ABSTRACT

In 1914 almost one quarter of the earth's surface was British. When the empire and its allies went to war in 1914 against the Central Powers, history's first global conflict was inevitable. 

It is the social and cultural reactions to that war and within those distant, often overlooked, societies which is the focus of this volume. From Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Iraq and around the rest of the British imperial world, further complexities and interlocking themes are addressed, offering new perspectives on imperial and colonial history and theory, as well as art, music, photography, propaganda, education, pacifism, gender, class, race and diplomacy at the end of the pax Britannica.

part I|38 pages

The Great War and the British Empire

part II|88 pages

Imperial responses, identities and culture

chapter Chapter 3|22 pages

The ‘Kaiser Cartoon’, 1914–1918

A transnational comic art genre

chapter Chapter 5|22 pages

“We New Zealanders pride ourselves most of all upon loyalty to our Empire, our country, our flag”

Internalised Britishness and national character in New Zealand's First World War propaganda

chapter Chapter 6|14 pages

Heligoland

Between the lion and the eagle

chapter Chapter 7|10 pages

Imperial Austerlitz

The Singapore Strategy and the culture of victory, 1917–1924

part III|178 pages

Art, memory and forgetting

chapter Chapter 8|22 pages

‘Our warrior Brown Brethran’

Identity and difference in images of non-white soldiers serving with the British army in British art of the First World War

chapter Chapter 10|22 pages

Spaces of conflict and ambivalent attachments

Irish artists visualise the Great War

chapter Chapter 12|16 pages

A tribute to the British Empire

Lowell Thomas's With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia

chapter Chapter 13|34 pages

An architecture of imperial ambivalence

The Patcham Chattri

chapter Chapter 14|16 pages

The Great War's impact on imperial Delhi

Commemorating wartime sacrifice in the colonial built environment

chapter Chapter 15|14 pages

Sounds from the trenches

Australian composers and the Great War

chapter Chapter 16|12 pages

‘Brutalised’ veterans and tragic anti-heroes

Masculinity, crime and post-war trauma in Boardwalk Empire and Peaky Blinders