Geographies of The First World War

Geographies of the First World War
Dossier
35
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Geographies of Mobilization
and Territories of Belligerence
during the First World War
Olivier Compagnon and Pierre Purseigle
From now on, when a battle takes place anywhere in the world,
nothing will be easier than to make its artillery heard around
the globe. The roar of Verdun would have been heard in the
antipodes. One will even be able to glimpse something of the
fighting and of men falling six thousand nautical miles away,
three hundredths of a second after the shot.
Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel.1
First World War studies have significantly evolved over the past thirty years.
The present vitality of this field largely stems from the cultural and comparative
turn taken by historiography since the 1980s. In these decades, eager to break
free of national frameworks in order to examine the transnational dimension of
the conflict and the systems of representation relating to it, historians of the Great
War frequently emphasized its cultural aspects, and their preferred themes came
to occupy center stage in the historiography: the image of the enemy and the
representations associated with various national communities, the mobilization of
artists, intellectuals, and scientists in the service of belligerent states or in opposition
to mass violence, the religious transformations that took place between 1914 and
1918, and the memory of the conflict and the forms taken by its commemoration.2
In a context marked by the linguistic turn and the critique of what was seen as
an excessively conventional social and economic history, these developments were
hardly surprising.
Marked by the end of the Cold War and a reorganization of the international
order that favored comparative approaches, the political context of the time also
This article was translated from the French by Ethan Rundell and edited by Chloe
Morgan and Nicolas Barreyre.
1. Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel (Paris: Stock, Delamain and Boutelleau, 1931).
2. Jay M. Winter, “Catastrophe and Culture: Recent Trends in the Historiography of
the First World War,” Journal of Modern History 64, no. 3 (1992): 525–32; Antoine Prost
and Jay M. Winter, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present
37
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Annales HSS (English Edition) 71, no. 1 (2016): 37-60, 10.1017/S2398568217000024

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O L I V I E R C O M PA G N O N A N D P I E R R E P U R S E I G L E
played an important role in these historiographical developments. The events of

1989–1991, in particular, seemed to abruptly call into question the Concert of
Nations that had resulted from the peace treaties of 1919–1923 (largely reshaped,
it is true, in the aftermath of the Second World War). From one end of the
ruins of the Iron Curtain to the other, calls were heard for a general revision
of the grand narrative of European history. Even as French commemorations of
the bicentenary of the 1789 Revolution drew to a close, political and intellectual
milieus were confronted with the issue of the continent’s further economic and
political integration, from the signature of the Single European Act in February
1986 to that of the Maastricht Treaty six years later. Allied with the grandiloquent
announcement of the “end of history,”3 all of these changes were the source of a
new interest in “Europe” as a category of historical analysis.
Against the backdrop of the brutal breakup of Yugoslavia—a reminder that
war and mass violence are not just the scars of the European past but also
very contemporary realities and permanent risks—historians set about rethinking
European identity, and many cultural institutions responded in kind. Inaugurated
in 1990 and 1992 respectively, the museum at Kobarid (formerly Caporetto) on
Slovenia’s Isonzo front and the Historial de la Grande Guerre in the town of
Péronne (France) adopted a deliberately transnational approach that was hailed
by European commentators and authorities alike. At the same time, the all-out
pursuit of economic and financial globalization underpinned by neoliberal “good
governance” and the “Washington Consensus” seemed to lend credence to the
notion that the world of twentieth-century borders had once and for all come to
an end. It was in this context that global history gradually established itself on the
historiographical agenda, opening the prospect of a genuine reorientation of First
World War studies.
Sizing Up a Global Conflict

A quarter of a century later, after the centenary of 1914 has given rise to
countless colloquia, publications, and commemorations throughout the world, it
must nevertheless be admitted that the history and memory of the First World War
remain strongly anchored in national, and even sometimes resolutely nationalist,
frameworks. While comparative and transnational approaches have gained ground
in nearly all historiographical domains, a global history of the war seems as elusive as
ever. Although a large portion of the profession now claims to be ready to produce
a narrative of the conflict that will do justice to its geographical scale and to the
multiple circulatory phenomena that characterized it, most recent work remains
confined by the fetters of national borders, historiographical subfields, and the
disciplines of the human and social sciences. As a result, vast chasms continue to
exist between the military, diplomatic, economic, social, and cultural histories of the
38
3. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16, no. 3 (1989): 3–18.
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
war, between the various disciplinary and methodological approaches developed

within First World War studies, and between the countless monographs devoted to
particular spaces.
Hew Strachan has brilliantly deconstructed the process by which a conflict
successively referred to as the Third Balkan War, the European War, the Great
War, and, finally, the World War came to be named.4 These terms do not simply
refer to the geopolitical aspects of the war, its imperial dimension, or its global
economic impact, but also reflect the full ideological burden of a conflict constructed
in existential terms: it was precisely the protagonists’ Weltanschauung (vision of
the world) that explained their determination to fight and win this Weltkrieg. In
other words, any consideration of the nature and geography of the First World War
must take into account the high degree of globalization that—independently of
considerations specific to imperial domination—already characterized the world on
the eve of 1914: the commercial and financial globalization that spread outwards
from the hubs of economic power that were the United States, Great Britain, and
Germany; the demographic globalization brought about by the massive transatlantic
migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the intellectual
and cultural globalization that took place within the “Global Republic of Letters”
and the transnational space of artistic avant-gardes.5
The several attempts that have been made to write this global history of the
conflict can be divided into two distinct genres. The first is that of the overarching
synthesis, an example of which was offered by Strachan in the first volume of his
history of the First World War.6 Few scholars, however, are capable of meeting the
linguistic, narrative, and analytical challenges posed by this kind of global history
of the war. The second genre takes the form of edited volumes or thematic issues
of academic journals, productions that nevertheless generally limit themselves to a
juxtaposition of national case studies or disciplinary approaches.7 Unprecedented
in its ambition and scope, the Cambridge History of the First World War edited by Jay
Winter in 2014 constitutes one of the first real successes in this genre. It offers an
authentically transnational vision of the conflict and attempts to give attention to
every part of the world, even though it also demonstrates the degree to which global
history continues to depend on national or regional case studies.8
While these pioneering works have decisively contributed to our understand-
ing of the conflict’s global dimension, a question nevertheless remains: How can
we integrate the diversity and complexity of experiences that unfolded at the
4. Hew Strachan, “The First World War as a Global War,” First World War Studies 1, no. 1
(2010): 3–14.
5. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2007); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques,
1848–1918. Une histoire transnationale (Paris: Gallimard, 2015).
6. Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1, To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); Strachan, The First World War (London: Free Press, 2006).
7. John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
8. Jay M. Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 1, Global War,
39
vol. 2, The State, and vol. 3, Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
global scale into a common analytical framework? This question is all the more
crucial as a pronounced Eurocentrism continues to dominate the historiography
of the First World War. While the conflict’s military and strategic epicenter was
undeniably located in Europe, historians have everything to gain from examining
what have traditionally been described as “peripheral” experiences in order to
better understand the nature of this first truly global war. This is the main
objective of the present collection of articles: to “de-Europeanize,” as it were, the
historiography of the conflict by offering two possible paths to a global history of
the First World War. On the one hand, it suggests broadening the discussion to
encompass a number of objects that lend themselves to global history, including
natural resources and manufactured goods, propaganda and its impact, scientific
activity, diasporas, and wartime artistic production. The environmental history of
the war proposed by Tait Keller offers some particularly innovative perspectives in
this regard. On the other hand, the dossier advocates reevaluating the experience of
war in what have long been considered—in both geographical and historical terms—
“peripheral” regions of the world. One of course thinks of colonial territories, which
histories of the years 1914–1918 generally approach in terms of their “contribution”
to the war effort, thereby betraying a pronounced ethnocentrism that remains
tenacious despite calls for history to be written in “equal parts.”9 It is in order
to break with this traditional approach to colonial spaces in wartime that Pryia
Satia addresses non-European theaters of the conflict. By evaluating their reciprocal
effects on Europe and deconstructing representations of the Middle East, she seeks
to understand how the geographical imaginary of the British Empire was employed
in the service of what were simultaneously national and imperial projects. But this
effort at decentering is also worth bringing to bear on spaces that escaped European
colonial domination such as Latin America, where several recent works have shown
that, contrary to traditional national narratives, the experience of the war was intense
and contributed to major upheavals.10
The attention given to global history here is neither a fad nor merely a matter
of methodological interest; it is a necessity stemming from the very nature of the
Great War, something that older approaches tend to obfuscate. The 1914–1918
sequence was thus long understood as a quintessentially modern industrial conflict,
with much ink spilled over whether it amounted to a “total war” or constituted a
“revolution in military affairs.”11 These debates, which continue to engage many
9. Romain Bertrand, L’histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident,

