Transnationalism and insurrection: independence committees, anti-colonial networks, and Germany’s global war

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses the Indian, Persian, and Algerian–Tunisian independence committees and their place in Germany’s ‘programme for revolution’, Berlin’s attempt to instigate insurrection across the British, French, and Russian empires during the First World War. The agency of Asian and North African activists in this programme remains largely unknown, and their wartime collaboration in Germany is an under-researched topic in the histories of anti-colonial activism. This article explores the collaboration between the three committees, highlighting their strategic relationships with German officials and with each other. Criticizing the Eurocentric framings still present in studies of wartime strategy, it contributes to a growing historiography on the war as a global conflict. It argues that the independence committees were central actors in Germany’s programme, that the transnationalism of the pre-1914 anti-colonial movements both imprinted Germany’s programme and was furthered by it, and that only a comparative perspective exploring the interactions of its anti-colonial activists fully grasps the global scope of this topic.