ABSTRACT

A century after the Armistice and the associated peace agreements that formally ended the Great War, many issues pertaining to the UK and its empire are yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Accordingly, this volume presents a multi-disciplinary approach to better understanding the post-Armistice Empire across a broad spectrum of disciplines, geographies and chronologies. Through the lens of diplomatic, social, cultural, historical and economic analysis, the chapters engage with the histories of Lagos and Tonga, Cyprus and China, as well as more obvious geographies of empire such as Ireland, India and Australia. Though globally diverse, and encompassing much of the post-Armistice century, the studies are nevertheless united by three common themes: the interrogation of that transitionary ‘moment’ after the Armistice that lingered well beyond the final Treaty of Lausanne in 1924; the utilisation of new research methods and avenues of enquiry to compliment extant debates concerning the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; and the common leitmotif of the British Empire in all its political and cultural complexity. The centenary of the Armistice offers a timely occasion on which to present these studies.

part |17 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|15 pages

‘Britannia Pacificatrix’

Re-imagining a post-Armistice empire

part I|141 pages

Imperial endgames

chapter 2|22 pages

Imperial Coercion in Ireland and India 1919–21

Insights for Irish Australians

chapter 4|16 pages

Imperial masculinity and racial pacification

‘Martial Bengalis’ in the Great War

chapter 5|21 pages

Society and identity in the former Ottoman world

Encounters between Cypriots and Armenians of the Légion d'Orient in Cyprus in 1917–18

chapter 7|29 pages

Shanzhai 山寨 nationalism 中国民族主义

Reflexive empires and digital commemoration in China from Ah Q to AI

chapter 8|18 pages

An empire man on the road to Dominion independence

Robert Randolph Garran and the Armistice ‘blunder’ 1

part II|102 pages

Cultural aftermaths

chapter 9|14 pages

‘The threshold of the British Empire’

Accommodation, coercion and the commemoration of a national Australian narrative of war at an imperial site of memory

chapter 10|13 pages

‘A deathless monument of valour’

Memorialising Anzacs as ancient Greek citizen-soldiers from the war's aftermath to Julia Gillard's 2012 Gallipoli Dawn Service speech

chapter 11|21 pages

If Not In This World

Memorialising the personal narrative of war and its aftermath with music

chapter 12|19 pages

Pleasant remembrances and foreboding futures

Glorifying representations of empire and their opposition within Britain's national cinema during the 1930s

chapter 13|17 pages

Reconciliation through commemoration

Ireland, empire, and the 1987 Enniskillen Armistice Day bombing

chapter 14|16 pages

We're here because we're here

Participatory art and the mobilisation of First World War memory in post-Brexit Britain

part III|7 pages

Coda

chapter 15|5 pages

The Hall of Remembrance