HIST 2200 – Lesson 3

Roosting Chickens and the Great War

Roosting Chickens & the Great War

 Intro: The Age of Empire

 Part I: Colonial Roots of War
 Part 2: Propaganda and The War
 Part 3: The Great War, 1914-18
 Part 4: New World, New Woman
The Age of Empire
 “I understood by a world policy
merely the support and advancement
of the tasks that have grown out of
the expansion of our industry, our
trade, the labour power, activity and
intelligence of our people. We had
no intention of conducting an
aggressive policy of expansion. We
wanted only to protect the vital
interests that we had acquired…” –
German Chancellor von Bulow
The Age of Empire
 “Have we the right to divide among
ourselves this vast continent , to
throw out the local chiefs and
impose our own ideas? To that
there can only be one answer: yes!
What value would it have in the
hands of Blacks who, in their
natural state, are crueller to each
other than the worst Arabs or
wickedest Whites?” – British Capt.
William Stairs
The Age of Empire
 Von Bulow may have denied an aggressive policy,
but his government killed as many as 100,000
people in what is today called Namibia, in order to
“protect the vital interests” of Germany
 Stairs called black people “cruel,” but he himself
carried out massacres against Congolese, testing
out machine guns, burning villages, starving and
executing the slaves he took, to secure British
control of the region
The Age of Empire
 Early 20th century,
Britain’s dominant
position in the world
challenged by Germany
 This rivalry was at the
centre of the First World
War, which was
ultimately a struggle
between competing
empires for global
domination
Part 1 – Colonial Roots of War
Capitalism and the Crisis
 Last lesson we looked at the emergence of
capitalism and its need for constant expansion
 Remember that by the end of the 19 th century,
the governments of the great European
powers were controlled by the capitalist
classes of those countries
 Most of the rest of the world, by extension,
was under their control
The Highest Stage of Capitalism
 But capitalism is a contradictory system: it creates
dynamic expansion and growth, but that growth
inevitably leads the system into crisis
 Capital must be constantly expanding (or a competitor
will take its place) and thus more exploitative
 Working people were extremely poor and were regularly
injured or died at their jobs; when they tried to organize
unions, they would be attacked by thugs and pinkertons
 But if the workers are too heavily exploited, how will
they buy the products?
The Highest Stage of Capitalism
 By 1873, this problem had created a full-blown
crisis, in which profits across the capitalist
economies were stagnating
 Capitalists and the governments that they
controlled recognized that they needed to do
something to resolve this crisis
 The most obvious strategy was to go out into the
world and find new territory to expand into: thus,
the late 1800s saw a new wave of colonial
expansion by the Euro/American powers
The World in White Hands
Inter-Imperialist Rivalry
 However, capitalism is dynamic, competitive
and irrational – new potential imperial blocks
of capital regularly arise; thus there emerges
rivalry between capitalist powers
 This was the genesis of the First World War: it
was never a battle of “good and evil” but of
several competing European imperial powers,
each wanting to control the greatest territory in
order to protect the profits of its businesses
The Limits of Expansion
 “The natural frontiers of Standard Oil, the
Deutsche Bank or the De Beers Diamond
Company were at the end of the universe.” –
Eric Hobsbawm, historian
 There was an inevitability to the war, then,
because each capitalist power was governed by
the needs of capital to forever be expanding; a
need which could not possibly be met without
conflict with other powers
Part 2 – Propaganda and the War
The Bubbling Cauldron
 Wars between the European powers had been
relatively rare in the 1800s (they had turned
their guns to the peoples of the colonies)
 The standing armies of Europe were mostly
used to smash internal dissent
 Militarism was woven into the fabric of life
(think of army parades and flag days) and
patriotic fervour helped to distract people from
poverty and inequality
The Bubbling Cauldron
 Remember:
capitalism was
creating dramatic
inequality and
poverty, and
revolutionary
movements were
building across the
capitalist world
The Bubbling Cauldron
 Given the real threat that people would
overthrow the capitalist governments and put
an end to the system that was enriching the
capitalists, it became urgent that they convince
people to fight for the flag rather than against it
 As such, war against other Europeans (and
certainly against the colonies) was seen as a
good way to cement the peoples’ loyalty
But Would The Masses Fight?
 European wars, for most of recent history, had
been fought between professional armies
 But it was clear that the next war would be
fought by the working classes
 Would they fight? Or would they rebel?
 Hence, the proliferation of war propaganda, by
all sides, designed to de-humanize the enemy and
convince working classes to take up arms against
one another
War Propaganda

“We teach you to run!”

