Even as many of its institutional legacies endured, the First World War brought about the collapse of the German colonial empire. The July Crisis of 1914 was triggered by mounting tensions in the Balkans, but colonial rivalries and the naval arms race had already helped to entrench some of the alignments that defined the war. Germany’s bid to construct Mittelafrika and to challenge Britain at sea failed. Most German colonies were conquered early with only Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign in East Africa continued until 1918. Germany’s war aims combined continental annexations with overseas expansion, but these ambitions collapsed with the military defeat on the Western Front, creating the conditions for the November Revolution. For Germany, the Treaty of Versailles brought a double loss of empire with the cession of its European borderlands and the transformation of its colonies into League of Nations mandates. Reduced to its national core, the Weimar Republic codified a more centralised nation-state, consolidating institutional developments fostered by the colonial empire in preceding decades. At the same time, the loss of imperial status fuelled a politics of resentment that contributed to the erosion of the republican order.

This introduction reflects on the conceptual benefits, challenges, and limits of putting into conversation military history and global history. It regards the two world wars as times of both disruption and heightened connectedness. Severed trade, breaches in diplomatic relations, enforced immobility, and economic sanctions were paired with new connections, contacts, networks, emulations, and reroutings. Four key perspectives define the volume’s approach. First, decentering the study of the world wars widens the geographic, chronological, and social scope of historians’ outlook, introducing a more diverse historical narrative. Second, focusing on the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, which the world wars both engendered and deepened, raises important questions about what was absorbed, adapted, and rejected as part of these circulations. Third, emphasizing encounters helps to show the impact of global warfare at the local level, highlights the transformation of individual and collective identities, and forces a reflection on the lives of those who remained untouched, at least apparently, by faraway events. Finally, this volume explores global languages: the shared systems of conceptualization and communication – including commemorative practices and international and humanitarian law – which developed on account of the world wars’ extreme violence.

This conclusion reflects on the importance of studying the two world wars as moments of interconnectedness, when societies, economies, and cultures interacted with one another across national boundaries. It insists on the importance of moving beyond solely diplomatic, military, and political histories to instead prioritize transnational and transimperial perspectives, acknowledging groups and individuals above and below the level of states. Several categories are particularly useful in this endeavor: home fronts, colonial mobilization, captivity, occupations, and neutrality. Taking stock of these helps to highlight new frameworks of experience spread across the world. Finally, there is the important question of the relationship between the world wars and globalization. By their nature and by the reactions they prompted, these two global conflicts were ultimately the agents as much as the opponents of that process.

The First World War did not mark the end of economic interdependence, but the strategic demands of the war twisted international economic relations even further in the service of power politics. The chapter concludes by returning to the central question of how economic interdependence transformed power politics. It restrained war amongst the great powers and offered new areas for the conduct of power politics. As it reshaped power relations, states that suffered setbacks to their perceived vital interests, became more willing to compensate for their weakness in economic competition by turning to the use of military force.

The First World War occupies a central place in debates about effects of economic interdependence on international politics. This chapter examines how historians and IR scholars have explained the outbreak of war in 1914 between states with deep economic ties. It discusses the reciprocal effects of economic interdependence and power politics upon each other. By the early twentieth century, growing international trade and capital flows constituted an essential part of the international order, along with the institutions and practices of power politics. The chapter argues that the interdependence transformed power politics in ways that both sustained peace and created conditions for war. It sets out how that balance tilted towards militarisation from 1911.

The chapter introduces the origins of the plebiscite as a tool of international politics, and examines Sarah Wambaugh’s early career in the American women’s peace and suffrage movements. Wambaugh began researching the plebiscite following American entry into the First World War in 1917, and her early contributions reflected her youthful idealism and embrace of the principle of the self-determination of nations pronounced by Woodrow Wilson. Her early works may have influenced the peacemakers during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; however, the plebiscites that resulted were more frequently the result of instrumental bargaining among the victorious powers. If the plebiscite was not used as consistently as advocates such as Wambaugh would have liked, a major achievement was the inclusion of women’s suffrage in nearly all plebiscites written into the post-war settlement. In this the first plebiscite decided upon for the Danish–German border region of Schleswig set an important precedent.

In the twentieth century, English identity changed through the impact of two World Wars, from a nostalgic sentiment cherished by the privileged classes, to a more widespread attachment to an endangered homeland. The wars saw a dramatic expansion of British state power and were followed by egalitarian social policies that promoted a sense of British belonging while often maintaining undertones of Englishness.

This chapter examines Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys (2018) and, more briefly, Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian (2019). It argues that each of these novels offers a reassessment of the First World War in Mesopotamia (contemporary Iraq) and Palestine, and its ongoing repercussions in the region. This chapter argues that these books should be read as resistant forms of cultural production, which assert the humanity of populations that were often reduced to racialized types or caricature in First World War representations of them. In contrast, these authors draw attention to the imperial roots of contemporary conflict in the Middle East; to the rich cultures, histories, and traditions of its people; and to the impact of violence on ordinary Arab lives, especially those of women and children. As such, they not only offer a new perspective on the First World War, but also challenge the perverse logic of twenty-first-century conflicts in which the deaths of Iraqi and Palestinian civilians continue to be seen as acceptable “collateral damage.”

