Word War I and the humanitarian impulse

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-163
Author(s):  
William I. Hitchcock

The Great War is quite rightly associated with the tragedies of the battlefield, with combat deaths of nearly ten million soldiers, with the construction of the vast network of cemeteries all across northern Europe that Kipling called “cities of the dead,” and with the emotional and psychic scarring of a generation of European peoples. Knowing the political and military history' of post-1918 Europe, we think of the Great War as but the first act in a century of horrors. Yet when we consider the legacies of the Great War, it is worth recalling that one less melancholy outcome was the creation of a new conception of humanitarian action on behalf of wounded soldiers and distressed civilians.

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-42
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.


1919 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 176-176
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (156) ◽  
pp. 643-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fitzpatrick

AbstractIt is now widely admitted that the Great War was also Ireland’s war, with profound consequences for every element of Irish life after 1914. Its impact may be discerned in aberrant aspects of Ireland’s demographic, economic and social history, as well as in the more familiar political and military convulsions of the war years. This article surveys recent scholarship, assesses statistical evidence of the war’s social and economic impact (both positive and negative), and explores its far-reaching political repercussions. These include the postponement of expected civil conflict, the unexpected occurrence of an unpopular rebellion in 1916, and public response to the consequent coercion. The speculative final section outlines a number of plausible outcomes for Irish history in the absence of war, concluding that no single counterfactual history of a warless Ireland is defensible.


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