The First World War
Senior 3 · History and Citizenship
The First World War
Lesson 4 of 4
25 min
No one knows exactly how many people the First World War killed. Governments counted soldiers carelessly, many men were never found, and civilians died of hunger and disease far from any battle. Figure 1 shows the range of estimates that historians accept today.
Figure 1. The human cost of the war. Even the lowest estimates add up to at least 15 million dead.
Analysing the source. Notice how wide the civilian range is: 6 to 13 million. Deaths from hunger, disease and massacre were recorded far less carefully than soldiers' deaths, especially in eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Africa. About two-thirds of military deaths were in battle; disease, including the influenza pandemic of 1918, caused most of the rest. When you use casualty figures, always say that they are estimates.
Figure 2. Cause, course and effect of the First World War.
Definition
Pandemic: an outbreak of a disease that spreads across many countries and continents.
Inflation: a general rise in prices, so that money buys less; hyperinflation is extremely fast inflation.
Veteran: a person who has served in the armed forces, especially in a war.
Suffrage: the right to vote in elections.
The war cost enormous sums. Britain and France borrowed heavily, much of it from the United States. Northern France and Belgium were left in ruins. Governments printed money to pay their debts, causing inflation; in Germany this turned into the hyperinflation of 1923, when a loaf of bread cost billions of marks.
With millions of men at the front, women took their places in factories, offices, transport and farms. In Britain alone, hundreds of thousands of women worked in munitions factories. After the war many governments gave women the vote: British women over 30 in 1918, German women in 1918, American women in 1920. Millions of veterans came home wounded in body or mind; the trauma then called "shell shock" is today understood as a mental injury. Finally, as soldiers travelled home in 1918 and 1919, the influenza pandemic spread around the world and killed more people than the war itself.
| Effect | What happened |
|---|---|
| A new colonial map | Germany lost all its African colonies. They became League of Nations mandates: Tanganyika (Britain), Ruanda-Urundi (Belgium), Togoland and Kamerun (divided between Britain and France), and South West Africa (South Africa). |
| Loss of life | Hundreds of thousands of Africans served as soldiers and far more as carriers; in East Africa carriers died in huge numbers from disease, hunger and overwork. |
| Famine in Rwanda | The Rumanura famine (1916 to 1918) struck western Rwanda first, where German and Belgian troops fought and took food and labour from the people. Made worse by poor rains, it spread across the kingdom. Its name means "exhausting one's resources". |
| Belgian rule | For Rwanda the war replaced German rule with Belgian occupation from 1916 and the Belgian mandate from 1922, which shaped the colonial period you studied in Senior 2. |
| New ideas | African soldiers who had fought in Europe and the Middle East had seen that the colonial powers could be beaten and heard talk of self-determination. Some of them and their children joined later movements for independence. |
Worked example: classifying effects
Question: Describe one political, one economic and one social effect of the First World War. (6 marks)
Why this scores: each effect is named, placed in the right category and supported by a specific example.
Tip
Sort effects with "PESA": Political, Economic, Social, and Africa. An effects question is easier to plan, and harder to forget, with four boxes.
Warning
Don't give casualty figures as exact facts. Write "about 9 to 11 million soldiers died", not "10,000,000 soldiers died". And don't forget civilians, who died in their millions from hunger, disease and famine, as in Rwanda's Rumanura famine.
The First World War was called "the war to end all wars". Only twenty years after the Treaty of Versailles, the Second World War began. Which effect of the First World War do you think did most to cause the second? Explain your choice.
Practice
Further reading
Sources and credits
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