XVI e –XVII e siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2011).
10. For instance, Olivier Compagnon, “Latin America,” in Winter, The Cambridge History
of the First World War, 1:533–55; and Stefan Rinke, Im Sog der Katastrophe. Lateinamerika
und der Erste Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015). See also the many
articles and chapters by María Inés Tato, whose research focuses on the town of Buenos
Aires at the conjuncture of the Great War, including “An Overseas Trench: Social
Mobilization in Buenos Aires during the Great War,” in Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The
Great War as a Global War, ed. Maximilian Lakitsch, Susanne Reitmair-Juárez, and Katja
Seidel (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2015), 43–59.
11. Jonathan Bailey, The First World War and the Birth of the Modern Style of Warfare
40
(Camberley: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, 1996); Roger Chickering and
scholars and regularly contribute valuable new information, nevertheless tend to

obscure the extreme diversity of experiences and contexts. On this point, much is
owed to those who have written on the war’s imperial dimension, as their efforts
have prompted recent works to adopt a more nuanced approach to the idea that the
First World War constituted a clear and distinct break with the past. For instance,
it was long said that the Great War called into question the customary distinction
between civilian and soldier. Yet this distinction had already been undermined by
colonial wars, which need to be taken into consideration to the degree that they
produced forms of violence that partly anticipated those observed between the
shock of August 1914 and the November 1918 Armistice. As this blurring of bound-
aries between combatants and noncombatants was a fundamental feature of military
operations and occupation policies across the world’s battlefields, understanding the
war at its supposed “centers” requires scholars to take into account the nature and
transformation of the imperial project since the early nineteenth century—in other
words, to pay serious attention to the “peripheral” spaces of coloniality beyond
their human and economic mobilization during the conflict.12 By moving beyond
the dialectic of “centers” and “peripheries,” combining scales of analysis, and
reconstructing the spaces that corresponded to the population’s lived and projected
experience, one may explore what Antoinette Burton has called the structural
and geographical “below.”13 This, in turn, makes it possible to resist ethnocentric
approaches and unearth what has long been excluded by the conventional analytical
categories inherited from political, diplomatic, and military history.
The chronology of the war, which convention states began in early August
1914 and ended with the Armistice of November 11, 1918, remains another
burdensome legacy of this traditional history. Recent work has underscored the
necessity of re-placing the First World War within a broader temporal sequence—
from 1911 to 1923, at the very least—and along a continuum of colonial wars,
European wars, civil wars, revolutions, political violence, and genocide.14 For the
Great War did not end with the Armistice of Rethondes: between 1918 and 1923,
Stig Förster, eds., Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front,
1914–1918 (Cambridge/Washington: Cambridge University Press/German Historical
Institute, 2000); Chickering and Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East
Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge/Washington: Cambridge University
Press/German Historical Institute, 2003).
12. John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War: An Imperial History (London: Routledge, 2004);
Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial
Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction:
Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Sophie De Schaepdrijver, “Military Occupation, Political Imaginations, and the First
World War,” First World War Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 1–5; Sönke Neitzel, “Der historische
Ort des Ersten Weltkrieges in der Gewaltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Aus Politik
und Zeitgeschichte 64, no. 16/17 (2014): 17–23.
13. Antoinette Burton, “Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World
History,” History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): 323–28.
14. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis,
1914–1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Robert Gerwarth and John
41
Horne, eds., War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (New
four million people died.15 In all regions of the world, including those that remained
at a remove from the fighting, the end of the war was a process that took place
over the medium term and set in motion a variety of repercussions—economic,
diplomatic, and cultural. In his latest book, Adam Tooze thus explores the organic
link between strategy and finance to examine the emergence of a new world order
characterized by the ambiguous hegemony of the United States. In 1931, at the
culmination of a fifteen-year process, it was the First World War that set the stage
for a new cataclysm pitting the victorious liberal democracies against Fascist and
Communist uprisings and which makes it possible to understand the Japanese
invasion of Manchuria.16
With these elements in place, how might a historical geography or
geographical history of the war attentive to notions of space and place be useful?
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands supplies a partial response: situating the experience
of war and examining sites of conflict—or, in this case, genocide—obliges scholars
to rethink the meaning and temporality of the event.17 By emphasizing the
location of experienced or imagined battle, a geographical history can deepen our
understanding of the totalizing and globalizing dynamics of the first global conflict.
Situating the First World War is in no way to make the case for a “spatial turn” in
studies of the conflict, however, and there are at least two reasons to be wary of
this new methodological trend. First, history and the social sciences were already
attentive to space well before the institutionalization of geography as an academic
discipline. Second, simply affirming the war’s spatial dimension might amount to
no more than a reiteration of several truisms: that soldiers fought with maps, that
battle transformed terrains and landscapes, and that the conflict created imaginary
geographies.18 Indeed, such is the domination of spatial metaphors in historical and
social scientific discourse that a few definitions need to be revisited. John Lewis
Gaddis has rightly underscored the role played by these metaphors in history,
art, and the sciences,19 but it is nonetheless important to clarify the categories of
analysis—our understanding of “peripheries,” for example—if we want them to
be truly useful. If gender historians have shown how effective metaphors can be
when comparing the construction of distinctions in the public and private spheres, if
Michel Foucault and his “heterotopias” have allowed bodies, identities, and sexual
York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Christoph Nübel, “Neuvermessungen der

Gewaltgeschichte. Über den ‘langen Ersten Weltkrieg’ (1900–1930),” Mittelweg 36 24,
no. 1/2 (2015): 225–48.
15. Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
16. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931
(London: Allen Lane, 2014).
17. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books,
2010).
18. Christoph Nübel, “Raum in der Militärgeschichte und Gewaltgeschichte. Probleme,
Ergebnisse und neue Felder der Forschung,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 73, no. 2
(2014): 285–307.
19. John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York:
42
Oxford University Press, 2002).
practices to be reconceived in a spatial framework,20 and if specialists of queer