War Propaganda
War Propaganda
War Propaganda
War Propaganda
 Propaganda and mass media was pioneered
during the Great War, as millions of men were
killed in trenches for one of several flags that
represented more or less the same things
 But the soldiers often had more in common with
each other than with the generals (the famous
football game on Christmas day in “no-man’s-
land”)
 Clip from the film Joyeux Noel (2005)
 https://vimeo.com/148454777
Part 3 – The Great War, 1914-18
The Guns of August
 Was the war a surprise? Yes and no
 It was predicted by many, and attempts to
build a lasting peace had begun as early as
1897 (the Nobel Peace Prize was created for
this purpose)
 And yet, the political classes of Europe
mostly thought they could wish it away, with
diplomacy and power balances and arms
races, even while they basically planned for it
The Guns of August
 Yes the war was a surprise to many, an interruption
of a long period of peace…
 …but only if you don’t count the world outside of
Europe
 Colonial wars were ceaseless throughout this period as
European powers maintained control over the rest of the
world (examples include the Boer War in South Africa,
the French wars in Benin and Madagascar, British wars
in Malaysia and Zanzibar, Italian wars against Ethopia,
and many more)
The Guns of August
 Where did “the guns of
August” come from? Who
profited from the carnage?
 In fact, the various European
powers had been racing for
decades to build more (and
more advanced) weaponry,
including poison gases
 Industrial capitalism brought industrial tools for
killing, and massive arms manufacturing firms
needed customers
The First Shot
 As many of you know, the spark that lit the war was the
assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of
Austria, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princep

VS
The First Shot(s)
The First Shot
 Princep himself could hardly have believed this would
set off a war; assassinations of world leaders was not
uncommon, and the Serbian struggle for independence
was deemed an ‘internal matter’ of the Austrian Empire
The Alliance System
 But once the various powers began committing to
defend their alliances, war became unavoidable
 Thus, the war is often blamed on the complex
system of alliances between European powers,
which meant that a declaration of war in the
Balkans (following the assassination of a lesser
noble in the Austrian Empire) triggered war
between all the European powers
 But the war was practically inevitable – rooted in the
dynamics of colonial expansion – the alliance system
was part of the preparation for war (not the cause)
The Alliance System
 The Central Powers were led by Germany, which was
seeking expansion, and included the dying Ottoman
Empire, the fading Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy
and Bulgaria
 The Entente Powers were primarily Britain and
France, but also included Russia, the small Balkan
states, Greece and Portugal
 At the centre of it all was antagonism between
Britain and Germany, the two largest capitalist
powers, neither of them more/less evil than the
other
Drawing the Lines
 The most obvious way to
illustrate the connection
between colonialism and the
war is by looking at the
various maps of how the
war played out:
https://www.vox.com/a/world-war-i-
maps

 For instance, here is the

struggle over Africa
Drawing the Lines
 This map also
tells us some-
thing inter-esting
about German
am-bitions in the
Middle East
 Take note of the
railroad
travelling south
from Germany
through Turkey
 Drawing the Lines
 Germany intended to
build its rival
imperial system
around the Berlin-
Baghdad railroad
 Did Germany have
any ‘right’ to the
Middle East? Did
Britain? It’s hard to
sympathize with
either side here
The First War in Iraq
 This was where tension between Germany and England
climaxed: a railroad to Baghdad and control of Iraq would
guarantee German access to oil, blocking out England
 Thus, the first place British (mostly Indian) troops were
deployed in the war was Iraq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9oRiUr3XIo
Uh-huh
 “Our armies do not come into your
cities and lands as conquerors or
enemies, but as liberators.” –
British Gen. Stanley Maude after
marching into Baghdad in 1917

