Turkey and India in the Shadow of the Great War: An Imperial War

Journal Article Andrew T. Jarboe. Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War. Get access Andrew T. Jarboe. Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. viii, 319. Cloth $60.00. Tarak Barkawi Tarak Barkawi Johns Hopkins University, US Email: t.k.barkawi@lse.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1054–1055, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad159 Published: 22 June 2023

Introduction. The paper is devoted to the participation of Canada in the creation and activities of the Imperial War Cabinet and two Imperial War Conferences of 1917 and 1918 to explain the evolution of the foreign and political status of Canada as a part of the British Empire after the end of the War. Methods and materials. The paper is based on the British and Canadian Parliamentary Debates, Reports, Minutes of Proceedings and Meetings of the Imperial War Conferences 1917/1918 and the Imperial War Cabinet. To study them, it uses the method of historical criticism of sources. The author also uses the historical-genetic, comparative and the narrative methods to investigate the causes, the process of creating and activities of imperial military bodies for the unified management of the war. Analysis. The paper analyzes the reasons for the creation of imperial military organizations in the British Empire during the war. It reveals the organizational and functional differences between the two imperial military bodies: Cabinet and Conference. The author studies the activities of imperial military bodies during the war in detail, determines the role of the Canadian delegation in this process. The article analyzes the decisions of the imperial military bodies, reveals their domestic and foreign policy consequences for Dominion of Canada. Results. Canada’s active participation in the creation and activities of the imperial military bodies during the First World War was one of the factors in the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, the formation of its own national identity, political and foreign independence within the Empire.

Drawing on the accounts of Tatar soldiers and Muslim chaplains as well as the Tatar press, this article probes the ways in which the Russo-Turkish War, Russo-Japanese War, and the Balkan Wars shaped Volga-Ural Muslim literati discourse concerning citizenship, the nation's body and soul, and its fates in a growingly violent world order. It concludes that all these elements were crucial to Tatar political workers of the Red Army for finding solutions to their coreligionists' sufferings from the imperialist wars in Bolshevik class universalism, which drove their fellow soldiers from the Great War to the Civil War.

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Modernity alongside with new technologies development, fundamental changes in the printing industry and informatization of society presented the mankind with such an invention as propaganda. It became an integral part of authoritarian and totalitarian political regimes of the XXth century. However, as a tool of consciousness manipulation, it was actively used by the empires during the "long" XIXth century. In the conditions of the First World War propaganda played a significant role in the mobilization processes and in the formation of the enemy's image. The article attempts to assess the effectiveness of the propaganda during the First World War. The article examines the researches that analyze the events of the war from the point of view of Soviet, modern Ukrainian and foreign historiography and contain descriptions of the propaganda campaign on the front line and in the rear. The state of modern historical research is highlighted and the prospects of further research are indicated. The study of the experience of the First World War and the information component of the fighting can be useful, given the fact that the Russian Federation today uses ideological stamps of that period.The analysis of existing studies on the issues of the First World War in general and its propaganda component in particular proves an increasing interest in the investigation of information warfare topic. Since 2014, the number of studies devoted to the First World War has increased in domestic and foreign research. The Ukrainian regions were a part of Austria-Hungary and Russia, so the usage of the Ukrainian national question in the propaganda of those states was significant. However, the issue of the propaganda war between the two empires is not covered comprehensively.The first study on this subject was of general practical character. The first foreign scholars who examined propaganda were mass communication specialists. For Soviet historical science, the priority task was to study the revolutionary events of 1917 and the period of the civil war. The events of 1914-1918 were interpreted only as an imperialist war, their study was conducted tendentiously. Modern historiography on the First World War reflects the main directions of the European historical school at the beginning of the XXIst century with a focus on social and socio-cultural history. Foreign historiography is represented by Russian, European and American authors. In their research considerable attention is paid to the topic of military psychology and cultural-anthropological aspects of war. The analysis of the extent of the given problem research in the studies of foreign historians suggests a sufficient level of its investigation. Modern historians pay much attention to the ideological aspect, the analysis of visual propaganda. The interest in considering the mechanisms for the formation of images of the enemy, its state and allies increased. A promising object of historical research is the study of the verbal and nonverbal aspects of the propaganda production of both empires.