studies have shown the need to take the spatial dimension of sexual “orientation”
seriously,21 the proliferation of spatial metaphors nevertheless threatens to diminish
their heuristic potential. As Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift have underscored, “Space
is the everywhere of modern thought. It is the flesh that flatters the bones of theory.
It is an all-purpose nostrum to be applied whenever things look sticky.”22
While there is an abundant theoretical literature on spatial approaches in
the human and social sciences, no real consensus exists regarding the notions of
space and place in geography, history, sociology, or urban studies. These notions
must thus be clearly defined if one is to construct a historical geography of the
First World War, and in this regard Michel de Certeau remains an indispensable
guide. The notion of place refers to the natural and material environment in which
historical actors evolve; it is fundamentally a matter of position, whereas space is
defined by the movement and the circulation of men, goods, and representations.23
In other words, the notion of space is relational and opens the way to an approach
to the Great War that does not isolate the places of fighting—battlefields—from
the putatively nonbelligerent world located behind the lines. Maintaining a clear
distinction between place and space nevertheless remains complex, since the
historical experience permanently blurs the frontiers that separate them. Such
was the case, for example, for the 1,500 to 2,000 Latin American volunteers who
enlisted in the French Foreign Legion between 1914 and 1918. They of course
experienced the trench as a place, with its litany of horrors and suffering, but
they also experienced the relational space of the Atlantic Ocean, across which they
transmitted—whether by letter or, in the event they returned safe and sound, in
person—narratives and representations of the war to regions that had never heard
the artillery’s roar.24
While conventional geography and military history tend to reduce the war to
its operational aspects, shifting our attention to the varied forms of belligerence and
mobilization makes it possible to redefine both the spaces and the temporalities
of the conflict. Writing a global history of the First World War thus turns on
comprehending the manner in which multiple vectors—people, goods, printed
material, films, representations, and so on—served to spread it beyond the borders
20. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec
in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 229–36.
21. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006).
22. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space: Critical Geographies (London:
Routledge, 2000).
23. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen F. Rendell (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
24. Michaël Bourlet, “Les volontaires latino-américains dans l’armée française pendant
la Première Guerre mondiale,” Revue historique des armées 255 (2009): 68–78; Olivier
Compagnon and Manuel Rodriguez, “‘Pour cette triple cause de la liberté, du droit et
de la civilisation’ : le volontariat latino-américain dans l’armée française (1914–1918)”
(paper presented at the symposium “Se battre à l’étranger pour des idées. Volontariat
43
armé international et politique, XVIIIe –XXIe siècles,” Paris, 2012).
of the belligerent states to colonial societies and, perhaps most importantly, to

neutral countries that lacked political ties with European metropoles and had
putatively remained on the war’s sidelines. It is only in this way that a new
cartography of the Great War becomes possible, one that is emancipated from the
“center/periphery” dichotomy and reveals the conflict’s genuinely global nature.
Geographies of Combat
In defining the war by reference to combat operations, their location, and their
scale, military geography fails to fully take into account the planetary nature
of the first global conflict. Edited by two British historians, the Palgrave Concise
Historical Atlas of the First World War thus draws an explicit distinction between the
conflict’s epicenters, zones of low intensity combat (in Italy, Greece, the Caucasus,
Mesopotamia, Palestine, and so on), and places that were truly at the margins of the
war.25 In this perspective, most of Africa and Asia as well as the Americas seem to
have been hardly affected by the conflict. Even as the centenary of the Great War
is commemorated, this traditional vision of the state of war, defined by reference to
the direct experience of conflict, has unfortunately not loosened its grip. Two more
recent syntheses intended for English-language readers attest to the persistence in
the historiography of this combat-centered geography of war.26
From such a perspective, spaces such as Latin America appear to have
been entirely spared the war—whose global character thereby disappears—even
though evidence has long pointed to a specifically Latin American experience of
the conflict. Apart from two large naval battles that took place off the coasts of
Chile and Argentina in November and December 1914 (and ultimately carry little
significance), in early 1917 Mexico found itself at the heart of the conflict following
the Zimmermann telegram, which played a crucial role in Washington’s decision to
enter the war in April of that year.27 The continent’s natural resources, both mineral
and agricultural, were the object of particularly intense exploitation,28 and the region
25. Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott, The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the
First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
26. William Kelleher Storey, The First World War: A Concise Global History (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Lawrence Sondhaus, World War I: The Global Revolution
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
27. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (New York: Dell Publishing, 1965);
Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Esperanza Durán, Guerra y revolución. Las
grandes potencias y México, 1914–1918 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Centro de
estudios internacionales, 1985).
28. Roger Gravil, “Argentina and the First World War,” Revista de História 54, no. 108
(1976): 385–417; Víctor A. Madueño, “La Primera Guerra Mundial y el desarrollo
industrial del Perú,” Estudios Andinos 9, no. 17/18 (1981): 41–53; Juan Ricardo
Couyoumdjian, Chile y Gran Bretaña durante la Primera Guerra Mundial y la postguerra,
1914–1921 (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello/Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile,
44
1986); Bill Albert and Paul Henderson, South America and the First World War: The Impact
was heavily targeted by the propaganda campaigns of the main belligerent states,
eager to win over new allies.29 The military and symbolic mobilization of European-
origin communities proceeded on a massive scale,30 and in each country many
intellectuals took sides in favor of one of the rival camps or agitated for peace.31
By the second half of the 1910s, the war had become a genuine political fault line
throughout the region.32
of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence,
3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 6, pp. 165–207; Marc
Badia-Miró and Anna Carreras-Marín, “The First World War and Coal Trade Geography
in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1890–1930,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 45
(2008): 369–91; Philip Dehne, On the Far Western Front: Britain’s First World War in South
America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Frank Notten, La influencia
de la Primera Guerra Mundial sobre las economías centroamericanas, 1900–1929. Un enfoque
desde el comercio exterior (San José: Centro de investigaciones históricas de América
Central/Universidad de Costa Rica, 2012).
29. For Mexico and Argentina, see Ingrid Schulze Schneider, “La propaganda alemana
en México durante la Primera Guerra Mundial,” Anuario del Departamento de Historia 5
(1993): 261–72; and María Inés Tato, “Luring Neutrals: Allied and German Propaganda
in Argentina during the First World War,” in World War I and Propaganda, ed. Troy R. E.
Paddock, (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 322–44.
30. The best documented cases are those of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, which
received the great bulk of European migration between the 1870s and 1914. See
Frederick C. Luebke, Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of Cultural Conflict during
World War I (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Emilio Franzina,
“La guerra lontana. Il primo conflitto mondiale e gli italiani d’Argentina,” Estudios
migratorios latinoamericanos 15, no. 44 (2000): 57–84, in particular pp. 66–73; Franzina,
“Italiani del Brasile ed italobrasiliani durante il Primo Conflitto Mondiale (1914–1918),”
História. Debates e tendências 5, no. 1 (2004): 225–67; Álvaro Cuenca, La colonia británica
de Montevideo y la Gran Guerra (Montevideo: Torre del Vigía Editores, 2006); Hernán
Otero, La guerra en la sangre. Los Franco-Argentinos ante la Primera Guerra Mundial
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2009); María Inés Tato, “El llamado de la patria.
Británicos e Italianos residentes en la Argentina frente a la Primera Guerra Mundial,”
Estudios migratorios latinoamericanos 25, no. 71 (2011): 273–92; Tato, “Germanófilos versus
aliadófilos. La colonia española de Buenos Aires frente a las polarizaciones de la Gran
Guerra,” in Las grandes guerras del siglo XX y la comunidad española de Buenos Aires,
ed. Nadia Andrea de Cristóforis and María Inés Tato (Buenos Aires: Facultad de filosofía
y letras de la universidad de Buenos Aires, 2015), 15–43.
31. Olivier Compagnon, “1914–18: The Death Throes of Civilization. The Elites of Latin
America Face the Great War,” in Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in First World War Studies,
ed. Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 279–95; María Inés Tato,
“The Latin American Intellectual Field in the Face of the First World War: An Initial
Approach,” in A Civil War of Words: The Cultural Impact of the Great War in Catalonia, Spain,
Europe and a Glance at Latin America, ed. Xavier Pla, Maximiliano Fuentes, and Francesc
Montero (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015).
32. Freddy Vivas Gallardo, “Venezuela y la Primera Guerra Mundial. De la neutralidad
al compromiso (octubre 1914–marzo 1919),” Revista de la Facultad de ciencias jurídicas y
políticas 61 (1981): 113–33; Jane M. Rausch, Colombia and World War I: The Experience
of a Neutral Latin American Nation during the Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1921
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014); Rausch, “Venezuela’s Neutrality during the Great
45
War: The Consolidation of the Gómez Dictatorship between 1914 and 1918,” The Latin
In fact, current historiography is determined by a series of implicit