 “We will, in fact, be greeted as

liberators.” – US Vice-President
Dick Cheney, 2003
 War in Europe
 In Europe itself, the war was a
massive death factory
 Men died in trenches, blown to
bits by shells, eaten by lice,
stabbed by bayonets or barbed
wire, poisoned, smeared in
their own excre-ment,
survivors scarred and broken
forever
 The front lines were trenches a short distance apart, where
bodies were flung onto the fire to gain a mile or two
War in Europe
 Despite the fact that it was utter
misery, the war lasted four years,
as its rulers refused to give in
 Companies that produced
weapons made wild profits, early
versions of tanks were invented
and tested, and the very new
technology of airplanes was
immediately put to use in aerial
bombardment
 Besides mass death (14 million
people) little was accomplished
Roosting Chickens
 What is often forgotten is that the horrific violence
of WWI was new only if you ignored what Europe
had been doing in the rest of the world
 Eg. France killed 800,000 people in Algeria
between 1830-1875, using organized rape as a
tactic to instill fear
Roosting Chickens
 Europeans carrying out widespread, genocidal conquest
around the world often had brief moments of reflection, as
if they caught a glimpse of the seeds they were planting
 British-Canadian William Stairs is a perfect example, as
he tore up Egypt, Sudan and the Congo, slaughtering
Africans whom he literally described as animals,
imagining himself to be some kind of saviour
 “This morning I cut off the heads of two men and placed them on
poles one at each exit from the bush into the plantation. This
may prevent further attempts [theft] for some time and so save
life.” – William Stairs, 1888
 William Stairs, 1887, Congo
 “I often wonder what English
people would say if they knew
the ways in which we go for
these natives. Friendship we
don’t want as then we should
get little meat and probably
have to pay for the bananas.
Every male native capable of
using a bow is shot, this of
course we must do. All the
children and women are taken
as slaves by our men to do
work in the camps. Of course
they are well treated and
rarely beaten.”
 “It was most interesting, lying in
the bush and watching the natives
quietly at their day’s work; some
women were pounding the bark of
trees preparatory to making the
coarse native cloth used all along
this part of the river, others were
making banana flour by pounding
up dried bananas, men we could
see building huts and engaged at
other such work, boys and girls
running about, singing, crying,
others playing a small [musical]
instrument. All was as it was every
day until our discharge of bullets,
when the usual uproar and
Roosting Chickens
 Stairs was ravaging the African countryside,
stealing land and food from people whom he was
massacring, why?
 “The European is not only feared but respected…
[allowing for] openings that will be offered to the
expansion of English and other trade in supplying
new markets for the goods of the world.” – William
Stairs, 1887
 His rivals were doing the same thing all over the
world: eventually, this violence would be brought
home, and that was the First World War
 Imperialism and the Great War
 This pathology drove the European powers into the
most horrific war in modern history in 1914
 Yet, today it is implied
that the Great War was
fought for “freedom”
and “to protect our way
of life”
 Does that ring true to
you? Do you think
WWI made you free?
For King and Country?
 Indeed, despite an initial surge of
patriotic fervour, the reality of the
war quickly set in, turning
working people against it
 It became increasingly clear that
the savage wars that had been
undertaken against the
“backwards” people of the
colonies had finally come home to
roost in Europe itself
For King and Country?
 Meanwhile, the colonized people of the world were
dragged into the carnage (eg. Indians under British
dictatorship were brought to Europe to die for the
British crown, and Canada tried to force Indigenous
people to fight for the empire that had conquered
them)
 The obvious injustice of this experience only hardened
the resolve of people in the colonies to overthrow their
colonial overlords: Vietnam’s revolutionary movement
was first built during the war
 For King and Country?
 These are some numbers from the colonies
 In most cases, these people were directly or
indirectly (for lack of other opportunities)
forced into the war, and they were used as
cannon fodder (sent to the front to die first)
 China – 175,000 conscripted (50,000 died)
 Vietnam – 140,000 (forced to fight)
 India – 1,400,000 conscripted (115,000 died)
 Cameroon/Tanzania (250,000 died)
 West Africa (135,000 forced to fight)
War’s End?
 How did the war end? Most of
the governments on the
winning side tell us that they
won due to their superior
strength, bravery, skill, etc…
which is ludicrous from any
historical standpoint
 In Canada we are often led to believe that the turning
point in the war was the Battle of Vimy Ridge (in fact, it
was an insignificant battle that other countries usually
don’t even consider separate from the Battle of Arras)
From War to Revolution
 How did the Great War end? It ended
when Russian, and then German,
workers refused to keep fighting and
instead turned against their leaders,
overthrew their respective states, took
direct control of their governments,
and immediately withdrew from the
war
 Indeed, it was revolution that
eventually ended the slaughter of the
Nie Wieder Kreig (Never War Again)

1917: Russian Revolution 1918: German Revolution

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/jul/23/a-global-guide-to-the-first-world-war-interactive-documentary