ABSTRACT
The First World War was a watershed in the age of modernity, marking not only the power of new technology to facilitate mass death and destruction - over ten million people were killed - but also a new balance of power within and outside Europe. The war itself and its immediate aftermath created millions of refugees and displaced people - 9.5 million in Europe alone in the mid-1920s, according to one estimate. Refugees, already a growing problem before the conflict, became a permanent and ever-increasing feature of the twentieth-century world. In addition, groups previously marginalised and discriminated against such as Jews in eastern Europe and Armenians in the Turkish Empire were subject to even more murderous attacks (genocidal in the latter case) during and after the conflict.1
