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REVIEW BY JONATHAN EATON
In recent years, historians have increasingly sought to understand major conflicts from a genuinely global perspective. While this approach has perhaps always been synonymous with the Second World War, where the shape of the conflict was inevitably textured by major geopolitical trends, it has been less frequently applied to the First World War, where public perceptions – in Britain at least – are traditionally framed by the experience of the Western Front.
In Ring of Fire, a new work by historians Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst, the authors seek to outline the events of August and September 1914 in a different way, demonstrating how traditional and somewhat narrow-minded views of this period have obscured broader international trends.
As the European powers edged closer to the outbreak of war in summer 1914, they sought to draw on the resources of their colonial territories to recruit troops, disrupt the operations of their enemies, and provide economic support. For instance, Britain’s war effort was buttressed by access to more than two million men across its empire. Its territories of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia collectively offered to provide 53,000 men as war was declared. Even a sparsely populated region such as Newfoundland was able to contribute 500 troops within days – a generous offer driven by the patriotic fervour of the time. But, as a consequence, the terrible cost of the conflict was felt in communities around the globe, many of which were far from the battlefields. Around 1% of all Maori men are believed to have been killed while serving in the conflict.
The outbreak of war also placed pressure on the delicate economic ties and trade routes on which individual nations had become dependent. Despite her imperial power, Britain could only feed itself for around eight weeks if trade links were to be severed, and was equally reliant on the import of seven million tonnes of timber each year. Moving ships and sailors from merchant to military service imperilled the flow of goods across the world, too, with the costs of transport increasing rapidly and, in the most extreme cases, goods abandoned on docks to rot. The First World War exposed the fragility of global economies and the reliance of key military powers on access to goods from beyond their shores. Even nations outside the conflict, such as those of South America, were badly impacted by trade pressures, as exports collapsed and unemployment soared.
The desire to draw from colonial territories and global diasporas resulted in some absurd situations, particularly as emigrants to the United States were recalled to serve. The French Consul-General in New Orleans lamented that so many French residents refused to join up. Italy expected first-, second-, and third-generation emigrants to return and fight, but as many as 800,000 did not. In August 1914, the American government confirmed their position that they would not force anyone recalled to Europe to do so. In Japan and China, Europeans from different sides of the conflict embarked for the voyage home to fight from the same harbours, with British and German expatriates forming separate queues from each other.
The terrible cost of the conflict was felt around the globe.
The mobilisation of forces across such a wide geographic range inevitably exposed political hypocrisy and societal inequalities. For instance, Michel Lempicki, a Polish member of the Russian State Duma, boldly challenged the rationale for fighting to defend Serbia when his own people were subject to severe restrictions by Russia, which included the Polish language being prohibited from the public sphere.
Colonial ambitions
The concentration of colonial ambitions within Africa meant that the continent played a key role in early competition between the warring powers, with most of sub-Saharan Africa under their control by 1914. The Berlin Act of 1885 had forged an agreement that sought to limit the potential for military confrontation in Africa in the event of an outbreak of war in Europe.
This agreement was soon cast aside as mobilisation involving Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany commenced, with fighting under way across a broad geographic area by the end of September 1914. As Churchill and Eberholst demonstrate, the first shot of the war fired by a British soldier was probably not in Europe at all, but in Togo- land on 7 August 1914, during a campaign to seize a German wireless station at Kamina. The first British officer to be killed in the war fell during the same campaign, on 22 August.
Japan’s military prowess had been ably demonstrated through victories in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The events of 1914 promised the opportunity to expand Japanese territorial reach and influence, all while acting as a British ally. Britain hoped that Japan would exert naval influence to inhibit German operations in the Pacific. Japan aimed to go beyond mere deterrence and also to seize the German base at Tsingtao within Kiaochao Bay, under the pretext of restoring it to Chinese ownership.
In reality, Tsingtao served as one of the best harbours in the region and was therefore fundamental to Japan’s imperial ambitions. It is alleged that the Kaiser himself claimed that ‘it would shame me more to surrender Tsingtao to the Japanese than Berlin to the Russians’. Yet Germany was unable to match the military might which Japan was able to deploy in the Pacific. Some 20,000 Japanese troops and more than 140 artillery pieces were deployed to take the port, which ultimately fell after a siege in November 1914.
Ring of Fire explicitly aims not to join the expansive literature analysing the causes of the First World War, but rather to depict the opening weeks of the conflict from multiple international perspectives, allowing eye- witness accounts drawn from a vast range of sources to speak for themselves. The depth of research involved in identifying these many accounts – from combatants and civilians of such a range of nationalities – is admirable.
Churchill and Eberholst more than succeed in their primary aim, which is to convincingly challenge popular narratives of the conflict that all too often focus on specific campaigns or theatres. As such, their book is to be strongly recommended to anyone who seeks to understand the origins of the First World War within a truly global context.
Ring of Fire: a new global history of the outbreak of the First World War
Alex Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst
Apollo, hbk, 448pp (£30)
ISBN 978-1035903429
