Exiting war: The British Empire and the 1918–20 moment

By Manchester University Press

Exiting war explores a particular 1918–20 ‘moment’ in the British Empire’s history, between the First World War’s armistices of 1918, and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. That moment, we argue, was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation, and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918–20 ‘moment’ and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526155832

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General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester

Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Exiting war

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Exiting war

The British Empire and the 1918–20 moment

Romain Fathi

Margaret Hutchison

Andrekos Varnava

Michael J. K. Walsh

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5584 9 hardback

First published 2022

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Contents

List of contributors

1 The 1918–20 moment and the British Empire's sorties de guerre

Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava and Michael J. K. Walsh

IFacing the challenges of peace

2 Australia, empire and the 1918–19 influenza pandemic

Hannah Mawdsley

3 Repatriation 1918–20 and the changing Anglo-imperial relationship

Trevor Harris

4 The elimination of Germans from the British Empire at the end of the First World War

Panikos Panayi

IIControlling and exporting a military tradition

5 British colonial reaffirmation at the 1918−20 moment: appropriation, dehumanisation and the rule of colonial difference

Samraghni Bonnerjee

6 Beyond Amritsar: the Indian Army and the fight for empire, 1918–20

Kate Imy

IIIContesting and strengthening empire

7 The aftermath of the Great War and the birth of modern Quebec nationalism

Charles-Philippe Courtois

8 The failure of the enosis policy in Cyprus after the Great War: between liberal philhellenism and imperialism

Andrekos Varnava

9 From Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to Middle Eastern mandates: understanding Britain's 1918–20 moment in the Middle East

Clothilde Houot

Conclusion

Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava and Michael J. K. Walsh

Select bibliography

Index

Contributors

Dr Samraghni Bonnerjee is Wellcome ISSF Fellow at the School of English, University of Leeds, and Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. Formerly, she was a Vice-Chancellor's Scholar at the University of Sheffield, where she read for a PhD in English Literature. Her edited collection Subaltern Women’s Narratives: Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies is forthcoming in the Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality series in 2021. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Charles-Philippe Courtois is Associate Professor of History at Collège Militaire Royal Saint-Jean (Canada). Specialising in Quebec intellectual history, he is the author of the first biography of canon Lionel Groulx (Montréal, Éditions de l’Homme, 2017), known as a ‘national historian’. His other publications include La Conquête, une anthologie (Montréal, 2018) and, as editor with Laurent Veyssière, Le Québec dans la Grande Guerre. Engagements, refus, héritages in 2015 and with R. Comeau and D. Monière, Histoire intellectuelle de l’indépendantisme québécois (2 vols, Montréal, 2010–12).

Dr Romain Fathi is a Senior Lecturer at Flinders University and a Chercheur Associé at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po in Paris. He is an award-winning cultural historian whose research focuses on the First World War, war commemorations and sorties de guerre. His latest book, Our Corner of the Somme, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. Dr Fathi is currently investigating the handling of human remains during and after the First World War. He is one of Resilient Humanitarianism's (DP190101171) Chief Investigators, an Australian Research Council-funded project (2019–23) that investigates the League of Red Cross Societies.

Trevor Harris teaches British political and intellectual history at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. His recent publications include (with Andrekos Varnava) ‘It is quite impossible to receive them: Saving the Musa Dagh refugees and the imperialism of European humanitarianism’, Journal of Modern History, 90:4 (December 2018); ‘The experience of British-Argentine volunteers 1914–18: A very colonial non-colony?’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 17:2 (2016); ‘A place to speak the language of heaven? Patagonia as a land of broken Welsh promise’, in Andrekos Varnava (ed.), Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias (Manchester University Press, 2015).

Clothilde Houot is completing her doctorate in Modern History of the Middle East at Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne. While investigating Britain's military and imperial defence policies in the Middle East, her research focuses on ‘local’ and ‘imperial’ armed forces in Iraq and Transjordan from 1914 to 1941. In 2014–16, she was the Paris 1 exchange student in the partnership between Oxford University, Paris 1, the Mission du Centenaire and the Maison Française d’Oxford. There, she was a member of the Oxford-based ‘Globalising and Localising the Great War’ research programme. In February 2019, her co-written book Moyen-Orient et Occident au XXème siècle was republished.

