Abstract
Much recent writing about the British Empire during the First World War has been concerned with the reconception of the war as a global conflict, through examination of military ‘sideshows’, regions deemed ‘peripheral’ (neutrals, ‘latecomers’, mediators), and the history of encounters and entanglement as a form of transnational history. While the messiness and complexity of mass imperial mobilization has been made apparent, historians have less often turned to the aftermath of the conflict in the British Empire, beyond the experiences of colonial veterans. In this rich new collection, the editors pose the significant question of what it means to exit war: the active, complex, deliberate and contingent process of sortie de guerre. As they reflect in the book's conclusion, ‘demobilisation could not simply be a matter of undoing what had been done’ (p. 183). Through the eight case studies offered in the book's chapters, the difficult disentanglement of the consequences of imperial mobilization and global warfare are made clear. The movement of people, the movement of ideas, race and racialization, the possibilities and challenges of the new world order are all explored to various degrees here, and, running through all these themes, control: of people, of borders, of nations, of enemies, of resources, of health. The chapters cover an admirable geographic range in their consideration of the British Empire's exit from war, from military officers stationed in Burma, to Québécois nationalists, to Arab resistance movements.
The volume is divided into three parts. In Part One, the ‘challenges of peace’ being faced range across the influenza pandemic, the repatriation of troops, and the ‘elimination’ of Germans as enemies in the British Empire. All three chapters are concerned with ‘freedom of movement’ and its restriction: the facilitation of quarantine through Australia's existing selective exclusion in immigration; competition for resources for the return of troops; the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Germans through both internment and repatriation. Hannah Mawdsley and Trevor Harris demonstrate how the management of flu and repatriation respectively was used to demonstrate emerging authority and imperial differentiation in the dominions, where Panikos Panayi places German repatriation within a longer context of imperial co-ordination of – and dependence upon – the forced movement of people around the world, accelerated in this wartime context.
Part Two deals with the control and export of military tradition post-Armistice as both Samraghni Bonnerjee and Kate Imy consider the experiences and military organization of soldiers in the 1918–20 moment. Both chapters attend to a pluralistic understanding of the exit from war, which makes space for political hybridities. Bonnerjee's exploration of the life writing of two British officers reveals the reaffirmation of colonial agency in this moment, leading to ‘complex ways by which some British colonial soldiers refashioned and performed the imperial project.’ (p. 82). This refashioning is evident in Imy's study of the Indian Army and the plying of religious identities and causes by British military officials to respond to soldiers’ post-war demands and secure their loyalties.
The reconfiguration of what empire was and would be in the wake of the First World War is extended to the final part, where chapters deal with ‘contesting and strengthening empire’ in three areas: state (Quebec), nation (Cyprus), and region (the Middle East) (p. 119). Charles-Philippe Courtois deals with the crystallization of the debate about Quebec nationalism in the 1918–20 moment, as part of the turning away from a pan-Canadian identity precipitated by the First World War. Andrekos Varnava positions Cyprus as a key site for imperialists after the war and the persistence of inflexible and old techniques of rule. This contrasts with the final chapter, where Clothilde Houet considers the dominance of expediency in Britain's role in the Middle East (Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia), driven by reactivity in local contexts and a lack of centrally driven policy.
The adoption of 1918–20 as a ‘moment’, bookended here by armistice and peace treaties, offers an intriguing methodological tool for historians of the greater war and of transnational and global history more broadly. This is a moment of creation and adaptation, of expansion and contest. The period is proposed not as a turning point but as a ‘lens of investigation’ through which the plural and multiple ways of exiting war can be considered in all their unevenness of power dynamics, political ambitions, and participation (p. 3). In her chapter, Bonnerjee points us to the question previously posed by Romain Fathi and Bart Ziino of ‘who is demobilizing’ (p. 83, emphasis in original). Many of the chapters here are concerned with the work of state actors and agencies, including the British; what of those who are being ‘demobilized’ through this process? Future work might expand the frame of the 1918–20 moment to further consider colonial agency on the ground. Yet, the attention to the who and how of the process of exiting war that the more bounded periodization of this volume allows suggests a strategy for balancing the local and the global, for attending to world events and international phenomena's particular and specific impact as they were understood and experienced across multiple regions and territories.