Food in the era of the First World War was much more than a military necessity. The shortages of foodstuffs profoundly shaped states and societies during the conflict and beyond. Hunger in war was not a new phenomenon, but its experience during the First World War led to three main changes. First, it changed the social contract between citizens and the state. People who had suffered serial nutritional deprivation came to believe more forcefully than before that a primary responsibility of the state was to provide a bare minimum of supplies for their survival. States, too, understood that being able to provide foodstuffs for their citizens was essential for their legitimacy. Second, hunger in the era of the First World War brought a new emphasis on “nutritional sovereignty”: the idea that states must be able to produce their food supplies themselves, rather than import them. Finally, hunger in the era of the First World War was a turning point in the development of international aid. While international charitable aid had existed long before the War, the amount of aid given the number of different groups and institutions grew exponentially.

Food insecurity during the First World War made hungry civilians around the continent search for alternative modes and means to fight hunger in war and post-war Europe. A transnational comparison of survival strategies, employed by individuals throughout Europe, demonstrates how ordinary civilians responded to the shortcomings of official food provisioning. The chapter explores how civilians turned to home-based agricultural production, made trips to the countryside or participated in black market. As regular circuits for obtaining food were very restricted, individuals circumvented official distribution means by relying on the alternative economies of grey and black markets. Bartering, especially, became an important means to cope with the economy of shortages. Relying on informal channels, as this chapter demonstrates, the hungry population traded jewellery for potatoes or furniture for meat. Civilians sometimes even resorted to illegal and criminal activities such as fraud and theft to meet their basic needs. In Eastern and Western Europe, individuals of course took actions in different forms, depending on the severity of the food scarcity, but, as this chapter argues, the strategies they used also shared many similar features and delineated new modes of social interactions, and new relationships to the licit and the illicit in wartime.

The chapter explores US–Russia relations in the years before Russia entered her second revolution in February 1917 and America joined the First World War in April 1917. This period was complicated by discrimination against Jews and other ethnic minorities in Russia, by ideological differences between American democracy and Russian autocracy, and by geopolitical disagreements. Yet these elements of conflict did not hamper the two states’ rapprochement, which began at the end of 1914 and at times resembled the euphoria of a honeymoon. This chapter emphasizes that the surprising thaw in US–Russia relations cannot be explained only by the convergence of the two governments’ interests: namely, that the Russian Empire desperately needed to buy American supplies for its armed forces, while Americans were eager to sell their surplus products. Interactions between Imperial Russia and the United States call for more comprehensive consideration, with a particular focus on the changes in mutual representations and the intensified process of Russians and Americans studying each other. This is precisely what this chapter sets out to provide.

While many European countries had used rationing and price ceilings to respond to emergency hunger situations before the First World War, these measures had been limited in their scope to cities and smaller areas, and were of short duration, generally lasting weeks or months. The long-term experience of hunger in the First World War era shattered civilian expectations of state responsibility and pushed governments to act in new and different ways. This chapter examines how a variety of states chose to respond to the changing experiences of insufficient food supplies and hunger faced by their citizens as they realized that their previous plans, or lack of planning, were insufficient. This chapter is the first comparative analysis of the technical and political aspects of food distribution systems in the First World War for a wide range of different states. The timing and practices implemented by different governments differed for both practical reasons – food did not disappear at equal rates everywhere – and for political reasons.

For contemporaneous writers on Debussy, the First World War presented a persistent problem, with many choosing to omit or minimise these years in their portrayals of the composer, or French music in general. Drawing on work in collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs and successive generations of scholars, I consider the ways in which such portrayals were constructed and speculate on the reasons for why they endured. This chapter presents three narratives and examines them in terms of the types of memory at work, the motivations of the groups sustaining these memories, and the actions undertaken by these groups to promote their visions of the past. Each narrative subscribed to a particular collective remembering of recent French music, while each was consistent in what it overlooked: that is, they all contributed to a general collective forgetting with regards to Debussy’s late works and the war years.

Prior to the First World War, the operations of the British financial sector primarily fell under the jurisdiction of a banking aristocracy. The Old Guard, comprising prominent bankers and industrialists based in the City of London, oversaw a system of indirect regulation, characterized by the lack of direct government intervention and the self-sustaining operations of the classical gold standard. Yet the outbreak of the war fundamentally upended the traditional balance between the state and the economy. With the abandonment of the gold standard and the closure of the London Stock Exchange in 1914, the nation faced a series of unprecedented crises that threatened Britain’s hegemonic position in the global order. By war’s end, the Bank of England had begun to reconsider its position in the City, throughout Europe, and across the empire.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.