geographies, undermining most efforts to write genuinely European or global
histories of the conflict. In the English-language literature, the western front thus
remains the absolute center of a discussion that cannot even be described as
Eurocentric: the eastern front has only recently attracted the attention of social
and military historians, while just a handful of scholars have shown an interest
in the Italian and Balkan fronts.33 In Britain, the Gallipoli campaign against the
Ottoman Empire is often regarded as a sort of sideshow—a secondary front at the
periphery of what Carl von Clausewitz would have called the fighting’s “center of
gravity” (Schwerpunkt). These observations must not be taken for denying, in the
service of a radical desire to “provincialize” the war,34 the value of the hierarchy
of fronts established by the traditional geography of the conflict or the patently
obvious fact that northwestern Europe was the conflict’s nerve center. Rather, the
main goal is to recognize that insofar as the Great War constituted a moment of
profound transformation in the conduct of military affairs, and since its industrial
dimension required a total mobilization of human, material, and political resources,
the geography of the war cannot be limited to the front lines alone.
One of the most persistent images of the First World War is that of a strategic
quagmire embodied by the millions of soldiers bogged down on the western front,
frozen in place in the trenches. Amply recorded by photography and the artistic
production of the era, this representation continues to this day to inform the
historiography of the conflict and masks the fact that the space of belligerence
was defined as much by mobility to and from the zones of combat as by the
static appearance of the trenches. The first phases of military mobilization saw
millions of soldiers flood the train stations of the belligerent world. While many
reached their units on foot, colonial troops had to cross considerable distances to
carry out their duty. At the front, soldiers rarely remained very long in a given
sector. Due to the French Army’s rotation policy, most of the soldiers serving in
1916 fought at Verdun—a large number of men could thus lay claim to a share
in the victory and the battle thereby acquired a national significance. Curiously,
little is known about the frequency of movements on the front lines or transfers
between the various theaters of operations. Yet the issue of mobility raises crucial
questions touching, among other things, on the combatants’ identity, the cohesion
and morale of units, and the relationship between the front and the rear. The
volunteers who left their countries to join the belligerent armies on both sides of
the conflict shared a particular experience of wartime mobility. This population of
transnational volunteers partly reflected the existence of nationalist movements
Americanist 59, no. 1 (2015): 61–76; Adriana Ortega Orozco and Romain Robinet, “‘Nous
les Latino-Américains, nous qui n’avons ni canons ni cuirassés.’ Les élites du Mexique
révolutionnaire face à la Grande Guerre,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 125, no. 1
(2015): 105–20.
33. Jörn Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 2014).
34. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
46
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
that saw the war as an opportunity to redraw Europe’s borders. In the United
States, migrant communities—especially Poles, Lithuanians, and Czechs—broadly
mobilized along both political and military lines. Inspired by the memory of General
Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, many Italians enlisted in the French
Army, just like the 1,500 to 2,000 Latin Americans mentioned above. The majority
were convinced that the defense of French civilization—the crucible of modern
liberties and mother of all arts—merited spilling their blood. Armenians formed
their own “legion” within the British Expeditionary Force and, later, the French
Army. While new work is necessary to understand their motivations and trace their
itineraries during and after the conflict, these groups nevertheless constituted the
transnational go-betweens of the war experience.35
The mobility of soldiers also contributed to structuring noncombatant
experience behind the lines. Their movements acted as vectors of belligerence
and prompted societies to construct the experience of the war. Private journals,
letters, official communiqués, the omnipresent “war atlas,” and, of course, the
local and national press provide countless illustrations of how this space of war
was produced. When an official French communiqué announced without further
explanation in November 1914 that the front extended “from Flanders to the
Vosges,” the population realized that statements originating in the capital or military
command centers were in contradiction with the situation at the front and that
there was no longer any hope for the short war touted by official propaganda. A
simple half sentence thus sufficed to stamp the geography of the western front
on the minds of most French people. Throughout the world at war, families and
local communities developed an intimate geographical expertise marked by specific
projections onto certain combat zones. The central role played by the battle of
Gallipoli in the construction of national identity in Australia and New Zealand
testifies to the major importance and resilience of these cultural cartographies
of war. Mass violence and the reality of combat deeply permeated imaginaries,
sometimes at a remove of several thousand kilometers from northwestern Europe:
in 1915 a surprisingly realistic drawing—featuring French soldiers in madder-red
trousers and zeppelins crisscrossing the sky—could be made by the ten-year-old
Carlos Manuel Holguín Dávila, a child of the Columbian elite who remained in
Bogotá throughout the conflict, his imagination fed by his mother’s regular letters
35. Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins, eds., Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in
the Modern Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Stéfanie Prezioso, “Les Italiens
en France au prisme de l’engagement volontaire. Les raisons de l’enrôlement dans la
Grande Guerre (1914–1915),” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 81 (2010): 147–63; Andrekos
Varnava, “The Politics and Imperialism of Colonial and Foreign Volunteer Legions
during the Great War: Comparing Proposals for Cypriot, Armenian, and Jewish Legions,”
War in History 22, no. 3 (2015): 344–63. Alongside the volunteers, the role of other
transnational agents also merits reevaluation. One example would be the case of war
correspondents like the Argentine Roberto Payró (1867–1928), who spent the better part
of the conflict in Brussels for the La Nación daily. See Roberto J. Payró, Corresponsal de
guerra. Cartas, diarios, relatos (1907–1922), ed. Martha Vanbiesem de Burbridge (Buenos
47
Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2009).
from Paris.36 These various considerations argue for reevaluating the importance of
the war’s “sideshows” and broadening the discussion to encompass the spread of
specific imaginaries of combat to nonbelligerent zones.
Moreover, in what formed yet another obstacle to the emergence of a global
history of the First World War, the experience of neutral countries was long neg-
lected by historians of the conflict. Over the course of the past ten years, however,
comparative history and the revival of interest in international law has shifted
attention onto what were formerly seen as marginal situations.37 In fact, any attempt
to locate neutrality on a historical map of the Great War instantly raises a number
of questions, for, as the political scientist Lawrence Preuss noted at the start of the
Second World War, this status “in no way represents an insurance against war.”38
While one immediately thinks of direct violations of neutrality such as that of
Belgium by the German Army in August 1914, modern war may impinge upon
neutral countries even when there has been no military infraction of their neutrality.
Such was the case in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in the first half of 1917, after
the German navy sunk a series of boats sailing under the Argentine and Brazilian
flags. In this context, the political, economic, cultural, and even military reactions
of neutral countries—in Europe, Latin America, or elsewhere—raise the question
of their capacity to preserve forms of autonomy and truly remain out of the war.
For neutral countries were not just witnesses to the “seminal catastrophe” of the
twentieth century; they were among its actors and their experience can no longer be
ignored by historiography. In general, the experience of neutral countries like Italy,
36. Exhibition catalogue, La Gran Guerra. Narrativas y vivencias colombianas en el fín de