Margaret Hutchison is a Lecturer in history in the School of Arts at the Australian Catholic University, Brisbane. Her research focuses on the history of war, culture and memory. She earned a BA (Honours) from the University of Adelaide and a PhD in history from the Australian National University. She is the author of Painting War: A History of Australia’s First World War Art Scheme, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also co-editor of Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory and the First World War, which was published with the University of Alabama Press in 2020.

Kate Imy is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. She was a Fulbright-Nehru fellow in India, an IHR-Mellon fellow in London, and a two-time recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship for Hindi and Urdu. She is a managing editor of the British Journal for Military History. Her first article won the Nupur Chaudhuri first article prize with the Coordinating Council for Women Historians at the American Historical Association. Her first book, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army, was published by Stanford University Press in 2019.

Hannah Mawdsley is a Property Curator for the National Trust in London, United Kingdom. Her PhD with Queen Mary, University of London and the Imperial War Museum used the 1918–19 influenza pandemic as a case study to analyse the politics of commemoration. She co-curated the award-winning exhibition ‘Spanish Flu: Nursing during History's Deadliest Pandemic’ at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London. She co-presented the Spanish flu podcast ‘Going Viral: The Mother of all Pandemics’. She also acts as a historical consultant for television and radio, such as BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4 programme ‘Our Anniversary Obsession’.

Panikos Panayi is Professor of European History at De Montfort University. His recent publications include The Germans in India: Elite European Migrants in the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 2017), Migrant City: A New History of London (Yale University Press, 2020), and, with Stefan Manz, Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a project called ‘The Cypriot Peasant’ funded by the Leventis Foundation and De Montfort University.

Andrekos Varnava, FRHistS, is an Associate Professor in History at Flinders University, South Australia, and an Honorary Professor in History at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is the author of four monographs, most recently Assassination in Colonial Cyprus in 1934 and the Origins of EOKA (Anthem Press, 2021). He has edited/co-edited eight volumes, most recently Comic Empires: The Imperialism of Cartoons, Caricature and Satirical Art (Manchester University Press, 2019). He has published 50 book chapters and articles, including in English Historical Review (2017), The Historical Journal (2014), Journal of Modern History (2018) and Historical Research (2014 and 2017).

Michael J. K. Walsh is Professor of Art History and Chair of the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has published widely on the arts in Britain and its empire in the era of the First World War. He is currently researching England's composers from 1910 to 1920.

Chapter One

The 1918–20 moment and the British Empire's sorties de guerre

Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava and Michael J. K. Walsh

On 22 August 2019, a 20-year-old musician called Sheku Kanneh-Mason, an Englishman whose parents originally came from Antigua and Sierra Leone, took to the stage of a packed Royal Albert Hall to perform Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, composed in 1919. This piece represented the composer's last undisputed moment of creative genius and importantly signposted the British Empire's exit from the Great War into a post-war world. Kanneh-Mason's performance simultaneously marked the centenary of both the completion of the concerto and the signing of the Paris peace agreement at Versailles. The opening chords are written and played ff (fortissimo) and ‘nobilmente’, but they are unmistakably elegiac, visceral harbingers, that give way to a lonely melancholy descent. In fact, the Adagio – Moderato (first movement) of the concerto alone has embedded within it many of the sentiments associated with the historical ‘moment’, and the sorties de guerre, that this book sets out to examine. It is a piece of music imbued with trauma, anger, uncertainty, contemplation, pain, fear, hope, romance, and perhaps offers a reluctant backward glance, a farewell, to a world now gone, while daring to suggest a tentative forward glance at what might yet be.

