An estimated two million Africans served in World War One as soldiers or labourers. Moreover, beyond each front there was a massive hinterland where normal life was disrupted. Whole agricultural economies were ruined. Civilians starved or fled. In Africa, all of the armies used porters - locals used to carry the soldiers' food and munitions during the campaign, who were often coerced and who endured terrible conditions and high death rates.
The war also gave rise to epic refugee flows in much of Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, a process aggravated even further by the outbreak of revolution there in The war saw severe treatment of minorities.
In particular, Tsarist Russia persecuted its Jewish population and the Ottoman Empire deliberately destroyed its Armenian minority through massacre and deportation. World War One was also global in terms of the range of ethnicities and nationalities mobilised to fight. The British mobilised more than a million Indian men for the war.
They made up one third of the British army on the Western Front in - but also fought in East Africa and in Mesopotamia. The Germans too mobilised black colonial troops but only for use in Africa - Germany believed using non-white troops in Europe was a dangerous breach of colonial racial hierarchies. Along with fighting men, the British and French also recruited colonial labour on a massive scale, to work on the Western front and in other war theatres.
Both Britain and France also conducted an enormous recruitment campaign in China bringing some , Chinese labourers to Europe to do war work. Colonial labourers often found themselves close to the front lines, under fire. If we measure the war in terms of its ideological effects it was clearly global. The war's economic legacy changed the world as the capital of finance shifted during the conflict from London to New York and, with vast swathes of European agriculture ruined, Argentina and Canada greatly increased their market share as food suppliers.
Global attitudes were also changed. The Japanese called for a clause on the equality of all races to be inserted into the League of Nations covenant after the war - they were unsuccessful, but the idea revealed changing mindsets.
The first Pan-African Congress, held in Paris in , advocated that African peoples should govern themselves. The war's legacy was new global ideas about the right of peoples to self-determination and the need for a global system of international co-operation, which was embodied in the League of Nations.
It was a war that utterly altered the world and in this regard, in the sheer scale of the changes it brought, it was certainly a first. Countdown to WW1. Image source, Getty Images. The Seven Years' War. Image source, Alamy. North America, India, the Caribbean, the Philippines and large parts of central Europe were affected.
Napoleonic Wars. After the French Revolutionary wars of , a series of campaigns known as the Napoleonic Wars saw France in conflict with shifting alliances of European powers, ending in with the Battle of Waterloo.
Image source, Mary Evans Picture Library. Related Topics. World War One. Stage and screen. Birds and the bees. And when did people realise that the "Second World War" was such? When war was declared in September and the realisation came that most countries of the world were involved in some way, "Great" became regarded as a misnomer so First was substituted.
Logically the war became the Second world war. Taylor's English History "In contemporary parlance, the war of was alway, not surprisingly, the Great War.
It did not need the war of to change it into the first World War. Repington devised the phrase at the time of the armistice 'to prevent the millenian folk from forgetting that the history of the world is the history of war'. Repington, The First World War, ii. That is to say, as soon as the Second World War started. Until then it had been referred to as The Great War.
Polish time Friday, September 1, when a German bombing plane dropped a projectile on Puck, fishing village and air base in the armpit of the Hel Peninsula. Can anyone confirm this rather morbid - but accurate - prediction? Robert Smales, Middlesbrough England Add your answer.
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