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Globalizing the History of the First World War: Economic Approaches

Part of: Historiographical Reviews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

Jamie Martin Open the ORCID record for Jamie Martin [Opens in a new window]
Jamie Martin*
Affiliation:
Department of History and School of Foreign Service, Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20007, USA
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Email: jamie.martin@georgetown.edu
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Abstract

This historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the First World War. It first considers how, over the last decade, there has been a move to emphasize the war's imperial dimensions: in reconsiderations of the war in Africa, the experience of soldiers and workers from across Europe's colonial empires, and the German ‘global strategy’ of fomenting unrest within the Allied empires. It then suggests that new global histories of the First World War give further attention to its economic aspects, particularly in two ways: first, by recovering understudied global financial aspects of the war, including the effects of the 1914 financial crisis and wartime inflation on economies and societies far outside of Europe; and second, by investigating wartime histories of primary production, both in colonial territories and sovereign states in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It argues that these approaches can offer an important corrective to common assumptions that the First World War led to a dramatic break with pre-war globalizing trends.

Type
Historiographical Review
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , June 2022 , pp. 838 - 855
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Over the last decade, the global historiography of the First World War has expanded dramatically. It is now common for general histories of the war to include discussion of its non-European theatres, the role of colonial subjects as soldiers and workers, and its effects on societies and politics from East Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. The focus of new compendia – such as the Cambridge history of the First World War, an enormous and expanding online encyclopaedia published by the Freie Universität, and the journal First World War Studies – have shown how much the war's history has moved beyond Europe.Footnote 1

Despite enthusiasm for globalizing histories of the First World War, however, there have been few attempts to tie together research on its extra-European social, political, and cultural dimensions into new and overarching interpretative schema beyond brief discussion in the introductions to a growing number of edited volumes.Footnote 2 One approach has been to focus on the question of ‘spread’: namely, how what began as another Balkan war turned into a globe-spanning one.Footnote 3 In a 2010 article setting the stage for the global turn in the literature, Hew Strachan listed several reasons why the war expanded so widely after the July Crisis: first, the obvious – though for a long time overlooked – fact that several of the belligerents were empires; second, the globalized nature of finance in 1914 (though Strachan's focus in this case was largely on Europe and the United States); third, the German strategy of fomenting unrest among the Muslim populations of the Entente empires, from the Caucasus to India; and fourth, the decision by some governments, like the Japanese or Ottoman, to join the war to gain leverage in regional disputes and win a seat at the peace table.Footnote 4 Three of these factors have informed much of the war's global historiography in the ten years since. The most popular has been the war's imperial dimensions, usually focused on its African theatres and the experiences of colonial subjects fighting and working for the Entente powers. Another is the decision of governments like the Chinese and Ottoman to join the war to regain lost territory and sovereign rights. A third is Germany's ‘global strategy’ – a topic that was mostly overlooked after Fritz Fischer's 1961 Griff nach der Weltmacht, until receiving extensive treatment in the first volume of Strachan's The First World War, and which since then has been investigated further.Footnote 5

What is the state of the global historiography of the First World War today? In what follows, this review will provide an overview, focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on English-language scholarship. It will then propose areas that merit closer investigation, particularly the war's global economic effects. It argues that making sense of how the war was the first crisis in human history to have touched every corner of the earth – one whose scope far outstripped that of the fighting itself – requires new research on its material and economic dimensions. One of the key implications of further study of the global political economy of the war will be to reframe how we understand its effect on the integrated world economic system that had emerged in the years before its outbreak – one the war did not tear asunder, as it has been common to claim, but whose vulnerabilities it put on clear display.

I

The global dimensions of the First World War have been explored most thoroughly in studies that frame it as a conflict of empires. For a long time, few wrote about the imperial aspects of the war, in general, even as literature on the wartime histories of specific colonies expanded. This produced a paradoxical result: as studies appeared of the war's impact on, say, India or Madagascar, there were few overarching imperial interpretative frames into which they could be placed.Footnote 6 When empire-wide histories did appear, they were largely French in focus.Footnote 7 Around 2010, this situation began to change.Footnote 8 In 2014, Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela published an influential edited volume, Empires at war: 1911–1923, which argued that the war stood at the ‘epicentre of a cycle of armed imperial conflict’ stretching from 1911 – with the outbreak of the First Balkan War and the Italian invasion of North Africa – to 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed.Footnote 9 This framing of the war as the midpoint of a longer struggle over Ottoman territory (what Sean McKeekin has called the ‘War of Ottoman Succession’) corresponded with a new wave of scholarship on the Ottoman war.Footnote 10 By the early 2010s, there was, as Mustafa Aksakal has pointed out, a growing consensus that the war had profound political consequences for modern Middle Eastern history, though ones that were only then coming into full view.Footnote 11 Gerwarth and Manela's framing was not only Ottoman-focused, but also emphasized the war's effects on the British empire, particularly in reference to the wave of anti-colonial uprisings it unleashed from Ireland to Iraq to the Punjab. (Keith Jeffery, building on the work of John Gallagher, has similarly argued that the war overlapped with a broader crisis of the British empire, stretching from 1916 to 1922.)Footnote 12 Empires at war provided a kind of mission statement for a productive book series edited by Gerwarth, The greater war, several volumes of which have detailed the war's imperial dimensions. Other related themes have also been reconsidered, including the Hobson/Lenin thesis about imperialism, the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the origins of the League of Nations's Mandates system.Footnote 13

