Abstract
In the run-up to the centenary of the First World War, several preeminent scholars identified the conflict’s global dimensions as a blind spot in most mainstream narratives. Although for years now, many scholars have analysed the extra-European theatres of war, the recruitment, deployment and perceptions of African, Asian and Caribbean colonial troops and war workers, the transfer of dominion contingents to the Western front, and the impact of the war on local communities across the world, the results of this research have hardly been noticed beyond specialized circles and the regions concerned until very recently. During the last decade, however, a number of new syntheses have tried to overcome the Eurocentric lens and narrate the First World War through the perspective of global history. The new book by Australian military historian John Connor is in line with this tendency. The global perspective, however, is somewhat limited to the British Empire, and the fact that the other main belligerent powers were no nation-states either, but rather multi-ethnic, and in most cases intercontinental empires, might have been better emphasized.
The author alternately covers military events demonstrating the high level of imperial participation in warfare and phenomena of the ‘home fronts’ in different parts of the British Empire. Military events presented include the odyssey of the German warship Emden in the Indian Ocean in autumn 1914; the three battles of Aubert Ridge in 1915 with plenty of Indian and Canadian troops employed; the East African Campaign; the battle of Messines in 1917, which saw troops from Australia, New Zealand and Canada in action; and the battles of Amiens and Megiddo in 1918 with soldiers from India, Australia, Canada, the West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand, and Ireland involved. While these chapters are composed as rather traditional military history, the ones analysing phenomena behind the front lines from an imperial perspective add very interesting social, economic and political aspects. They include sections on shipping, trade, rationing and the arms industry in different parts of the British Empire; furthermore on dissent, covering rebellions in several parts of Africa, the mutiny of Indian soldiers in Singapore, the Irish Easter Rising, as well as conscientious objection, desertions and workers strikes in different parts of the Empire. The author also covers the different recruitment systems in place in individual territories of the Empire and how they changed over time as well as the role of farmers and agriculture.
On balance, Connor’s study is a well-written history of the British Empire in the First World War, marrying operational military history with the economic, social and political dimensions of the global conflict all over the British Empire. It might be criticized that the author’s primary expertise in Australian history results in a certain preponderance of the dominions and some more space might have been dedicated to India and Britain’s African colonies. Some seminal monographs and edited volumes regarding these parts of the British Empire (e. g. by David Omissi, Santanu Das, Melvin Page, Hew Strachan, and David Killingray) are strikingly absent from the select bibliography. Nevertheless, while most material presented naturally is not completely new, the book as a synthesis of otherwise dispersed information will be very welcome, not least to a wider audience as well as for teaching purposes.