una era (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2014), 106–7.
37. Maartje M. Abbenhuis, The Art of Staying Neutral: The Netherlands in the First World
War, 1914–1918 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Claes Ahlund, ed.,
Scandinavia in the First World War: Studies in the War Experience of the Northern Neutrals
(Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2012); Willem H. van Boom, “The Great War and Dutch
Contract Law: Resistance, Responsiveness and Neutrality,” Comparative Legal History 2,
no. 2 (2014): 303–24; Johan den Hertog and Samuël Kruizinga, eds., Caught in the Middle:
Neutrals, Neutrality, and the First World War (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2011); Wim Klinkert,
Defending Neutrality: The Netherlands Prepares for War, 1900–1925 (Leiden: Brill, 2013);
Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, and Sven Widmalm, eds., Neutrality in Twentieth-
Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture and Politics after the First World War (New
York: Routledge, 2012); Carlo Moos, “Neutralité(s) suisse(s) à l’époque de la Première
Guerre mondiale. La mise en œuvre difficile d’un concept controversé,” in 14/18, la Suisse
et la Grande Guerre, ed. Roman Rossfeld, Thomas Buomberger, and Patrick Kury (Baden:
Hier und Jetzt, 2014), 214–39; María Inés Tato, “Neutralismos transatlánticos. España
en el imaginario de los neutralistas argentinos durante la Primera Guerra Mundial,” in
Entre Europa y América. Circulación de ideas y debates entre las dos guerras mundiales, ed.
Ángeles Castro Montero and Nadia de Cristóforis (Buenos Aires: Fundación Ortega y
Gasset Argentina, 2014), 41–48.
38. Lawrence Preuss, “The Concepts of Neutrality and Nonbelligerency,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 218 (1941): 97–109. In this text, Preuss
offers a canonical definition of neutrality, which “as a status of international law can
therefore be defined as the condition of a state that abstains from any participation
48 in a war and maintains an attitude of impartiality in its relations with the belligerent
countries” (p. 100).
Portugal, the United States, and Brazil has only been considered in light of their
subsequent entry into the war.39 What matters from this perspective is therefore
not so much neutrality as the path leading toward the state of war, despite the
fact that the initial state of non-participation in the conflict and the motivations
underpinning it deserve to be examined in their own right. From this point of view,
countries that maintained their neutrality throughout the conflict—countries like
Spain and Argentina, where the very conception of neutrality varied considerably
over the course of the war—obviously constitute a fascinating object of study.40
Finally, writing a global history of the war implies making a critical distinction
between belligerency and belligerence. While the first term designates a status defined
by international law as the state of being at war, the second describes a process of
adaptation or organization in the context of war and seems particularly significant
in the case of neutral countries. In this sense Scandinavian and Latin American
societies were most certainly belligerent, since they mobilized themselves in
various ways and were traversed by multiple tensions directly relating to the
conflict. Once this is established, the map of the belligerent world appears very
different from that of countries at war and includes zones that have until now been
seen as “peripheral,” “marginal” or “external to the war.”
Mobilizations
The experience of neutral countries rightly reminds us that, insofar as the nation
constituted the main frame of reference and identity for the immense majority of
the period’s actors, one cannot write a global history of the First World War against
national histories. To the contrary, what is most interesting about global approaches
is the interplay among scales of analysis and the way they can help historians rethink
the manner in which the rhythm and intensity of national mobilizations shaped the
chronology and geography of a global conflict.
Once again, it is worth underscoring the distance between the state of war
(belligerency) and the social experience of the conflict (belligerence). For the
declaration of war is frequently and erroneously confounded with the mobilization
of armed forces: in France, war was declared on August 1, 1914, but the mobilization
did not get under way until two days later.41 Even today, the start of the First World
39. On the case of Brazil, which entered the war on October 26, 1917, and had been a
traditional ally of Washington in Latin America since the start of the twentieth century,
see Francisco Luiz Teixeira Vinhosa, O Brasil e a Primeira Guerra Mundial. A diplomacia
e as grandes potências (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 1990).
40. For Spain, see Francisco J. Romero Salvadó, Spain, 1914–1918: Between War and
Revolution (London: Routledge, 1999); and Maximiliano Fuentes Codera, España
en la Primera Guerra Mundial. Una movilización cultural (Madrid: Akal, 2014). For
Argentina, see Ricardo Weinmann, Argentina en la Primera Guerra Mundial. Neutralidad,
transición política y continuismo económico (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos/Fundación
Simón Rodríguez, 1994).
41. Philippe Boulanger, La France devant la conscription. Géographie historique d’une
institution républicaine, 1914–1922 (Paris: Economica/Institut de stratégie comparée, 49
2001).
War is associated more with the mobilization than with its official declaration, for
it was only with mobilization that the reality of the conflict was finally brought
home to French society, once and for all shattering the hopes of pacifists. Leaving
western Europe for the less well-traveled paths of central Asia, however, gives an
even better sense of the significance of the dynamics of mobilization. From the
perspective of the “peripheries,” the war’s chronology and geography is often best
defined by the mobilization of resources and labor. The populations of central Asia
did not enter into war along with the Russian Empire on August 1, 1914, but
rather in 1916 and in response to the conflict’s intensification and globalization.
On June 25 of that year, the imperial authorities revoked all existing exemptions
and proceeded to conscript Kazakh, Kyrghyz, and Uzbek men for service in labor
battalions, provoking a series of anticolonial revolts.42 According to Joshua Sanborn,
it was moreover at this moment that the crisis of imperial Russia was transformed
into a truly revolutionary situation.43 While Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela have
clearly shown the need to take a “Greater War” into account,44 there are also cases
in which the war can seem “smaller” than traditional discussions would suggest.
The attention given to the intensity and dynamics of mobilization also argues
for revisiting the geography of war experiences. In both material and cultural terms,
these were never confined to a single spatial unit, whether that of the nation-
state, the local community, or the empire. The history of the African campaigns,
for example, demonstrates the degree to which it is essential to integrate several
scales of analysis, from the local to the imperial. Michelle Moyd has thus examined
German operations in East Africa in light of the dual context of imperialism and
the Great War, while simultaneously situating the conflict in the long social history
of the communities directly affected by mobilization and military operations.45
In fact, the issues raised by mobilization for imperial and industrialized nations
had appeared well before the outbreak of the conflict in 1914: while pacifists
advanced economic and financial arguments to underscore the impossibility of
a long war, the course of the conflict’s first months brushed aside these claims
and demonstrated that the empires were prepared for the possibility of a lasting
conflict. Mobilization nevertheless remained a challenge that was not only spatial
but also logistical. Wealth was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the
rapid and profound—albeit temporary—transformation of national economies; this
transformation also required political will, buttressed by scientific and technical
42. Cloé Drieu, “L’impact de la Première Guerre mondiale en Asie centrale. Des
révoltes de 1916 aux enjeux politiques et scientifiques de leur historiographie,”
Histoire@Politique 22, no. 1 (2014): https://www.cairn.info/revue-histoire-politique-
2014-1-page-175.htm.
43. Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian
Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
44. Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, “The Great War as a Global War: Imperial
Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order, 1911–1923,” Diplomatic History 38,
no. 4 (2014): 786–800.
45. Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday
50
Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
know-how and a strong organizational capacity. As Eric Hobsbawm showed, “total