Reviewed by: The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro Stacy Reardon (bio) Whalan, Mark. The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. 400,000 African American soldiers participated in World War I within a segregated military that in large part consigned them to service roles: building roads, digging trenches, and unloading cargo. Nevertheless, prominent African American intellectuals in the early-twentieth century pushed for African American inclusion in the military as an opportunity for social progress and a means for African American men to acquire the trappings of masculine honor and respect so long denied them. When the 369th regiment, "The Harlem Hellfighters," paraded up 5th Avenue into Harlem, 250,000 people came to greet them. Yet the prevalence in 1919 of race riots and lynching—including of African American veterans still in uniform—cut into the optimism. Meanwhile, white America went busily about memorializing the war as one fought exclusively by whites. Almost a century later, the memory of World War I remains a contested site in American culture, particularly in the arts, where the relationship of the Great War to African American literature and culture has gone virtually undiscussed. While many of the prominent histories of the Harlem Renaissance, including When Harlem Was in Vogue by David Levering Lewis (1989), The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White by George Hutchinson (1995), and Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance by Cary D. Wintz (1998), touch on World War I, Mark Whalan's The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro is the first full-length work to examine in detail how African American participation in World War I played out in the cultural sphere. Recognizing that a critical focus on battlefield narratives as the defining texts of war literature has failed to document the way the War interwove with the New Negro movement, Whalan expands his investigation to cover writings of the "talented tenth" not normally considered to be war literature. By examining texts ranging from fictive representations of African American soldiers, such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), to popular war poetry exhorting African American soldiers to victory, such as Roscoe Jamison's "Negro Soldiers," to the influential [End Page 1140] photography and soldier portraits of James VanDerZee, Whalan unveils the tensions generated within African American culture at the prospect of participating in an imperial war on behalf of a racist state in which racialization of the enemy was a dominant ideological strategy. Whalan persuasively theorizes that African American participation in the War, however oppressive, energized the New Negro movement and helped shape its models of manhood and resistance. Whalan opens with a thoroughly grounded history of the experiences of African Americans in the War and at home. He outlines the social debates framing race and the military, showing that a central question for African Americans was whether the possibility of social advancement through military service could offset the costs and contradictions of serving in a segregated military during a time of widespread racial violence and oppression. At the same time, white America "deplored the thought of militarily trained black men in their communities" and was conflicted as to whether the need for men was urgent enough to risk training and arming a group so long held in subjugation through violence (1). Whalan traces how these issues funneled into the practical but contentious disputes taking place on a national level about military segregation, black military roles, and officer training. The book's major project, however, is to offer a cultural thematics of African American engagement with the cultural implications and memory of the Great War, particularly adumbrating the internal debates within the New Negro movement about the role of African Americans in the military, its implications, and how that participation should be represented. In the second chapter, "'Civilization has met its Waterloo': The Great War, Race, and the Canon," Whalan brings into focus the way African American intellectuals negotiated a precarious position between demanding that African Americans be acknowledged as rightful participants in American culture on the one hand and celebrating African American culture as an attractive refuge...

Depth of Field: Disorienting the “Ethnographic Gaze” through Zeme Naga Realms

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer

In 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while three million civilians were killed by the war-induced Bengal Famine, and Indian National Army soldiers fought against the British for Indian independence. This captivating new history shines a spotlight on emotions as a way of unearthing these troubled and contested experiences, exposing the personal as political.Diya Gupta draws upon photographs, letters, memoirs, novels, poetry, and philosophical essays, in both English and Bengali languages, to weave a compelling tapestry of emotions felt by Indians in service and at home during the war. She brings to life an unknown sepoy in the Middle East yearning for home, and anti-fascist activist Tara Ali Baig; a disillusioned doctor on the Burma frontline, and Sukanta Bhattacharya’s modernist poetry of hunger; Mulk Raj Anand’s revolutionary home front, and Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of civilization.This vivid book recovers a truly global history of the Second World War, revealing the crucial importance of cultural approaches in challenging a traditional focus on the wartime experiences of European populations. Seen through Indian eyes, this conflict is no longer the “good” war.

