Empires at War: 1911-1923

Front Cover
Robert Gerwarth, Erez Manela
Oxford University Press, 2014 - History - 283 pages
Empires at War, 1911-1923 offers a new perspective on the history of the Great War, looking at the war beyond the generally-accepted 1914-1918 timeline, and as a global war between empires, rather than a European war between nation-states.

The volume expands the story of the war both in time and space to include the violent conflicts that preceded and followed World War I, from the 1911 Italian invasion of Libya to the massive violence that followed the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, and Austrian empires until 1923. It argues that the traditional focus on the period between August 1914 and November 1918 makes more sense for the victorious western front powers (notably Britain and France), than it does for much of central-eastern and south-eastern Europe or for those colonial troops whose demobilization did not begin in November 1918. The paroxysm of 1914-18 has to be seen in the wider context of armed imperial conflict that began in 1911 and did not end until 1923.

If we take the Great War seriously as a world war, we must, a century after the event, adopt a perspective that does justice more fully to the millions of imperial subjects called upon to defend their imperial governments' interest, to theatres of war that lay far beyond Europe including in Asia and Africa and, more generally, to the wartime roles and experiences of innumerable peoples from outside the European continent. Empires at War also tells the story of the broad, global mobilizations that saw African soldiers and Chinese labourers in the trenches of the Western front, Indian troops in Jerusalem, and the Japanese military occupying Chinese territory. Finally, the volume shows how the war set the stage for the collapse not only of specific empires but of the imperial world order.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
The Ottoman Empire
17
The Italian Empire
34
The German Empire
52
AustriaHungary
73
The Russian Empire
91
The French Empire
109
British Imperial Africa
130
The Dominions Ireland and India
152
The Portuguese Empire
179
The Japanese Empire
197
China and Empire
214
The United States Empire
235
Empires at the Paris Peace Conference
254
Index
277
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