war was the largest enterprise hitherto known to man, which had to be consciously
organized and managed.”46 States and empires made full use of their bureaucratic
and logistical expertise to extract, transport, and allocate human and material
resources to their armies on the battlefield. In this respect, the conflict’s resolution
largely depended on the belligerents’ capacity to control the space between
supply sites and combat zones, with maritime empires—and Britain in particular—
holding a decisive advantage from this point of view.47 Curiously, however, the
historiography of the Great War has not given any particular attention to these
logistical dimensions.48
Both within and outside belligerent nations, the war thus profoundly
transformed the nature and density of infrastructural networks. It required large-
scale development that affected not just the territory of warring countries, but
also that of colonies and neutral countries. Evidence of this can be found in the
profound transformations experienced by most of the world’s major port cities,
from Osaka and Buenos Aires to Santos, Lagos, and Dakar.49 In Europe and the
Maritime World, Michael Miller thus rightly insists on the important role played
by the maritime war and naval transport at the global scale. Miller shows that the
war was not synonymous with deglobalization, although it undeniably disrupted
commercial and migratory flows—rather, globalization continued by other means
and at a different pace.50 His argument does not completely overturn the traditional
interpretation of the war as a stumbling block in the process of global market
integration observed during the nineteenth century,51 but it does encourage us
to rethink the conflict in the context of the longer-term history of globalization.
For the economic and the environmental history of the war both underscore the
46. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 45.
47. Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
1994); Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First
World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Lawrence Sondhaus, The Great
War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014).
48. Allain Bernède, “Verdun 1916 : un choix stratégique, une équation logistique,” Revue
historique des armées 242 (2006): 48–59; Ian Malcolm Brown, British Logistics on the Western
Front, 1914–1919 (Westport: Praeger, 1998); Kaushik Roy, “From Defeat to Victory:
Logistics of the Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918,” First World War Studies 1, no. 1
(2010): 35–55; Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns
in the Middle East, 1914–22 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
49. Albert and Henderson, South America and the First World War ; Miguel Suárez Bosa,
Atlantic Ports and the First Globalisation, c. 1850–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014); Arndt Graf and Beng Huat Chua, eds., Port Cities in Asia and Europe (London:
Routledge, 2009); Ayodeji Olukoju, The “Liverpool” of West Africa: The Dynamics and Impact
of Maritime Trade in Lagos, 1900–1950 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004).
50. Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History
51. Suzanne Berger, Notre première mondialisation. Leçons d’un échec oublié , trans.
R. Robert (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2003); Paul Scheffer, Immigrant Nations, trans. Liz Waters
51
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
crucial role played by global flows of resources and energy and the manner in
which they were reconfigured as a result of the conflict. In the warring empires, the
armies’ needs transformed—at least temporarily—the relationship between center
and periphery. In this context of imperial emergency, resource extraction was thus
not merely the result of a quest for power or an expression of colonial domination;
it also illustrated the dependence of “centers” on their “peripheries.” As Keller
underscores, the extraction of tin, which was necessary for the weapons industry and
in the production of canned foods for the soldiers, transformed the landscape of the
Malay Peninsula and the Dutch East Indies. In so doing, it profoundly exposed local
populations to the impact of what was an otherwise distant war. The repercussions
of the armies’ needs were also felt in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where sodium nitrate
deposits were extensively mined to supply European farmers with nitrogenous
fertilizer and for the production of explosives. Further illustration of the armies’
dependence on these “peripheries” can be found in the massive use of Argentine
and Uruguayan meat, which supplied most of the protein consumed by Entente
troops over the course of the war (particularly during its second half). Beyond
revealing the European powers’ dependence on territories lying outside the formal
sphere of colonial domination, these facts show that the local, the imperial, and the
global are not simple scales of analysis to be combined at will for the purposes of
an economic or environmental history of the conflict. Rather, they correspond to
closely intertwined degrees of the experience of war.
A global history of the Great War that privileges a discussion of the geography
of belligerence must therefore not be seen as an effort to discard Europe or
the nation-state as analytical categories. The objective here is not to replace one
paradigm with another, but rather to combine historiographical perspectives that
have in the past almost always been isolated from one another. This is evident
in the case of the economic mobilization of Latin American states during the
conflict, the focus of a number of valuable studies that have nevertheless remained
confined by the notion that Latin America was on the margins of the war. And yet
the economic consequences of the conflict—from the spectacular increase in the
cost of living witnessed right across the region to the transformation of forms of
production in accordance with European needs and the difficulties of transatlantic
trade—produced major shifts within these societies. The intensification of social
movements and their frequent repression by governments, the rural exodus created
by the crisis in certain kinds of agricultural production (such as coffee in Brazil),
and shortages in the manufactured goods that had been imported from Europe
before the outbreak of war52 were all locally lived experiences of the conflict. These
phenomena generated specific systems of representation and should be considered
not just from the perspective of economic history, but also from that of social,
political, and cultural history. Along the same lines, the recent revival of the urban
history of the war stems in part from a growing awareness that the rigid frontiers
established between the local, national, imperial, and global scales are not capable
52
52. Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America.
of doing justice to the conflict’s social history.53 For in all of the world’s metropoles
and cities, soldiers and civilians responded to the conflict in a variety of ways,
invalidating the notion of a unanimously shared enthusiasm for the war or a unified
“war culture.”54
Patriotism was nevertheless a crucial aspect of the dynamics of mobilization,
and wartime loyalty was not the exclusive privilege of Western nation-states. A
multinational political community such as the Habsburg Empire was thus based
on loyalties that were often more deeply anchored than has been traditionally
recognized by national historiographies.55 Elsewhere, the experience of war
contributed to the process of nationalizing the masses. This was true not just of Italy
and Russia—countries in the thrall of profound military and political crises56 —but
also of Argentina and Brazil, where the years 1914–1918 witnessed a consolidation
53. Jay M. Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War, vol. 1, Paris, London,
Berlin, 1914–1919, and vol. 2, A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997 and 2007); Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday
Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in
World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Roger Chickering, The Great
War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007); Élise Julien, Paris, Berlin. La mémoire de la guerre, 1914–1933 (Rennes:
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009); Emmanuelle Cronier, Permissionnaires dans la
Grande Guerre (Paris: Belin, 2013).
54. Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914. Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre. Contribution
à l’étude de l’opinion publique, printemps–été 1914 (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1977); Jeffrey
Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and
the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). It should be recalled
that the “war culture” paradigm was first formulated in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and
Annette Becker, “Vers une histoire culturelle de la Première Guerre mondiale,” Vingtième
Siècle. Revue d’histoire 41, no. 1 (1994): 5–8; and above all in Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker,
14–18, retrouver la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
55. Mark Cornwall, “The Experience of Yugoslav Agitation in Austria-Hungary,
1917–18,” in Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, ed. Hugh Cecil and
Peter H. Liddle (1996; repr. London: Pen and Sword Books, 1999), 656–76; Hugh Cecil
and Peter H. Liddle, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-
Hungary: Essays in Political and Military History, 1908–1918 (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 1990); István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg
Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); John Deak, “The
Great War and the Forgotten Realm: The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War,”
Journal of Modern History 86, no. 2 (2014): 336–80.
56. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens
during World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Joshua A. Sanborn,
Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Melissa K. Stockdale, “‘My Death
for the Motherland Is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great
War, 1914–1917,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (2004): 78–116; Vanda Wilcox,
“‘Weeping Tears of Blood’: Exploring Italian Soldiers’ Emotions in the First World War,”
53
Modern Italy 17, no. 2 (2012): 171–84.
of the national paradigm. In these cases, the period thus needs to be set in
the context of the longer-term process of the construction of national identities
in Latin America, beginning with the independence movements of the early
nineteenth century.57
Patriotism counted for a great deal during the conflict, but the discourses
and practices that expressed it often diverged from the ideal and abstract language
that characterized the vocabulary of nationalism.58 National defense was generally
expressed in communitarian terms and, depending on the case and context, could
draw upon the language of class-based, urban, religious, or imperial solidarities.59
Expressed in everyday language and habits, wartime patriotism was nevertheless
not the same thing as the “banal nationalism” ruthlessly deconstructed by Michael
Billig. Indeed, the term “nationalism,” which suggests ideological coherence and
the systematic and absolute primacy of the nation, very poorly captures the
characteristics of patriotism. Important though it may be, Billig’s work moreover
ignores the capacity of patriotism to launch and support social movements directed
against the state.60 As the history of cities in wartime shows, urban social movements
do not always oppose national mobilization, even when they directly challenge state
authorities. In wartime, resistance and open conflict define relations between the
central authority and the urban periphery as much as collaboration and integration.
Patriotism must be understood in a simultaneously anthropological and politico-
legal sense as a show of solidarity toward family and friends and an expression of
loyalty toward an imaginary community of fellow citizens. As a political project or
as a category of analysis, by contrast, nationalism is intimately related to what the
state can require of its citizens.61
The success of the wartime mobilizations was therefore not based on an
unlikely national consensus but rather on the capacity of patriots of all hues to
reconcile their divergent visions of the nation for the purpose of defending its
existence. In this context, social movements played an essential role, allowing social
groups to define and assert the conditions of their participation in the war effort. As
in other areas of research, the urban history of the First World War underscores the
57. Olivier Compagnon, L’adieu à l’Europe. L’Amérique latine et la Grande Guerre, Argentine
et Brésil, 1914–1939 (Paris: Fayard, 2013).
58. This point was extensively demonstrated on the occasion of the colloquium “Patriotic
Cultures during the First World War,” organized by Boris Kolonitskii and Laura
Engelstein and held in 2014 at the European University of Saint Petersburg. See also
Dieter Langewiesche, “Gefühlsraum Nation. Eine Emotionsgeschichte der Nation, die
Grenzen zwischen öffentlichem und privatem Gefühlsraum nicht einebnet,” Zeitschrift
für Erziehungswissenschaft 15, no. 1 (2012): 195–215.
59. Stefan Goebel, “Forging the Industrial Home Front: Iron-Nail Memorials in the
Ruhr,” and Pierre Purseigle, “Beyond and below the Nations: Towards a Comparative
History of Local Communities at War,” both in Macleod and Purseigle, Uncovered Fields,
respectively pp. 159–78 and 95–123.
60. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).
61. Pierre Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice, et citoyenneté. Angleterre-France, 1900–1918
54
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013).
need to pay particular attention to the geography of belligerence, which in turn

