scholarly journals Prince Lichnowsky’s memorandum as a source for determining the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War

Author(s):  
Djordje Djuric

Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky was a German ambassador in London from 1912 to 1914. He was one of the most important direct participants of the July Crisis which led to the outbreak of the First World War. This document was written in 1916 and secretly delivered to the German military and political supreme authorities. It came into possession of Swedish socialists and they published it, first in English and then in all other European languages. This document explicitly attributes the responsibility for the outbreak of the war to the German political and social circles. It accuses them of instigating Austria- Hungary to attack Serbia. The Germans declined and undermined solemn interventions to evade the war. Also, this document briefly describes the German imperialistic politics in the decade before the War and indicates that these politics have inevitably led to the confrontation with Great Britain, Russia and France. Assassination in Sarajevo is indicated as a motive but little attention is paid to it (Gavrilo Princip is not even mentioned at all). During the Paris Peace Conference (in Versailles), this document was used as one of the important arguments to declare Germany guilty of starting the war. Western press wrote a great deal about it and it was given a lot of credit. Also, this memorandum was often disputed during the debate in German politics and historiography in the 1920s and the 1930s on the war accountability (Kriegsschuldsfrage), but it was often quoted by German opponents.

Author(s):  
S. S. Shchevelev

The article examines the initial period of the mandate administration of Iraq by Great Britain, the anti-British uprising of 1920. The chronological framework covers the period from May 1916 to October 1921 and includes an analysis of events in the Middle East from May 1916, when the secret agreement on the division of the territories of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I (the Sykes-Picot agreement) was concluded before the proclamation of Faisal as king of Iraq and from the formation of the country՚s government. This period is a key one in the Iraqi-British relations at the turn of the 10-20s of the ХХ century. The author focuses on the Anglo-French negotiations during the First World War, on the eve and during the Paris Peace Conference on the division of the territory of the Ottoman Empire and the ownership of the territories in the Arab zone. During these negotiations, it was decided to transfer the mandates for Syria (with Lebanon) to the France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Great Britain. The British in Iraq immediately faced strong opposition from both Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in an anti-English uprising in 1920. The author describes the causes, course and consequences of this uprising.


Author(s):  
Thomas R. Hart

This chapter examines the history and developments in the study of medieval Hispanic literatures in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It explains that the importance of Hispanic studies in British universities increased greatly after the end of the First World War and that by 1925 there were four professorships in Spanish studies. The first chair of Spanish studies in Cambridge was J.B. Trend. Other notable British hispanists include William James Entwistle and Gerald Brenan.


Author(s):  
Mary S. Barton

Following Émile Cottin’s attempted assassination of Georges Clemenceau in February 1919, the victors in the First World War reassembled at the Paris Peace Conference and enacted protocols to prevent surplus stocks of weapons from being distributed “to persons and states who are not fitted to possess them.”...


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Gregory ◽  
Robert M. Schwartz

One of the early drivers of historical GIS was the development of national historical GISs. These systems usually hold all of a country's census and related statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such they have represent an extremely valuable resource, but at the same time they were and remain extremely expensive and time consuming to build. Was the investment worthwhile? This paper takes one of these systems, the Great Britain Historical GIS, and explores how it was built, what methodologies were developed to exploit the data that it contains, and provides an example to demonstrate how it made possible a unique analysis of railroads in Wales before the First World War.


2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.


Author(s):  
Gordon Pentland

This chapter examines the ways in which Thomas Muir was used by political activists, historians and writers in both Great Britain and Australia in the centuries following his death. It analyses Muir's posthumous lives as a case study of how, when and why revolutionary figures of the 1790s have become politically usable. It discusses three important contexts that help explain both revived interest in Muir and changed interpretations of his political significance: one was provided by two global conflicts, the First World War and the ‘age of revolutions’ between 1790 and 1848; the other was provided by the success of the Labour movement in the West of Scotland. The chapter shows how the transnational dimension of Muir's life has been at least partially recovered and his legacy shaped and deployed by an emerging Australian nationalism from the end of the nineteenth century.


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