Though the Cello Concerto in E minor was written during the warm summer months of 1919 in Elgar's country retreat (Brinkwells) in rural Sussex, his score contained no trace of the rustic English idyll of the pre-war years. Neither is there any hint of the self-confidence and triumphalism that had characterised his work and delighted pre-war audiences who embraced his Land of Hope and Glory as an unofficial second national anthem (or perhaps an ‘English’ national anthem) and rose to their feet at every patriotic performance during the 1914–18 conflict. There had been little doubt then that Britannia was ‘mother of the free’ and that for the Empire ‘wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’. It was, after all, ‘God, who made thee mighty’ and who was entreated to ‘make thee mightier yet’.¹ However, a handful of years later, in 1919, the cello concerto premiered to a concert hall that had not sold out and the performance itself was an under-rehearsed anticlimax. The unwavering idealism and self-assured imperial confidence had been replaced with an angst-ridden lament, performed in all its heart-rending complexity to a war-weary audience who grappled with what the unofficial composer laureate seemed to be telling them. By 2019, however, and for those listening to Sheku Kanneh-Mason's exquisite rendition of the concerto, the demise of empire was a long-accepted historical fact. Nevertheless, and in keeping with tradition, on the Last Night of the Proms ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was performed for the same eager, flag-waving, audience which now lapped up this imperial ‘moment’ with a modicum of eccentricity, curiosity and perhaps even a flicker of nostalgia, before departing the Royal Albert Hall and returning to the realities of ‘Brexit Britain’. In many ways, Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor is representative of a wider trend in post-war Europe, in an artistic world that expressed its awe at the modernity and lethality of the conflict and considerably renewed its forms of expression as a result of it.² The war had shaken the world's foundations and its ending created unforeseen challenges, hopes and despair at the same time. Elgar's concerto is an artwork that metaphorically encapsulates the moment of imperial transition from war to peace, the subject of this book.

This book explores the particular ‘1918–20 moment’ in the British Empire's history, between the First World War's armistices of 1918, and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. This moment was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish influenza pandemic, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements, and British responses to these. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918–20 moment and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred, and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system. In this chapter, we first define and conceptualise this ‘1918–20 moment’. Second, we interrogate the sortie de guerre paradigm and explain why it is a relevant framework for the contributors to this volume. Third, we locate our historiographical contribution to the field of British Empire studies, highlighting our use of far-flung geographies of empire as the main conduit for such contribution.

Conceptualising the 1918–20 moment

Historians have long argued over the elasticity and substance of time, as periodisation profoundly shapes the narratives they write. This book, for instance, does not consider British imperial history over its longue durée and the several centuries during which it existed, but within a much narrower period: the years 1918, 1919 and 1920 – what we call the ‘1918–20 moment’. The period from 1918 to 1920, or even up to the early 1920s, is not new ground for ‘momentization’. It has indeed been a popular era for historians given the immense changes that occurred during it.³ Their appetite for it is driven by the complexity of this historical period, which shook the world's fundamental order and signalled a significant shift from the long nineteenth century to the tumultuous twentieth century. Because the First World War and its aftermath are central to this transition and, to some extent, to explaining the world in which we live today, this time period remains a vibrant area for historical investigation. Yet, no study has thus far documented the 1918–20 moment in multiple areas of the British Empire within one volume, while comparing the diversity of their experiences. An in-depth analysis of these pivotal years is long overdue, and this book extends and adds to understandings of how the immediate aftermath of the First World War reshaped the British Empire.

The idea of a historical moment is, of course, a construct. As opposed to a war starting on a precise date in the summer of 1914 and finishing, for Western Europeans, in the winter of 1918, the idea of a 1918–20 moment does not refer to a conscious lived experience by the historical actors. This, however, does not make the construct less valid if it is considered as a lens of investigation and a methodological tool. While the notion of a ‘turning point’ in history inplies a revolution, a before and an after forever changed due to an unprecedented event – the French Revolution or the atomic bomb, for example – the concept of ‘moment’ has a heuristic dimension that enables us to capture the salient features of the British Empire's transition from war to peace. This book is therefore not an investigation into a before and after (the ‘turning point’ methodology), but instead adopts a theoretical space, a moment, that allows us to investigate and consider more deeply the central traits and characteristics of these years.