invites scholars not only to look beyond and below the nation, but also to think
“through the nation” in dialogue with global history.62
The Spatial Legacies of the Great War

This geography of war and belligerence makes it possible to revisit in a new way the
history of the First World War’s consequences and the process of reconstruction that
characterized the transition from war to peace. Postwar reconstruction was above
all experienced as “re-placement.” If mobility had defined the war experience as
much as the stalemate of combat, it also characterized the period of reconstruction.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the roads of the belligerent world thus filled
with homebound soldiers and refugees seeking a place to live.63 While specialists
of Fascism have paid particular attention to the veterans’ halting process of cultural
demobilization, historians have only recently begun to explore the problems raised
for new and old states alike by these unprecedented population movements and
transfers. While paramilitary violence kept many regions in a state of social and
sometimes diplomatic belligerence, the fate of displaced populations threatened
the legitimacy and structures of the new national and revolutionary communities
of eastern Europe.64 The social history of these populations—for example, that of
French and Belgian repatriates—largely remains to be written in terms of the simul-
taneously comparative and transnational perspective implied by their interrelated
efforts to reestablish and relocate themselves.
Furthermore, the First World War profoundly and durably redrew the political
map of Europe and the world. In eastern Europe, military operations took place in
a colonized space that today encompasses Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belorussia,
and Ukraine. The campaigning armies—German, Austro-Hungarian, or Czarist—
were also armies of occupation. Sanborn has recently emphasized the incompetence
of the Russian military administration in these regions: incapable of mastering
inflation—the scourge of belligerent societies—the Russian Army failed in its
efforts to manage local economies, and nationalization policies relying on the ethnic
recruitment of military units were accompanied by anti-Semitic pogroms.65 In the
62. Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
63. On the soldiers’ return and the military and cultural questions raised by
demobilization, see “Démobilisations culturelles après la Grande Guerre,” ed. John
Horne, special issue, 14–18. Aujourd’hui, Today, Heute 5 (2002); Bruno Cabanes, La victoire
endeuillée. La sortie de guerre des soldats français, 1918–1920 (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2004); Mark
Edele and Robert Gerwarth, “The Limits of Demobilization: Global Perspectives on the
Aftermath of the Great War,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 1 (2015): 3–14.
64. Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, eds., Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in
Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Press, 2004).
65. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse ; Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass
55
Deportation, Hostages and Violence during World War I,” Russian Review 60, no. 3
wake of these military administrations, the Russian Empire collapsed and local
elites gradually reaffirmed their control over the space, laying the foundations of
their future national independence. Even before the February 1917 Revolution,
nationalist movements hastened to exploit the political space and opportunities
created by the revolt in central Asia. In eastern Europe, at least, the war thus
triggered a process of decolonization that would conclude with the creation of the
Nazi and Soviet empires.
Though it is better known for the adventures of Gabriele d’Annunzio than
for its citizens’ extraordinary postwar attempt to redefine sovereignty outside the
framework inherited from the nation-state and international law, the case of Fiume
(now Rijeka) in Croatia provides a different illustration of the spatial evolution
of post-imperial political communities. Here, the transition from war to peace
constituted an exceptionally pragmatic attempt to build a political and legal niche
between the Habsburgs’ imperial political community and the nationalist project
of the Italian state.66 The fate of the Free State of Fiume testifies to the complex
impact of the war on imperial political geographies. On the other hand, within
empires that emerged victorious and consolidated by the war—such as that of
France—colonial subjects tended to seek strategies to renegotiate their position
in imperialist structures and imaginaries. Mary Lewis’s work on legal pluralism in
interwar Tunisia, for example, represents a brilliant demonstration of the need to
combine analytical scales in order to fully accommodate the complexity of postwar
reconfigurations of sovereignty.67
Outside Europe, however, the impact of the Great War on Asian and
African nationalist movements is still a matter of debate.68 Satia’s article on the
British campaigns in the Middle East illustrates what might be described as the
cultural reinvestment in imperial geography. The British experience on this front—
considered secondary during the war—in fact played a central role in the cultural
history of Great Britain and its empire during and after the First World War. The
campaigns in Palestine and Mesopotamia gave new life to conventional visions of
martial heroism and the faith in technology (and thus “civilization”)—visions that
had been left in tatters by the European war and were once and for all buried, it
seemed, in the mud of Flanders and the Somme. Airpower was not simply deployed
in this region as a tool of imperial control and coercion; it also allowed the British
(2001): 404–19; Eric Lohr and Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Economic Nationalism, Confiscation
and Genocide: A Comparison of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I,”
Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 4 (2014): 500–522.
66. Dominique Kirchner Reill, “Rebel Law: Fiume/Rijeka and the Dissolution of the
Habsburg Empire” (paper presented at Yale University’s international history seminar,
February 25, 2014).
67. Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia,
1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Lewis, “Geographies of
Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the
Mediterranean, 1881–1935,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 791–830.
68. Richard S. Fogarty and David Killingray, “Demobilization in British and French
Africa at the End of the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 1
56
(2015): 100–123.
to revive their modernizing and “civilizing” project. In a context marked by doubt

