The First World War (1914-1918)
Senior 6 · History (Languages)
The First World War (1914-1918)
Lesson 3 of 4
20 min
The photograph below shows no trenches, no guns and no enemy. Yet it belongs in a lesson on the effects of the war. As you look at it, ask: how could a war make a disease spread faster, and why might governments at war keep it quiet?
Army camps packed young men together, troopships carried them across oceans, and wartime censors suppressed bad news. Newspapers in neutral Spain reported the outbreak freely, so it was misnamed the "Spanish flu", although its earliest likely cases were recorded in Kansas in March 1918. Estimates of deaths from the 1918 to 1920 pandemic range from 17 million to 50 million. The war did not create the virus, but it helped it travel.
Definition
Self-determination: the right of a people to choose its own government and form its own state. US President Woodrow Wilson made it a principle of the peace, though it was applied mainly in Europe.
Mandate: a former German or Ottoman territory placed by the League of Nations under the administration of an Allied power, which was supposed to govern it in the interest of its inhabitants.
Hyperinflation: extremely rapid rise in prices, so that money loses almost all its value, as in Germany in 1923.
| Field | Effects |
|---|---|
| Human | About 9 to 11 million soldiers and 6 to 13 million civilians died, and about 21 million soldiers were wounded. Millions of widows and orphans; a "lost generation" of young men. |
| Political | Four empires fell: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. New states appeared, among them Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russia became a communist state (the USSR from 1922). The League of Nations was founded. |
| Economic | Huge debts, much of them owed to the United States, which became the world's leading creditor. Destruction in northern France and Belgium. Inflation, ending in Germany's hyperinflation of 1923. |
| Social | Women took over factory, transport and office work. Women won the vote in several countries soon after, such as Britain (1918, for women over 30), Germany (1918) and the United States (1920). The 1918 influenza pandemic spread along wartime routes. |
| Colonial and African | Hundreds of thousands of Africans served as soldiers and carriers, many dying of disease and hunger. Germany lost all its colonies, which became League mandates: Tanganyika to Britain, Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium, Kamerun and Togoland divided between Britain and France, South West Africa to South Africa. |
For Rwanda the war meant a change of colonial master. Belgian troops from the Congo occupied the country in 1916, and Belgium ruled it under military occupation until 1922, when the League of Nations awarded Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium as a mandate. Belgian rule later reshaped the kingdom: it removed and replaced chiefs, demanded forced labour, and in the 1930s issued identity cards that fixed a so-called ethnic label on every person. Those labels turned social categories into rigid divisions, with consequences that unit 1's principles were later written to undo.
CrashCourse, "Post-World War I Recovery" (Crash Course European History #36, about 15 minutes). Watch for the economic effects of the war and how different countries tried to rebuild; note which effects in the table it develops.
Warning
Watch the dates. The fighting stopped with the armistice of 11 November 1918, but the peace treaties were signed in 1919 and 1920, and Ruanda-Urundi became a mandate only in 1922. Do not write that Belgium "received Rwanda at Versailles in 1918".
Tip
Sort before you write. For any "effects" question, jot the headings Human, Political, Economic, Social and Colonial in the margin, put two facts under each, and then write. It stops you listing ten political effects and forgetting everything else.
Important
Discuss. Was the change from German to Belgian rule a turning point for Rwanda, or did colonial rule simply continue under a new flag? Use evidence from this lesson.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the table and the exercises.
