Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War
Editor: James E. Kitchen, Alisa Miller and Laura Rowe
Date Of Publication: Apr 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2737-9
Isbn: 1-4438-2737-1
The First World War is a subject that has fascinated the public as well as the academic community since the close of hostilities in 1918. Over the past thirty years in particular, the historiography associated with the conflict has expanded considerably to include studies whose emphases range between the economic, social, cultural, literary, and imperial aspects of the war, all coinciding with revisions to perceptions of its military context. Nevertheless, much of the discussion of the First World War remains confined to the experiences of a narrow collection of European armies on the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium.

This volume seeks to push the focus away from the Western Front and to draw out the multi-spectral nature of the conflict, examining forgotten theatres and neglected experiences. The chapters explore the question of what ‘total war’ meant for the lives of people around the world implicated in this momentous event, broadening current debates on the First World War as well as developing, reinforcing, and refining the existing categories of analysis. The chapters are grouped into sections that reflect neglected elements of the transnational interpretation of the conflict and aspects of the total war debate. These encompass alternative forms of mobilisation, issues of neutrality, ideas of racial identity, and the scope of violence. The volume thus not only expands First World War studies but also contributes to the wider discourse on the shifting nature of warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

With chapters by leading scholars and early career researchers, this volume draws on a diverse range of original archival research undertaken across disciplinary and national boundaries. The contributions to the volume provide an analysis of the conflict that draws out its full breadth and complexity. The First World War demonstrated the critically important relationship between national mobilisation and total war, and saw multiple mobilisations and re-mobilisations of European populations. This theme is explored at the national, regional, and local levels through examinations of the Sicilian province of Catania, the role of science in France and Britain, and the utilisation of the narrative of maritime heroism surrounding the British sailor Jack Cornwell. For Europe’s neutrals the First World War was often as total in its effects as for those states engaged in military operations. Chapters analyse the diverse range of these experiences of neutrality, from the economy and people of the Netherlands to the attitudes of Switzerland’s intellectuals. Racial interpretations of modern conflict have defined much of the historiography of total war. The complexities of racial analysis with respect to total war are highlighted in chapters dealing with white colonial internees in German East Africa, the treatment of prisoners of war in Europe, and the recruitment of India’s ‘primitive’ peoples for service in labour units. The final section of the volume considers the scale and broad scope of the violence unleashed during the First World War. Chapters on the continuation of German naval war culture after the conflict, the shaping of personal narratives of the war in the Ottoman Empire, and anti-alien violence among veterans in Canada serve to reinforce the extent to which the conflict affected wider aspects of twentieth-century history around the globe.

Other Combatants, Other Fronts sheds light on the diverse experiences of neutral and belligerent states, and their combatants and civilians, during the tumultuous events of 1914-18. This brings to the fore the extent to which the mechanisms of conflict developed during the struggle had a truly global reach, and the impact this has had ever since in defining modern conflict. The collection reinforces the notion that although the First World War was a vast and often bewildering industrial conflict, it was ultimately a very human phenomenon.

James E. Kitchen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland, working on the ‘Limits of Demobilisation: Paramilitary Violence in Europe and the Wider World, 1917–1923’ European Research Council project. Prior to this he was a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a DPhil in 2010 for his thesis entitled ‘Morale and the Role of Military Identity in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force: The Sinai and Palestine Campaigns, 1916–1918’. He has published articles on the Indian Army in Palestine and crusading rhetoric amongst British imperial soldiers serving in the Middle East during the First World War, and is currently working on a monograph based on his thesis.

Alisa Miller studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, and the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK before obtaining her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford in 2008, for her thesis entitled ‘Poetry, politics and propaganda: Rupert Brooke and the role of “patriotic poetry” in Great Britain, 1914–1918’. She has published articles on poetry and war culture in the United States and Great Britain, and is currently working on a monograph based on her thesis, as well as a book on how the First World War was taught in Europe and the United States over the course of the twentieth century. She also works for the higher education representative body, GuildHE, in London, heading up the CREST (Consortium for Research Excellence, Support and Training).

Laura Rowe completed her BA in Modern History and MSt in Historical Studies at Worcester College, Oxford in the UK. After taking a year away from academia to learn German she moved to the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. There she undertook a PhD thesis entitled ‘Morale and Discipline in the Royal Navy during the First World War’. Following completion of her PhD she was award the Alan Pearsall Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research in London. She was appointed as a Lecturer in Naval History at the University of Exeter in September 2009. She has published chapters on the Admiralty’s perspective on lower-deck unrest, and on the naval courts-martial from the First World War. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral and post-doctoral research.

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