and the fear of national decline, the Middle Eastern campaigns allowed the British
nation to relaunch its imperial project.
The case of Japan displays another form of imperial redefinition that took
place during the conflict. After entering the war in August 1914, Japan played an
important role alongside the Entente powers, rapidly seizing German possessions
from China to Micronesia. Its naval fleet protected convoys of troops transiting
to Europe from Australia and New Zealand and also hunted submarines in the
Mediterranean. But despite this contribution, the Japanese experience of the Great
War was clearly distinct from that of its allies. It lost only 2,000 men and the
Japanese economy prospered, having been spared the direct impact of fighting.69 As
Frederick Dickinson has shown, however, the war provoked intense public debates,
and in many respects represented a turning point in modern Japanese history. Like
their Latin American counterparts, Japanese commentators and politicians saw the
conflict as the bloody manifestation of a broader civilizational crisis, with Europe
and its crumbling pretensions to global cultural and political domination at its
epicenter. For a large segment of Japanese society, including its elites, the war
underscored the need to engage in profound national revival (ishin), reminiscent
of the program of radical reforms associated with the late nineteenth-century Meiji
era.70 These debates and the public policies that resulted permitted a series of social
and economic transformations that saw Japan shift from agrarianism to an industrial
model of society open to the world. Indeed, Japan strove to play a positive role in
the construction of a new world order even after the European imperial powers
and the United States rejected the racial equality clause at Versailles. Heavily
involved in the League of Nations and discussions regarding arbitration and the
outlawing of war, the Japan of the young Hirohito was no more condemned to
slide into militarism and dictatorship than Weimar Germany.71 A long campaign
of unprecedented political violence was necessary to undo the liberalizing and
modernizing effort of national revival.72
Finally, in neutral countries the international transformations tied to the
war and its immediate aftermath lent new meaning to discussions of national
identity and contributed to reconceiving the place of the nation in the new global
geography that resulted from the peace treaties. The debate was particularly intense
in Sweden, as Lina Sturfelt has shown,73 but also in Latin America, where it raised
a number of overlapping issues. On the one hand, in a country like Brazil the
69. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War,
1914–1919 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999).
70. Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930
71. Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007).
72. Frederick R. Dickinson, “Toward a Global Perspective of the Great War: Japan and
the Foundations of a Twentieth-Century World,” American Historical Review 119, no. 4
(2014): 1154–83.
73. Lina Sturfelt, Eldens återsken: första världskriget i svensk föreställningsvärld (Lund:
57
Sekel, 2008).
war revived a fear already present in the intellectual production of the “tropical
Belle Époque”74 : that its three southernmost states (Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio
Grande do Sul), home to some 400,000 inhabitants of German origin, would secede.
Following Rio’s entry into the war in October 1917, a series of measures were taken
to nationalize these populations, who were often described as “Teuto-Brazilian.”
With hindsight, these measures appear to have laid the foundation for the wholesale
policies of nationalization pursued by Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo between 1937
and 1945.75 In this respect, the First World War may be thought of as a major step in
the process of finalizing national territories in a number of Latin American countries.
On the other hand, the European civilizational crisis that the war represented in
the eyes of many Latin American intellectuals led to the emergence of at least
two competing visions of the future of Latin American nations. In the first, still
anchored in Europe, Latin American states would achieve representation within
the new international order of states—from which they had been almost completely
excluded from the Congress of Vienna up to 1914—as members of the League of
Nations. The second was turned toward the United States. Between 1890 and 1914,
the expansionist policies of that country in Central America and the Caribbean
had provoked fear and distrust. Its record during the war, however, presented a
threefold advantage: it had remained neutral in 1914, had helped bring an end to
the conflict following its entry into the war in 1917, and had offered the world a
lasting peace project in the form of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Yet the Eurocentric manner in which the League of Nations operated and the
arrogance displayed by the victorious powers toward countries they continued to
see as peripheral despite the resources supplied throughout the conflict quickly put
an end to Latin American experiments with the Geneva Assembly.76 The golden
age of Pan-Americanism that ran from 1933 to 1945—the era of the Good Neighbor
policy and Washington’s “seductive imperialism”77 south of the Rio Grande—owed
much to the shifts in hegemony that took place during the Great War and the new
imaginary geographies in which it resulted.
74. Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-
Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
75. Luebke, Germans in Brazil; Compagnon, L’adieu à l’Europe.
76. On Latin America and the League of Nations, see Thomas Fischer, Die Souveränität
der Schwachen. Lateinamerika und der Völkerbund, 1920–1936 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2012); Alan McPherson and Yannick Wehrli, eds., Beyond Geopolitics: New Histories
of Latin America at the League of Nations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2015); Jorge Rhenán Segura, La Sociedad de las Naciones y la política centroamericana,
1919–1939 (San José: Euroamericana de Ediciones, 1993); María de Monserrat Llairó and
Raimundo Siepe, Argentina en Europa. Yrigoyen y la Sociedad de las Naciones, 1918–1920
(Buenos Aires: Macchi, 1997); and Eugênio Vargas Garcia, O Brasil e a Liga das Nações,
1919–1926. Vencer ou não perder (Porto Alegre: Editora da universidade federal do Rio
Grande do Sul, 2000).
77. To borrow the expression of the Brazilian historian Antonio Pedro Tota, O imperialismo
sedutor. A americanização do Brasil na época da Segunda Guerra (São Paulo: Companhia das
58
Letras, 2000).
Rethinking the Spaces of the War

A hundred years after the start of the conflict and despite several pioneering works,
the global history of the First World War paradoxically remains a vast, uncultivated
terrain. Some of the more obvious reasons for this state of affairs include the
complexity of the events in question, the multiple scales at which they took place,
the immense mass of documentation to which they gave rise throughout the world,
and the fact that any comparative or transnational approach requires a mastery of
many foreign languages. At a time when the community of Great War historians
embarks on ever more international collaborations and appropriates the tools of
the digital humanities, however, one can only insist on the intellectual obstacles
to forging this global history. These include the continuing grip exercised by the
nation over the historian’s imagination, the difficulty of considering the centrality
of the national or imperial state alongside the pluralism of belligerent civil societies,
and the persistence of more or less implicit Eurocentric premises.
As Strachan has recently shown, transformations of strategy were fundamen-
tally contingent upon transformations in the spatial understanding of the war.
Because they imposed themselves as urgent necessities, economic mobilization
and the projection of power across oceans and airspaces—in particular via
propaganda campaigns—radically expanded the frontiers of the battlefield, drawing
noncombatant populations across the world into the conflict. On the basis of these
developments, which grafted themselves onto spatial imaginaries specific to the
colonial experiences of the nineteenth century, new attention to the conflict’s
geography and to the transformations of spatial perception in the early twentieth
century makes it possible to advance toward this global history of the Great War,78
clearing the way for a military, economic, social, political, and cultural history of the
years 1914–1918 predicated on a consideration of the spaces of the war. At the same
time, it allows for a more general consideration of the transformation of forms of
belligerence and the mobilization of wartime societies across the twentieth century.
In European and non-European societies alike, the conduct and contemporary
representations of the Great War had focused on the mastery and comprehension
of space. It is thus no accident that the interwar years should have witnessed the
emergence of geopolitics as both a field of study and a factor in political decision-
making. Nor is it a coincidence that the Nazi regime and the theoreticians of
National Socialism put many of these same ideas into the service of their genocidal
policy, thereby radically redefining the territories of modern belligerence.79
In our own era of consolidated mass cultures, the echoes and images of
war-ravaged Syria are transmitted across the world with near absolute immediacy.
The war has also pushed hundreds of thousands of migrants to take to the roads
78. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
79. Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations and
59
Complexities,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 3 (2013): 339–62.
across the Mediterranean. Their arrival in Europe has given rise to violent political
divisions at the scale of nation-states and has even called into question the future
existence of the Schengen Area. Articulating a multiplicity of scales and projecting
localized violence into the world-space, the forms of contemporary belligerence
seem very much the extension and exacerbation of transformations that initially
emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Olivier Compagnon
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3
Institut des hautes études de l’Amérique latine/CREDA–UMR 7227
Pierre Purseigle
University of Warwick, Department of History
Trinity College Dublin, Centre for War Studies
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Geographies of the First World War

Olivier Compagnon and Pierre Purseigle

Annales HSS (English Edition) 71, no. 1 (2016): 37-60, 10.1017/S2398568217000024

played an important role in these historiographical developments. The events of

Sizing Up a Global Conflict

war, between the various disciplinary and methodological approaches developed

9. Romain Bertrand, L’histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident,

scholars and regularly contribute valuable new information, nevertheless tend to

York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Christoph Nübel, “Neuvermessungen der

practices to be reconceived in a spatial framework,20 and if specialists of queer

of the belligerent states to colonial societies and, perhaps most importantly, to

In fact, current historiography is determined by a series of implicit

36. Exhibition catalogue, La Gran Guerra. Narrativas y vivencias colombianas en el fín de

know-how and a strong organizational capacity. As Eric Hobsbawm showed, “total

need to pay particular attention to the geography of belligerence, which in turn

The Spatial Legacies of the Great War

to revive their modernizing and “civilizing” project. In a context marked by doubt

Rethinking the Spaces of the War

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