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The era of greyhound racing in the U. See how people have imagined life on Mars through history. This was a direct challenge to the great power division of the colonial world that had dominated for much of the nineteenth century. Britain and France were equally clear that the newly occupied colonies would not be returned to their defeated former colonial masters.
In presentations at the peace conference both argued that the insertion of some form of international regime as a colonial steward would be certain to fail. Three types of mandate were proposed based upon the supposed stage of development of the subject population. These mandates included the former German colonies of Togoland and Cameroon, both of which were partitioned between Britain and France; Rwanda and Burundi passed to Belgian control and the rest of German East Africa went to Britain as Tanganyika.
The final category of "C" mandates was reserved for remote territories about which the European colonial powers cared little, but which were of interest to Japan and the British Dominions, states beginning to forge their own, smaller imperial realms to ensure their regional dominance.
The "C" mandates had a particularly ambiguous status and were perceived as being a long way from ever achieving self-government. Mandatory powers were allowed to administer them effectively as integral parts of their territory, a position which the South African representative at Versailles, Jan Smuts , declared as amounting to "annexation in all but name.
The establishment of the mandate system as a functioning element within the colonial division of the world, the enshrining of the principle of trusteeship in the League of Nations charter, and the role of the PMC as a check on the actions of the mandatory powers appeared to indicate a clear shift in international relations. Supporters of the League saw the mandates as a progression from discredited 19 th century forms of imperial rule, benevolent in intent and, crucially, intended to be of limited duration.
Yet as Susan Pedersen has argued, it is very difficult to generalise about the administration of the mandates, as there was a great deal of variation in the manner in which individual territories, even those supposedly of the same category, were administered. For example, in Tanganyika and Transjordan Britain introduced land reforms but Australia devoted few resources to New Guinea because it saw the territory merely as a buffer state.
In South-West Africa, the South African government simply shipped in white settlers and accelerated the process of dispossessing the indigenous population of its land. It was also evident that the principle of trusteeship as envisaged by the League was not necessarily the reality on the ground.
Yet such moderation was not applied universally, with Britain and France both resorting to repressive colonial policing methods to ensure internal security within their Middle Eastern mandates.
Revolt in Syria in , which began among the Druze population and soon spread across much of the country, was only contained by the use of the Levant Army and irregular forces.
Notoriously the bombardment of Damascus in October resulted in over 1, residents being killed. Nevertheless, the mandatory system did impose a new framework for the international oversight of the actions of the colonial powers. However, its oversight was not meaningless. Although all but one of the members of the PMC were Europeans and four were drawn from the mandatory powers themselves, they turned out to be much more critical and less tractable than expected, in particular the British appointee, Sir Frederick Lugard , former governor-general of Nigeria, and the Spanish and Belgian representatives.
Most importantly, the PMC acted as a forum for petitioners from within the mandates to raise problems with the activities of the mandatory powers. This was an opportunity that nationalist activists chose to exploit and which caused such concern for the colonial powers that they persuaded the Council in to curtail the rights of petitioners.
For all its deficiencies, the PMC and mandatory system should, as Pedersen suggests, be seen as a discursive arena rather than an engine for socio-economic development or progress for supposedly backwards peoples towards self-government.
It provided an opportunity for nationalists in Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific to appeal to international opinion and to publicise their critiques of the mandatory powers. Colonial rule for much of the interwar period was now scrutinised through a new lens with the emergence of a mechanism capable of highlighting its failings and misdemeanours on the global stage. The internationalist rhetoric that originated with Wilson had thus given birth to what some contemporaries saw as a new colonial era, at least at an ideological level, even if the realities of colonial rule remained hierarchical and oppressive for the subject populations concerned.
This was achieved by drastically scaling back the Turkish military, requiring Turkish recognition of minority rights and internationalizing the Straits. Britain was given the mandates of Palestine and Mesopotamia, with Transjordan as an off-shoot of the former. France was awarded the mandates of Lebanon and Syria.
The mandate system was here being used to simply validate the realities of European colonial power within the Middle East. The treaty was, therefore, a codification of the often fraught discussions between Britain and France during Wartime promises made by Britain to the Arabs in were ignored because they were no longer compatible with the settlement London and Paris wished to impose. These conflicting obligations were overridden by the outcome of the war in the Middle East which left British forces in occupation of vast swathes of the former Ottoman Empire.