Ian R Whitehead Leo Cooper, £25, pp 309 ISBN 0 85052 691 4 Rating: ![Graphic][1] ![Graphic][2] ![Graphic][3] Many books have been written about the first world war, but few have...

My own interests in Africa were nurtured in the late 1960s as an undergraduate in London, but they took form in, and were shaped by, the great political, economic and social firmament of the 1970s. With the powers of hindsight one can see what an extraordinary decade it was and how it necessarily framed our research programs, both in Geography and the social sciences more generally. The events of that decade bear repeating: an imperialist war in southeast Asia, a troubled American Fordism feeling the pressures of global competition, deepening class struggles over the future of embedded liberalism, the Nixon dollar devaluation and the turn to global financialization, massive volatility in commodities markets especially food and oil, a robust Third World nationalism and a raft of successful revolutionary movements ultimately hobbled by balance of payments deficits, massive public sector debt and Cold War 'low-intensity conflict' and proxy wars, popular energies unleashed by a global environmental movement, and not least, the first stirrings of what was to become, to quote Perry Anderson (2000), the global neoliberal 'grand slam'. My experience of the continent, in sum, came hot on the heels of the rebellion and turmoil of the 1960s and in the wake of the genuinely revolutionary moment of 1968. The 1970s actually became the high watermark for radical theorizing, enriched by exciting (and not so exciting) political experiments, not the least of which were the various African socialisms in the former Portuguese colonies (GuineaoBissau, Angola, Mozambique), in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Tanzania and elsewhere. Some locations--one thinks in particular of Dar es Saalam, Zaria, Dakar, Nairobi--became centers of great intellectual vitality often attracting significant numbers of European and North American scholars, and became central to the global debate over development and underdevelopment. Any assessment of what has changed on the continent, and what it might mean for both knowledge production, field research and scholarly collaboration, must start, of course, from the firmament of the present moment. On its face the parallels between now and then are striking: another imperialist war-making adventure (prosecuted not in the name of anti-communism but of global democracy and anti-terrorism), another round of oil and food volatility (and more Malthusian talk of scarcity), another space-ship earth moment (this time detonated by the spectre of global climate change), seething nationalisms (or proto-nationalisms and communalisms of multifarious stripe) in the global south in reaction to decades of structural adjustment and 'economic realism', an anti-imperialism issuing not from the secular or revolutionary Third Worldist left but in the name of political Islam, and, of course, a deep crisis of capitalism triggered by the wreckless commodification of money and monetized assets. This time around one might say that the crisis is defined by the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist project launched in the late 1970s. Naturally the contrasts between the 1970s and the current conjuncture are as striking as the resemblances or repetitions. Nobody would question the observation that US hegemony, from the vantage point of 2010, looks much more rocky. China now appears as a profound counterweight to the American sense of a Pacific Century. The US militarization of its program of global financialization ('military neoliberalism') exceeds virtually anything encompassed by the military Keynesianism of the 1970s. Whether we believe that the last vestiges of the 1960s have been finally swept away, the fact is that neoliberalism does rule undivided across the globe. In this sense Karl Polanyi's (1947) belief that free-market liberalism was finally dead and gone (he wrote at the end of the Second World War) was horribly wrong. At the very least one can say that Africa itself was radically shaped and reconfigured by this neoliberal revolution--the 'counter-revolution' in development theory as it was called--and the continent, as a consequence, looks very different now. …

This chapter analyses the debate on British informal empire in Latin America, pointing out the main historiographical schools, their hypotheses and observables, and concludes on the unresolved questions and the contribution of this book to them. Four main moments in the debate can be identified: the rivalries between European powers leading to the division of Africa and the First World War; the decolonization of Asia and Africa, the crisis of the British Empire and U.S. ascendancy during the second post-war period; U.S. global interventions and Latin American politics since the 1959 Cuban Revolution; and the neoliberal crisis, which gave rise to new imperialist wars and new ‘anti-imperialist’ governments in twenty-first century South America.

