The First World War (1914-1918)
Senior 6 · History
The First World War (1914-1918)
Lesson 4 of 5
25 min
In 1914 four emperors ruled most of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East: Wilhelm II of Germany, Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, Nicholas II of Russia and Mehmed V of the Ottoman Empire. By 1922 none of their empires survived. Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 and was killed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918; Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands in November 1918; Karl, Franz Joseph's successor, gave up power the same month; and the Turkish nationalists abolished the Ottoman sultanate in November 1922. No earlier war had swept away so many old states in so short a time. This lesson sorts the war's effects into political, human, economic and social, then asks whether 1918 was the turning point of the twentieth century.
Definition
Self-determination: the principle that a people (a nation) should choose its own government and state. President Wilson made it an Allied war aim in 1918.
Successor state: a new or enlarged state created from the territory of a collapsed empire, such as Czechoslovakia or Poland.
Total war: a war in which a state mobilises its whole population and economy, so that civilians, industry and food supplies become part of the war effort, and targets.
Inflation: a general rise in prices, so that money buys less. Governments that paid for the war by borrowing and printing money caused it.
Lost generation: the young men killed or maimed in the war, and the survivors marked by it; the phrase was used in the 1920s for the generation that fought.
| Empire in 1914 | What happened | What replaced it |
|---|---|---|
| Russian Empire | Revolutions of March and November 1917; civil war 1918–21 | Soviet Russia (the USSR from 1922), the first communist state; Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent; Poland was re-created |
| German Empire | Revolution, November 1918; the Kaiser abdicated | The Weimar Republic; land lost to France, Belgium, Denmark and Poland; all colonies lost |
| Austria-Hungary | Broke apart in October–November 1918 as its nations declared independence | Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia); land to Poland, Romania and Italy |
| Ottoman Empire | Defeated and occupied; Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal | The Republic of Turkey (1923); Arab lands became British and French mandates (Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan; Syria, Lebanon) |
The new states were meant to follow self-determination, but Central and Eastern Europe's peoples were too mixed to be separated cleanly. Millions found themselves minorities in someone else's nation state: Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hungarians in Romania, Ukrainians in Poland. Outside Europe, self-determination was not applied at all: the colonies of the defeated powers were handed to the victors as mandates. Beyond the map, the war produced two new kinds of power: the United States, now the world's leading creditor, and the Soviet state, which offered a revolutionary alternative to capitalism.
The number of soldiers killed is known only within a range. Earlier historians' totals cluster around 9.2 to 9.5 million; Antoine Prost's re-examination of the army records, published in 2014, raises it to about 10.1 million, mainly by counting soldiers who died of disease in uniform. About twice that number were wounded, many permanently disabled. Civilian deaths cannot be counted with any precision, Prost warns, because hunger, disease and the blockade killed slowly and records were poor. In the Ottoman Empire one million or more Armenians were killed in 1915–16 in the Armenian Genocide, carried out under cover of the war. On top of all this came the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, spread by troop movements; the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that it killed at least 50 million people worldwide.
Important
Source analysis: grief at home. The poet Wilfred Owen, an infantry officer, wrote "Anthem for Doomed Youth" in 1917. It asks what funeral rites there can be for soldiers killed at the front. Its last six lines turn to the families waiting in Britain:
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth", from Poems, with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon (Chatto and Windus, London, 1920).
Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, a week before the armistice; his poems were published only after his death. A "pall" is the cloth laid over a coffin, and drawing the blinds was the custom in a house of mourning. The bar chart gives the scale of the loss; the poem gives its meaning in one household after another. A historian needs both kinds of evidence, and should notice what each leaves out: the chart cannot show grief, and the poem speaks for one country's homes, not for the families of carriers in East Africa.
Warning
Don't confuse effects with causes of later events, or list without weighing. An answer that lists twenty effects scores less than one that groups them, ranks them and shows links, for example: war debts and inflation weakened Weimar Germany, which made it vulnerable to the Depression and to the Nazis. Also take care with numbers: give casualty figures as estimates, with their source, never as exact counts.
Tip
Was 1918 a turning point? The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the First World War the "great seminal catastrophe" of the twentieth century, the event from which later disasters grew. To test the idea, look for continuity as well as change: Britain and France kept and even enlarged their empires, monarchy survived in Britain, Italy and elsewhere, and women's suffrage had begun before 1914 in some places (New Zealand, 1893; Finland, 1906). A strong answer weighs change against continuity.
Important
Discuss. Which effect of the First World War do you think mattered most for Africa: the transfer of German colonies to new rulers, the human losses, the economic demands, or the new political ideas carried home by soldiers? Defend your choice with evidence from Lessons 3 and 4.
"WWI's Civilians, the Homefront, and an Uneasy Peace: Crash Course European History #34" (CrashCourse). John Green looks at total war on the home front, rationing, women's work, refugees in eastern Europe, and the troubled peace. Watch for the examples of civilian suffering and compare them with the hunger map above.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the chart, the tables, the definitions and the exercises.