The Arab regime of Faysal established in Damascus after the war only survived with the protection and financial support of Britain. Despite the loss of Syria, Faysal and his supporters were not written out of Middle Eastern politics. In August he was crowned king of Iraq, part of a British attempt to impose order on its new mandate and legitimise its role of guiding the territory towards self-government. Old diplomacy had seemingly triumphed over the ideas of Wilsonian internationalism and the war had served only to entrench the colonial system of rule across much of the extra-European world.
Such an interpretation does not hold true when considering the attempt to impose a peace settlement on Turkey, where imperialist ambitions were thwarted in their attempt to partition Anatolia. Kemal was a strong advocate of Turkish independence and gathered a group of like-minded nationalists who became the rallying point for those opposed to the ineffectual government in Constantinople and the Greek occupation of Smyrna and its hinterland.
Turkish nationalists formulated a set of demands the National Covenant which abandoned Ottoman imperial and pan-Turkish designs and concentrated instead on the limited and realistic goal of securing a sovereign and independent state based on areas with a Muslim majority.
Kemal envisaged a future state that would be secured around the Anatolian heartlands, retained Smyrna and Constantinople and had a European frontier in Thrace. British attempts to use Greece as a proxy for its imperial ambitions in Turkey, in part driven by the philhellenism of Lloyd George, proved an abysmal disaster. By late summer Greek forces had been defeated and then expelled from their enclave around Smyrna in an orgy of inter-communal violence.
In the ensuing Chanak crisis in September Britain was left to face Turkish military aggression alone as France had secured a deal with Kemal in order to safeguard its position in Syria. By the end of , Kemal had achieved everything he set out to do, crucially securing the Turkish state from external aggressors.
Lausanne demonstrates the somewhat confused legacy of the First World War for the colonial powers. It left Britain and France still in possession of vast swathes of the Middle East and recognised their imperial conquests but, at the same time, demonstrated that new, ethnically-defined nationalist forces were at play and were perfectly capable of re-negotiating the terms of colonial settlements through force and diplomacy.
Most of the imperial wartime gains were recognised and sustained, enlarging both the French and British Empires to their greatest territorial extent by the s. As John Gallagher argued, "once the British Empire became world-wide, the sun never set upon its crises;" was a period of imperial crisis for Britain, witnessing the accretion of a number of serious nationalist challenges to imperial rule. By the scale of crisis had become even greater, with a tribal rebellion in Mesopotamia so extensive that over 60, troops were required to contain it.
The British Army gradually faced increasing overstretch with its commitments, both imperial and domestic, multiplying at an impossible rate. Indeed, given the nationalist forces the war had unleashed, especially those in Ireland and Turkey, it appeared to be facing well-armed and popular opponents whom it was unable to defeat.
By Britain had been forced to pull back from most of its military commitments around the fringes of the former Tsarist Empire, withdraw from Turkey, concede the creation of the Irish Free State and agree to a new constitutional settlement in Egypt which reduced its political control. Where imperial dominance had been restored, repressive force often underwrote British rule, most notoriously in April at Amritsar.
It seemed that Britain could now only hold onto its empire by resorting to terror, undermining any liberal arguments promoting the legitimacy or progressive nature of colonial rule. The post-war "crisis of empire" was not solely a British imperial phenomenon. If the broader interwar period is considered, then France also experienced a series of uprisings that challenged its colonial hegemony. The latter saw forces of over 20, Berber tribesmen inflicting heavy casualties on the Foreign Legion and West African units sent to pacify them.
Only through the sustained commitment of military resources and extensive efforts by specialist tribal affairs officers to win over clans loyal to French rule was the revolt brought to heel by the spring of Colonial unrest remained a defining element of the imperial experience throughout the interwar years for both France and Britain.
Similarly, Palestine experienced continual challenges to British mandatory authority with rioting in Jerusalem linked to disputes over competing religious rights at the Wailing Wall in This was followed by an intense three-year Arab insurgency that began in The frequent resort to force to sustain that rule only demonstrated the fragile position of the colonial powers.
The Great War had witnessed not just the mobilisation of colonial societies and resources, but also the mobilisation of new ideas on the nature of imperial rule and international relations. As Erez Manela has argued, the rhetoric of Wilson resonated with nationalist movements and subject peoples around the world in the immediate wake of the conflict, creating an expectation that the League of Nations and a peace without annexations signalled the end of the tyranny of the great powers.
