Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
By
Edited by
Summary
On the rainy night of 2/3 March 1915, Jemadar Mir Mast, an Indian soldier serving in the 58th Vaughan's Rifles (Bareilly Brigade) at Neuve Chapelle, deserted and quietly crossed over to the German side with a group of fellow Pathans. Mir Mast was an enterprising man. It is believed that he became part of a jihad mission from Germany, and Anglo-Indian myth has it that the Kaiser decorated him with the Iron Cross. Because of the exceptional nature of the event, his trench notebook is now housed in the National Archives in Delhi, contained in a hitherto sealed envelope marked ‘His Majesty's Office’. It is a curious document. Along with a hand-drawn trench map, some casual jottings and numbers, it comprises a long list of words, first in Urdu and then in English. The words range from the functional (‘haversack’, ‘blanket’, ‘please’) to the warmly human (‘hungry’, ‘nephew’, ‘honeymoon’) to the robustly earthy (‘testacles’ [sic], ‘brests’ [sic]) (Figure 1). This tantalising and hitherto unknown ‘diary’ (as referred to in the National Archives catalogue) – a rare, if not the only surviving, example of a trench notebook by an Indian soldier of the First World War – raises a number of broad questions. What do we know about the daily lived war experience of these men from the former colonies and from different racial and ethnic groups?
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race, Empire and First World War Writing , pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
References
, L'Appel à L'Afrique, contributions et réactions à l'effort de guerre en AOF 1914–1918 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982)Google Scholar
, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (London: James Curry, 1991)Google Scholar
and (eds.), Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c.1700–1964 (Manchester University Press, 1999)Google Scholar
, Te Hokowhitu a Tu: The Maori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (Reed: Auckland, 1995)Google Scholar
, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (Manchester University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999)Google Scholar
, ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt’. Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001)Google Scholar
, Race and Empire in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)Google Scholar
and , The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I (1974; New York: Da Capo Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , , and (eds.), The World in World Wars: Experiences and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden and Baston: Brill, 2010)
, Der Zusammenbruch der alten Welt, quoted in , The First World War (London: Viking, 2003), 69–70Google Scholar
Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1918 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1920)
Les colonies dans la Grande Guerre: Combats et épreuves des peuples d'outre-mer (Paris: Soteca, Editions 14–18, 2006, 63
, The First World War (2003), 67
, ‘Immigrant Workers in France during World War I’, French Historical Studies, 14/1, 1985, 57–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Scott's Official History of the American Negro in the World War (Washington, DC, 1919), 458Google Scholar
(ed.), The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 12 vols., (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1921–43)Google Scholar
, ‘the participation of the Malawians in the East African campaign drew them inexorably into a wider world … into a modern world system’ (The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War, (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000), 215Google Scholar
, ‘Military Colonialism’, in and (eds.), World War I: Five Continents in Flanders (Ypres: Lanoo, 2006), 19Google Scholar
(ed.) Aborigines in the Defence of Australia (Sydney: Australian National University Press, 1991)
, Warriors of the King: Prairie Indians in World War I (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1999)Google Scholar
The Companion to World War I (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010
(ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 28Google Scholar
, ‘Remembering the Tirailleurs sénégalais and the Great War: Oral History as Methodology of Inclusion in French Colonial Studies’, French Colonial History 10 (2009), 125–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978)Google Scholar
, The Jews and the German War Experience 1914–1918 (London: Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, 1977)Google Scholar
, The History of Antisemitism: Suicidal Europe 1870–1933 (4 vols.) vol. iv trans. (Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar
, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two Wars (Oxford: Berg, 1993)Google Scholar
‘Letter from an African in France’, The Church Abroad, 15 (1917), 122
, From Adversaries to Comrades-In-Arms: West Africans and the French Military 1885–1918 (Waltham, MA: African Studies Association, 1979), 57–78Google Scholar
, The Races of Men: An Outline of Anthropology and Ethnography (London: Walter Scott, 1900)Google Scholar
, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
(ed.), The Concept Of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)
, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotype on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976)Google Scholar
, German Atrocities: An Official Investigation (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916) 52–3, 114–15Google Scholar
, The Church of England in the First World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), 92Google Scholar
The Times History of the War, vol. i (London: The Times, 1914), 155
, ‘The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War’, American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 3 (June 1998), 740CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2005)Google Scholar
, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005)Google Scholar
, ‘ “Les Races Guerrieres”: Racial Preconceptions in the French Military about West African Soldiers during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 34. no. 4 (October 1999), 523 (517–36)Google Scholar
, ‘Canadian Indians and the Great War’, in Canada in the Great World War: Guarding the Channel Ports by ‘Various Authorities’ (Toronto: United Publishers of Canada Limited, 1919)Google Scholar
, The Black Battalion 1916–1920: Canada's Best Kept Military Secret (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing Limited, 1987)Google Scholar
, ‘The War in Africa’, in (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 1998), 98Google Scholar
and , ‘Beasts of Burden: British West African Carriers in the First World War’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol.13, No.1/2 (1979), 7–23Google Scholar
, The Carrier Corps: Military Labour in the East African Campaign of 1914 to 1918 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986)Google Scholar
, ‘The Impact of the First World War on South African Blacks’, War and Society, 3, 1 (May, 1985)Google Scholar
, ‘Immigrant Workers in France during World War I’, French Historical Studies, vol. 14 no. 1 (Spring 1985), 80; 57–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Race, War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in the First World War (Kingston: James Currey, 2002), 17Google Scholar
, ‘World War I and the Rise of African Nationalism: Nigerian Veterans as Catalysts of Change’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 20, 3 (1982), 493–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘The Influence of Racial Attitudes on British Policy towards India in the First World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 14 (1986), 91–113Google Scholar
, ‘German and French Perceptions of the French North and West African contingents, 1910–1918’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 56 (1997), 31–68Google Scholar
, ‘The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War’, American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 3 (June 1998), 766 (737–69)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, In Kut and Captivity, with the Sixth Indian Division (London: John Murray, 1919), 285, 287Google Scholar
, ‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History’, in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. , trans. , 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8Google Scholar
Les lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984–92
The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975
(eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies (Cambridge University Press, 2005Google Scholar
, ‘Palimpsests’, in (ed.), Memory, History and Colonialism (London: German Historical Institute, 2009), 167 (167–73)Google Scholar
, An Autobiography or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. , (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 317Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this chapter is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.
- 8
- Cited by