Una combinación de factores ha asegurado que la conmemoración de la Primera Guerra Mundial en las tierras del anterior imperio ruso se haya quedado atrás con respecto al resto de Europa.El hecho de que el conflicto desembocó en el colapso del régimen zarista y su reemplazo por un estado bolchevique centró la atención en otro sitio. Las exigencias inmediatas de los enfrentamientos en la Guerra Civil y posteriormente la muerte de Lenin ofrecieron un marcado contrarrelatofrente a la historia principal europea de dolor, conmemoración y pérdida. Los veteranos de la «guerra imperialista» encajaron mal en el nuevo estado Soviético durante los años entre guerras donde, bajo Stalin, se hicieron difíciles incluso las conmemoraciones privadas. A pesar del regreso parcial a las tradiciones nacionales rusas durante la «Gran Guerra Patriótica», esto aseguró en gran parte que la derrota del nazismo sería la experiencia definitoria de Rusia durante el siglo, legitimando el estado Soviético y confirmando su estado como potencia global. Tras 1989-1991 la memoria de la Gran Guerra resurgió de esta sombra, más claramente como la comadrona de la independencia nacional en los estados sucesores al imperio zarista, y con el regreso del estado ruso esto ha continuado, perpetuando la narrativa de que su experiencia no es la típica del resto de Europa.

An article by the author in the Economic and Political Weekly in the late 1960s noted that Western anthropologists had neglected the study of as a world system. The author suggests below that this has been remedied, as various social and political movememnts catalyzed a corpus of social science literature and debate. This article examines demographic and economic indicators to highlight the changing character of developed and less developed capitalist and socialist countries and its significance for social scientists. In 1967 I wrote a paper New Proposals for Anthropologists for the Southwestern States Anthropological Association meeting in San Francisco. I couldn't think of a journal in the United States that might be likely to publish it, and it was published in Economic and Political Weekly. Monthly Review republished it in 1968, as and Imperialism, after which it was translated into several languages and reprinted many times. I want first to briefly outline the problems that were bothering me when I wrote that paper and the historical background to it. I would then like to mention some of the kinds of work that have been done in North America since 1968 that are relevant to these problems. Finally, I want to talk about some of the major changes in the world which have an impact on our subject and our thinking. Anthropology and Imperialism was written at the height of the war in Vietnam. My husband, David Aberle, and I, along with a number of other anthropologists, had become deeply disturbed by the evidence of wholesale destruction of territory, villages and people by U.S. forces in Vietnam, especially by the use of anti - personnel weapons such as napalm, and the defoliation of forests and cultivated land. In 1967 David Aberle presented a resolution at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association which condemned those weapons. To our dismay, it was ruled out of order by the then chairperson, Frederica de Laguna, and vehemently opposed by Margaret Mead, who argued that political resolutions were in the professional interests of anthropologists. There was a commotion on the floor. David Aberle, Gerald Berreman and others argued against the chair, but the day was won when Michael Harner rose and stated: Genocide is not in the professional interests of anthropologists. Against the chair's ruling, the resolution was then passed by a large majority. It was one of the first published statements by a professional association against the war in Vietnam. There was of course an enormous outcry against the war by the U.S. public as well as by professionals in later years. The Vietnam war (or as the Vietnamese more properly call it, the U.S. imperialist war) came to an end in 1975, after about two million Vietnamese had been killed and perhaps another two million crippled. By imperialism I mean any social system in which the government and/or private property owners of one or more countries dominate the government and people of one or more other countries or regions politically, militarily, economically or socio - culturally (usually all four of those) to the detriment of most of the subordinated people's welfare. For the last 400 years, most has been capitalist. During this century, capitalist has wreaked the most harm and been responsible for the most deaths through two world wars and almost countless minor wars, as well as through starvation, malnutrition, destruction of traditional agriculture and industries and political repression by dependent, dictatorial governments. However, the Soviet Union and China have also practised forms of since their revolutions. In 1967 I tended to neglect this phenomenon because I am a Marxist and was somewhat biased in my outlook, and partly because I did not have evidence that the U.S.S.R. and China had extracted economic surplus from their dependencies, and so I tended to underestimate the political and cultural repression that they had practised. …