Calls for colonial subjects to be represented at Versailles and mass popular protests swept not just the British territories of India and Egypt. In Korea and China people took to the streets as part of the 1 March and 4 May movements respectively, challenging the local colonial settlements that seemed to be superseding the promises of Wilsonian internationalism. The opportunities provided by Versailles for anti-colonial nationalists to petition the great powers opened up a transnational network of ideas shared among activists, allowing for the flourishing of an internationalist critique of empire.
The colonial empires of France and Britain emerged from the First World War as battered but victorious. By July the French Empire had, for example, reached its largest extent, ruling over territories amounting to The settlements imposed upon the defeated powers enshrined a new form of colonial regime, one that was mediated through the oversight of the League of Nations and which injected the concept of trusteeship into imperial discourse.
This, however, made little difference to the ways in which the British and French chose to manage their empires. Repressive force, often in excess of what could be applied in the metropole to recalcitrant workers or political opponents, remained the defining element of the colonial state.
Colonial strength after was, however, illusory. This reflects a central paradox of the imperial history of the inter-war years: colonial regimes which had weathered the storms of "total war" during would collapse within a matter of decades. The readiness to resort to violent militarised policing methods in order to deal with the crises that followed the war only demonstrated the limits to the legitimacy of colonial rule. This was, perhaps, an inherent weakness of colonial systems, particularly those which were inflected with a liberal strain or the desire to spread ideas of "European civilisation," as were those of Britain and France.
Although anti-colonial nationalist movements, with the exceptions of Ireland and Turkey, had been contained by the early s, they had begun a slow process of dismantling the foundations of imperial administrations.
Decolonisation should not be seen as starting with the Wilsonian moment after the First World War. Its roots in many territories were sunk much deeper into the very nature of the colonial conquests and systems that developed in the nineteenth century; these were systems of rule that slowly unravelled over generations.
Nonetheless, the colonial empires had reached a tipping point in the early s. Mass nationalist movements, spurred by the failure of internationalist dreams of both Lenin and Wilson in the wake of the Paris peace treaties, now stood as the main opponents to colonial rule across numerous territories.
The mobilisation of the colonial empires to fight a "total war" in , especially the recruitment of combatants and labourers, was the crucial dynamic that drove the development of this anti-colonial upsurge. The First World War unleashed internationalist and ethno-nationalist ideas alongside demands from subject populations which could not be met without significant concessions over sovereignty and political control. Tentative steps were made to address these calls for reform with measures such as those of Edwin Montagu and Chelmsford in India and Charles Jonnart in Algeria, but they merely underlined the increasingly contested nature of imperial legitimacy.
It would take the defeats of , with France crushed in Europe by Germany and Britain humiliated by Japan in South-East Asia, to finally seal the fate of the colonial empires and accelerate moves towards decolonisation. Defeat and victory in the "total wars" of the 20 th century were of great significance. Victory for the Allies produced a contrasting experience, with the Belgian, French, Italian, British, Portuguese and Japanese Empires all secured or enhanced by the war. Indeed, Britain provides an exceptional case, with the loss of Ireland by being the only example of a victorious power experiencing decolonisation in the immediate wake of the war.
More importantly, defeated powers in both world wars found it impossible to justify repressive rule and the racial hierarchies that excluded most colonial subjects from local political systems. After , Britain and France, therefore, faced an irreversible deficit of legitimacy, having asked their subjects to once again bear the burdens of fighting a "total war" in defence of a colonial system that offered them few rewards.
Victory in for Britain and France had, in some respects, only served to obscure the weaknesses of their empires when placed under the strains of mass mobilisation. Henry Wilson was correct to see the First World War and its confused aftermath as a transformational moment. Imperial overstretch and the stimulation of anti-colonial nationalist movements set the tone for the colonial relationships of the interwar years in which imperial rule was scrutinised as never before. The colonial empires, as Henry Wilson realised, would be unable to survive a second experience of "total war.
Section Editor: Robert Gerwarth. Kitchen, James E. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. DOI : Version 1. By James E. Why have certain empires decayed while others flourished? What state practices provoked independent resistance movements? How have ordinary people sought to combat imperial rule?
What have been the social, cultural and economic results of empire? Do imperial states inevitably spawn terrorist responses from below?
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