Above all, we conceive the ‘1918–20 moment’ as an analytical framework, a tight methodological focus for our contributing historians, and not an endpoint that suggests the very existence of that moment in the mind of imperial subjects at the time. Yet, the end of the First World War and its immediate aftermath was a new and distinct period, felt by those who lived through it. Across the world, the day after the armistices signalled a new unknown era, with commentators arguing for greater unity within the British Empire; for instance, Charles Bean, Australia's official historian of the war, urged Australians and Britons to seize that moment to strengthen their country and empire.⁴ Contemporaries knew this post-war period was a new phase and, although they could pin point when it started, the endpoint of this phase was more hazy.

It is worth noting that the ‘1918–20 moment’ was not preceded by a period of status quo within a formed and definitive Empire. The idea of a stable and steadfast pre-First World War British Empire is a chimera: the Empire was in perpetual evolution, constantly adjusting to both internal and external forces. It was fluid before the First World War and we do not posit that the 1918–20 moment represents a return to an imagined pre-war stability. Quite the opposite: there was not a return to a status quo ante because that status quo ante never quite existed. The heuristic value of the 1918–20 moment resides in its time frame that enables an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the Empire and of the dynamics of power within and outside of it during a time of acute, intense and accelerated transformation.

The time frame this volume considers starts with the signing of two major armistices for the British Empire: the Armistice of Mudros with the Ottoman Empire on 30 October 1918 and the better known 11 November Armistice with the German Empire. It finishes with the signing of several peace treaties in the vicinity of Paris between the major belligerents: the Treaty of Versailles on 29 June 1919, the Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye on 10 September 1919, the Treaty of Neuilly on 29 November 1919 and those of Trianon and Sèvres, respectively on 4 June and 10 August 1920. We do not include the Turkish War of Independence that stretched to the end of 1922 and concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on 24 July 1923 because the largest, most abrupt and most significant readjustments for the British Empire happened by 1920. The Treaty of Lausanne did not significantly reshape the internal dynamics of the British Empire for they were already reshaped by the 1918 Armistices and the 1919 and 1920 peace treaties and therefore it merely consolidated much that had already been decided and indeed that had happened. For example, as the chapter by Andrekos Varnava shows, one of the few clauses that did not change between the Sèvres and Lausanne Treaties was the Ottoman/Turkish recognition of British sovereignty over Cyprus.⁵ Another example was how the British passed the creation of Armenian state(s) in 1919 to the French (in south-eastern Anatolia) and the Americans (in north-eastern), who both abandoned them in 1920.⁶ The 1918–20 moment, however, was, at a point of imperial uncertainty, change and disorientation, faced by both imperial and colonial authorities within the British Empire more acutely than the challenges from 1921. With the passing of violent crackdowns at Amritsar and Valetta (‘Sette Guigno’), decisions on Egyptian independence, and the formation of British mandates, all by 1920, the period after seems to be a ‘different’ moment, another phase, in moving beyond the war and the consequences of these crises and policies, with different challenges for the Empire. Over the three years 1918–20, the world's geopolitics had changed dramatically and this profoundly affected the British Empire. While the impact of the Turkish War of Independence was important to the Empire, it must be seen within a new post-1920 phase, in which the previous treaties began to alter British imperial interests and strategy in the Near and Middle East, particularly with the rise and eventual formation of a ‘new’ Turkey.

⁷

The sortie de guerre paradigm

Scholars in the field of First World War studies have proposed the concept of ‘Greater War’ to understand the First World War as a conflict that spanned from 1912 and the Balkan Wars through to 1923 with the end of the Turkish War of Independence.⁸ The enormously rich studies that have emerged from teasing out this concept of ‘Greater War’ have contributed to the reshaping of the historiography of the First World War.⁹ This volume, however, is not about an ongoing or lingering First World War (e.g, the ‘Greater War’, 1912–23) – we do not look in isolation at various parts of the world, such as Russia and Turkey, in which the war ‘continued’. The chapters of this book instead approach this 1918–20 moment with a different conceptual framework: that of sortie de guerre (literally, ‘coming out of the war’). This framework, developed by French scholars, focuses on the transmuting period which follows a conflict, not as a return to a pre-war normalcy and status quo but as a phase of building an unknown future, which must address the immediate consequences of the conflict, often resulting in profound societal changes.¹⁰ The notion of sortie de guerre enables us to study the transition from war to peace as an active process and to consider colonial agency in that process. Sortie de guerre scholars contend that the idea refers to a period with its own challenges:

it insists on the active work necessary to demobilise: to reconvert wartime economy to civil production, treat the wounded, clean up the land and rebuild, and recalibrate mentally. If sortie de guerre relates to the active process of leaving war, then any study of that transition necessarily implies that simple dichotomies between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ are false. Exiting war was not a matter of undoing what was done but accommodating and adapting to new issues brought to life by the war. Peace is not a result of the cessation of hostilities; it is an effort, a state that can be difficult to secure.

