State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.

Since 1931, the two powers China and Japan had fought intermittently in localised engagements. In 1937, however, these conflicts turned into a full-scale war between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai-shek's (1887–1975) Guomindang, which entered into an alliance with the Chinese communists. The Second Sino-Japanese War which had begun with a local conflict near Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge incident) ushered in four years of Chinese resistance against an expanding enemy before it became part of the global Second World War, following Japan's simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in 1941. The conflict in East Asia evoked various responses from humanitarian organisations and actors abroad. However, some relief initiatives decided not to take up this new cause and to continue to concentrate on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. In other cases, offers to help were declined by Japan. The international humanitarian system that emerged during the first four years of the war in support of China was majorly sustained by non-state initiatives, both established and newly founded ones. The latter especially were hardly impartial in their aid giving and often also had political motives in addition to altruistic ones. They came from strong left-leaning backgrounds and/or were rooted in diasporic Chinese, missionary or philanthropic communities.

In India, political and social actors and organisations and the press had, for a long time, followed the developments in East Asia. The outbreak of the war brought forward the question of humanitarian relief for the belligerent parties.

The High Commissioner for India, Sir S. E. Runganadhan (1877–1966), extolled the work of the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) in the foreword to the fund's War Record as ‘a remarkable piece of humanitarian work carried out during the war largely by British women for the benefit of India's fighting men and merchant seamen’. After providing a short overview of the fund's work between 1939 and 1945, the High Commissioner expressed his and his country's gratitude by writing, ‘India will ever remain deeply indebted to them [the members of the fund's executive committee and the host of unseen helpers throughout Great Britain] for this practical expression of their sympathy and goodwill towards her.’ Although the imperial tone of this message, coming from the High Commissioner appointed by the colonial government in Delhi, might not come as a surprise, the used framing of India's indebtedness for British humanitarian assistance to Indian soldiers and merchant seamen (lascars) who had done their share to contribute to Britain's and the empire's war effort must have been puzzling for many contemporaries on the subcontinent. Next to doubting the underlying idea of the voluntariness of India's war contribution, they might also have raised questions about who should be indebted to whom.

Early in the war, the fund's public appeals for support in the form of knitted comforts and donations had struck a different note. Back in the spring of 1940, the fund had justified its appeal by emphasising that Indian soldiers had ‘come so far across the sea to help in our [the British] war effort’.

State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.

In 1917, a small group of women, some of whom had just come out of purdah, began to meet regularly for Red Cross work in Birbhum, Bengal. Called upon by Saroj Nalini Dutt (1887–1925), a Bengali social reformer and early rural development activist, the members of the Birbhum Mahilā Samiti (Birbhum women's group) sewed garments and made dātuns (teeth-cleaning sticks) made from the neem tree as well as pacīsī boards (an Indian game) for Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War. Dutt, who was honoured for her activities after the war by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS), also sent a monthly consignment of sweets, condiments, and newspapers to soldiers serving in Mesopotamia. The Birbhum group, which normally focused its activities on the social and educational ‘progress’ of Bengali women, is only one of the many examples of Indian non-state humanitarian initiatives organised during the First World War. Given that these initiatives were embedded in the British imperial context and contributed to the empire's war effort, they are examples of a larger phenomenon that historians before me have labelled ‘imperial humanitarianism’.

Two decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the future prime minister of independent India, and by then, President of the Indian National Congress (INC), became involved in propagating and organising Indian nationalist humanitarian activities. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Nehru swayed the Indian national movement to create its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collection of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain.

The First World War generated multiple state and non-state humanitarian replies, encompassing not only material and financial donations, but also different forms of voluntary work. In colonial India, one of these relief activities was the formation and working of the ambulance corps. Staffed with (Indian) volunteers, the corps assisted wounded and sick soldiers of the British Indian Army in Great Britain, Mesopotamia and India. Corps members worked closely with, or as part of, the military. Their duties not only included the transportation of war victims but also comprised other tasks, such as nursing them, dressing their wounds, providing medical care as doctors, and interpreting and cooking for them. The male volunteers came from all over India, and depending on the nature of the corps, their religious, caste, educational and class backgrounds varied substantially.

Sources suggest that at least four Indian volunteer ambulance initiatives existed: the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps (IFATC), the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA), the Bengal Ambulance Corps (BAC) and the Benares Ambulance Transport Corps. In Chapter 1 we have already read about the work of the ISJAA. This chapter sets out to analyse the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps. Established in Britain in autumn 1914, the unit was, as far as I know, the only relief initiative organised by colonial subjects back in the metropole during the war. This does not mean that it was the only humanitarian endeavour organised by non-Westerners.