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The first full-length study of the experience and memory of British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia during WWI.
This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.
Zionism combined dialogues with Jewish, Christian, and secular messianisms to create a politics based in redemptive visions of its own.
In 1914 almost one quarter of the earth's surface was British. When the empire and its allies went to war in 1914 against the Central Powers, history's first global conflict was inevitable. It is the social and cultural reactions to that war and within those distant, often overlooked, societies which is the focus of this volume. From Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Iraq and around the rest of the British imperial world, further complexities and interlocking themes are addressed, offering new perspectives on imperial and colonial history and theory, as well as art, music, photography, propaganda, education, pacifism, gender, class, race and diplomacy at the end of the pax Britannica.
Connects Germany's colonial adventure in Eastern Europe with the North American Frontier.
When war engulfed Europe in 1914, the conflict quickly took on global dimensions. Although fighting erupted in Africa and Asia, the Great War primarily pulled troops from around the world into Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Amid the fighting were large numbers of expeditionary forces—and yet they have remained largely unstudied as a collective phenomenon, along with the term “expeditionary force” itself. This collection examines the expeditionary experience through a wide range of case studies. They cover major themes such as the recruitment, transport, and supply of far-flung troops; the cultural and linguistic dissonance, as well as gender relations, navigated by soldiers in foreign lands; the political challenge of providing a rationale to justify their dislocation and sacrifice; and the role of memory and memorialization. Together, these essays open up new avenues for understanding the experiences of soldiers who fought the First World War far from home.
This is a ground-breaking study of German operational command during a critical phase of the First World War from November 1916 to the eve of the third battle of Ypres. The situation faced by the German army on the Western Front in 1917 was very different from the one anticipated in pre-war doctrine and Holding Out examines how German commanders and staff officers adapted. Tony Cowan analyses key command tasks to get under the skin of the army's command culture, internal politics and battle management systems from co-ordinating the troops, matériel and different levels of command needed to fight a modern battle to continuously learning and applying lessons from the ever-changing Western Front. His detailed analysis of the German defeat of the 1917 Entente spring offensive sheds new light on how the army and Germany were able to hold out so long during the war against increasing odds.
Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 explains the rise and decline and nature and extent of British military rule in the urban eastern Mediterranean during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. Combining novel case studies and theoretical approaches, the volume reveals the extent of military control that Britain established and anticipated maintaining in the post-Ottoman world, before a series of confrontations with nationalist and socialist anti-imperialists forced a new division of the eastern Mediterranean, still visible in the political borders of the present day. Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 tells this story through the eyes and ears of the British servicemen wh...
‘Those Who Have the Courage will be a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in the military and social history of New Zealand. It is a comprehensive history of the Royal New Zealand Armoured Corps, the Mounted Rifles and predecessor units ...’ — Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro, from the Foreword The product of painstaking, multi-year research by esteemed historian and author Matthew Wright, this richly illustrated hardback is a must-have for the history reader. Part 1 covers the colonial cavalry that fought in the NZ Wars and Anglo-Boer War, then Part 2 moves to the Mounted Rifles distinguishing themselves in the First World War, at the end of which the tank came into play. Part 3 describes the Armoured Corps’ varied roles in the Second World War; Part 4 details what Wright calls an ‘armoured evolution’, through actions from the Korean War to Vietnam and Part 5 records action in East Timor and Afghanistan, and modern challenges, rounding out this readable story. The appendices include rolls of honour, lists of vehicles and organisational charts.