¹¹

It is precisely this effort, this organised and disorganised transition in lesser studied parts of the British Empire, that the chapters of this volume address, decentring the Empire's post-war experience to better understand the structures that once underpinned the British Empire and that would continue to do so, whether altered or not, into the inter-war period.

Between 1918 and 1920, the British Empire considerably expanded in terms of both population and territory, reaching its territorial apex. While some German colonies and Ottoman territories were seized by British forces during the war, the peace treaties and conferences officialised these and other transfers of sovereignty. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, for instance, German colonies in Africa became League of Nations mandates mostly split between European powers. The British Empire secured parts of German Cameroon, Togoland and German East Africa, achieving Cecil Rhodes's dream of a Cape to Cairo channel.¹² In the Pacific, British dominions received mandates in German New Guinea and Nauru for Australia, and German Samoa for New Zealand. The following year, the conference of San Remo in 1920 formalised British mandates in Palestine and Mesopotamia and a French mandate over Syria.¹³ It is these eventful sorties de guerre across the British Empire that this book analyses. In Chapter 4, for instance, Panikos Panayi explores the expulsion of Germans from the British Empire, including in these newly gained territories, while in Chapter 9 Clothilde Houot examines how British imperial authorities anticipated and prepared Middle Eastern mandates well before the San Remo conference.

Besides geopolitics and the redrawing of borders as a result of the war, as the former Allies dismembered empires that did not survive, such as the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, changes across the post-war world were also ideological, with significant shifts pertaining to imperial doctrines. The ‘Wilsonian moment’ witnessed a clash between those who believed in and wanted self-determination to determine sovereignty and those ready to prevent it at all costs.¹⁴ This opposition, which framed the history of the twentieth century, became all the more visible at the end of the First World War as some colonies and their troops had been promised rights if they supported the war effort.¹⁵ This support was provided in the form of manpower, food stock, ammunition, capital and infrastructure in unprecedented ways and, when the war concluded, expectations across the Empire were high.

¹⁶

In focusing on a 1918–20 moment, the contributors to this book are able to assess the vigour of self-determination movements across the British Empire and how imperial authorities responded to these challenges. In Chapter 5, Samraghni Bonnerjee examines the private writings of British soldiers to see how they understood and responded to such movements in India, Burma and Mesopotamia. In Chapter 6, Kate Imy documents the role of the Indian Army in crushing anticolonial rebellions at home and abroad, while Charles-Philippe Courtois in Chapter 7 explores the evolution of Quebec nationalism immediately after the First World War. Another ideology that constituted this post-war moment for the British Empire was nationalism, which took various forms, with a nineteenth-century style of irredentist nationalism, competing with liberal, socialist and communist alternatives, as documented in the case of Cyprus by Andrekos Varnava in Chapter 8, and in Malta by Iliya Marovich-Old.¹⁷ In many ways, this 1918–20 moment was a multifaceted moment with a plurality of sorties de guerre that changed the physical, political and mental worlds of populations across the British Empire.

An historiographical contribution

Our ‘1918–20 moment’ lens of investigation aims both to create new knowledge, uncovering lesser known aspects of the British Empire's transition from war to peace in its far-flung colonies and territories, and to contribute to a long-standing and ongoing historiographical debate about time frames specific to the British Empire. Historians of the British Empire have long wondered about the aftermath of the First World War and whether it signalled the near zenith or apogée of British imperialism, seen in the work of A. J. Christopher and James Belich,¹⁸ a multifaceted ‘critical shift’ and ‘respite’, such as John Darwin asserts,¹⁹ or its decline, evident in the scholarship of Ronald Hyam and Spencer