Panic ensued. As the middle classes recognized the dangers of a global war, they attempted to empty their bank accounts. Emergency paper money was issued to cover basic transactions.

No civilian community anywhere was prima facie safe from the destructive violence. 

 

1. Holger Herwig, ‘Germany and the “Short-War” Illusion: Toward a New Interpretation?’ Journal of Military History 66, 3, 2002, pp. 681–93; Jakob Zollmann, Naulila 1914: World War I in Angola and International Law Nomos, 2016, p. 163. 

2.  William Philpott, ‘Squaring the Circle: The Higher Coordination of the Entente in the Winter of 1915–1916’ English Historical Review 114, 458, 1999, pp. 875–7.

3. Cf Dick Stegewerns, ‘The End of World War One as a Turning Point in Modern Japanese History’ in Bert Edström, ed., Turning Points in Japanese History Japan Library, 2002, pp. 138–40; Carl Strikwerda, ‘World War I in the History of Globalization’ Historical Reflections 42, 3, 2016, p. 112; Kai Evers, David Pan, ‘Introduction’ in Kai Evers, David Pan, eds, Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism Telos Press, 2018; David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century Simon & Shuster, 2013; Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 Penguin, 1994.

4. Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War, 2014   p.local merchants an emergency meetinge British Government’s Decision for War in 1914’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 29, 4, 2018, pp. 543–64.

5. Both quotes in Jane M. Rausch, Colombia and World War I: The Experience of a Neutral Latin American Nation during the Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1921 Lexington Books, 2014, p. 26.

6. For an excellent overview of these global ramifications: Richard Roberts, ‘A Tremendous Panic: The Global Financial Crisis of 1914’ in Andrew Smith, Simon Mollan, Kevin D. Tennent, eds, The Impact of the First World War on International Business Routledge, 2017, pp. 121–41.

7.  Mark Harrison, The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, 2000, pp-6-7.

8. Stephen Broadberry (Editor), Mark Harrison  (Editor) The Economics of World War I, 2005.

9. Kathryn Meyer, ‘Trade and Nationality at Shanghai upon the Outbreak of the First World War 1914–1915’ International History Review 10, 2, 1988, pp. 238–60.

10. F.V. Meyer, International Trade Policy (Routledge Library Editions: International Trade Policy), 2017. 

11. Global banking systems were similarly affected: Strikwerda, ‘World War I’ p. 121.

12. Meyer, ‘Trade’; D.K. Lieu, The Growth and Industrialization of Shanghai China Institute of Economic and Statistical Research, 1936, esp. pp. 11, 19, 23.     

13. Martin Horn, Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, p. 29; Bailey, ‘Supporting’ p. 28. 

14. Bill Albert, South America and the First World War: The Impact of War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 1. Also: Abbenhuis, Morrell, First Age pp. 185–6.

15. Ushisaburo Kobayashi, The Basic Industries and Social History of Japan 1914–1918 Yale University Press, 1930. 

16. Cf Roberts, ‘Tremendous’ p. 135.

17.  Cotton Mills in China’ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 9 July 1915, p. 769.

      18. Osborne, Britain’s p. 61. 

19.  Marc Frey, ‘Trade, Ships and the Neutrality of the Netherlands in the First World War’ International History Review 19, 3, 1997, p. 543.

20. Charles Stephenson, Germany’s Asia-Pacific Empire Boydell Press, 2009, p. 100. 

21. Steinbach, ‘Defending the Heimat’ pp. 179–208.

22. Bill Nasson, ‘Africa’, in Jay Winter, ed., Cambridge History of the First World War Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 445–6. 

23. Alison Fletcher, ‘Recruitment and Service of Maori Soldiers in World War One’ Itinerario 38, 3, 2014, pp. 59–78. 

24. Jennifer D. Keene, ‘North America’ in Winter, ed., Cambridge History Volume 1, p. 523; Guoqi, ‘Asia’ p. 487; Samuel Furphy, ‘Aboriginal Australians and the Home Front’ in Kate Ariotti, James Bennett, eds, Australians and the First World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 143–64; Reena N. Goldthree, ‘A Greater Enterprise than the Panama Canal: Migrant Labor and Military Recruitment in the World War I-Era Circum-Caribbean’ Labor 13, 3–4, 2016, pp. 63–4. 

25. Das, India p. 41. 

26. For example: Humayun Ansari, ‘“Tasting the King’s Salt”: Muslims Contested Loyalties and the First World War’ in Hannah Ewence, Tim Grady, eds, Minorities and the First World War Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 33–61. 

27. Streets-Salter, World War One.

28. Rik Verwast, Van Den Haag tot Geneve: België en het Internationale Oorlogsrecht 1874–1950 Die Keure, pp. 80–4.

29. T. Atabaki, ‘The First World War, Great Power Rivalries and the Emergence of a Political Community in Iran’ and M. Ettehadiyyeh, ‘The Iranian Provisional Government’ both in Touraj, ed., Iran pp. 1–7, 9–27; Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, ‘The British Occupation of Mesopotamia 1914–1922’ Journal of Strategic Studies 30, 2, 2007, pp. 349–77.

30. Guoqi, ‘Asia’ p. 483.

31. Kramer, Dynamic p. 144. 

32. Aksakal, ‘Ottoman Empire’ p. 473. 

33. Bailey, ‘Supporting’ p. 29. 

34. Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Introduction’ in Erik-Jan Zürcher, ed., Jihad and Islam in World War 1: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s ‘Holy War Made Germany’ Leiden University Press, 2016, p. 14.

35. Zürcher, ‘Introduction’ p. 22. 

36. Bruinessen, ‘A Kurdish’, p. 70.

 

 

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