One common focus of imperial histories of the war is on its once neglected African theatres. Since the late 1970s, a handful of Africanists, led by scholars like Melvin Page and David Killingray, have shown how the conflict over Germany's four African colonies – Togo, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa, and German East Africa – had profound effects across sub-Saharan Africa. These works have focused on recruitment, labour mobilization, disease and famine, uprisings such as in Nyasaland in 1915 and Mozambique in 1917, and the long-term political consequences of demobilization.Footnote 14 Debate continues about how the war shaped movements for self-determination, though claims that African veterans formed a principal source of anti-colonial resistance, at least in French colonies, have been challenged.Footnote 15 There also exists an extensive literature on the war's effects on the Black and white populations of South Africa, and, more recently, on North Africa and the Horn.Footnote 16 The work of Africanists is not always featured in general histories of the war, however, leaving discussion of Africa's war often limited to the operational aspects of the East African theatre, where the fighting was more extensive than elsewhere. As Michelle Moyd has argued, this means there is still a dearth of accounts of the war's history from the vantage point of the millions of Africans it directly involved or affected.Footnote 17

There is more scholarship on the experiences of colonial soldiers and labourers in the European and Ottoman theatres, especially the 500,000 soldiers from across the French empire –including North and West Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina – and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and workers employed by the British from India, Egypt, the Caribbean, and the Dominions, including significant numbers of indigenous peoples.Footnote 18 The scholarship on Indian soldiers and workers is particularly well developed, and there is growing work on the effects of military and labour recruitment within India as well.Footnote 19 Others have shown how labour mobilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India contributed to the outbreak of uprisings against British rule at war's end.Footnote 20 The simultaneous 1919 riots and strikes in Trinidad and Belize were also reactions to the strains of war, and involved returning soldiers from the British West Indies Regiment.Footnote 21

These studies complement literature on the racist panic unleashed by the unprecedented numbers of non-white and non-European people in wartime Europe. This is best known in the context of German outrage over the employment of African soldiers to occupy the Rhineland, a policy attacked by Hitler explicitly in Mein Kampf. But it was not only Nazis who objected to the prospect of non-white soldiers wielding deadly force against Europeans. Unlike the French, the British were reluctant to employ Black soldiers in combat roles in Europe. The fact that the French military incorporated African and African-American soldiers into roles mostly denied to them in other militaries contributed to a myth of ‘colour blind’ republicanism – at the same time that a wave of racist violence broke out against the many non-European workers in France.Footnote 22 The history of non-white workers in wartime Europe is not exclusively a story of colonial empire, however. They also included roughly 140,000 Chinese citizens, sent by the Republican government in lieu of soldiers, as part of a strategy to win Allied support for regaining territory occupied by the Japanese after the Germans were driven from Qingdao. The first book-length treatment of the Chinese labour corps in any language, which appeared in 2011, was one of several works by the Chinese historian Xu Guoqi exploring how the war intersected with Sino-Japanese conflict since the war of 1894–5.Footnote 23 This conflict reached a new pitch of intensity after the Japanese seizure of Shandong in 1914 and the promulgation of the Twenty-One Demands, which entailed humiliating violations of Chinese sovereignty.Footnote 24 The Chinese decision to join the Allied coalition alongside Japan made it one of several non-European countries with contested sovereignty that did so to shape the post-war settlement.Footnote 25

Germany's strategy of exacerbating regional tensions and inciting anti-colonial uprisings has also been another focus for scholarship of the war's global dimensions. This is best documented in the context of German attempts to encourage the Ottoman sultan to declare jihad against the Allied powers (though the domestic aspects of this decision have been increasingly emphasized against the claim that it was simply a German directive).Footnote 26 While revisiting the German ‘global strategy’ has been useful for showing the anti-colonial dimensions of the war, it can be extended further into exploring how formally sovereign neutral countries became sites of conflict as well.Footnote 27 In Iran, for example, German agents attempted to exploit anti-British and anti-Russian feelings that had grown since the arrival of occupying forces in 1911. The Iranian case has obvious similarities to that of Mexico, where the Germans sought to rally the revolutionary government of Carranza against the United States to keep Wilson from turning his attention to Europe (a strategy best remembered for the fiasco of the Zimmermann telegram). Like Iran, Mexico was a sovereign, oil-rich country that faced various forms of European and US informal imperialism and was invaded during the war. Both used their neutrality to play rivals off against each other to win concessions.Footnote 28 Investigating the war's legacies for this category of actor – the semi-sovereign, non-European neutral – can shed new light on how problems of self-determination at war's end were understood and contested. This is relevant for an expanding and increasingly globally focused historiography of the war's settlement, particularly in engagements with Erez Manela's highly influential concept of the ‘Wilsonian moment’.Footnote 29 New accounts of 1919 have looked at visions of international order that vied with Wilsonianism, particularly in East Asia, and an expanding literature on social movements, humanitarianism, and internationalism has become more global in focus, including recently, for example, in Mona Siegel's work on struggles for women's rights.Footnote 30

II

Considerably less work has been done, however, on the global political economic dimensions of the war. There is an irony here, since it is the terrain of the economic that most readily lends itself to the writing of a truly planetary history of the conflict. Most general economic histories of the war are focused on Europe and the United States, and on questions of industrial mobilization, the blockades, and war finance. These accounts sometimes include discussion of the Ottoman empire and Japan, but their focus is largely on the economics of the war in Europe and on US contributions to it.Footnote 31 General histories of the world economy, meanwhile, tend to describe the war as bringing a preceding period of globalization to an end, when the classical gold standard was suspended and a cascading suite of exchange and trade controls were erected in all of the belligerent countries.Footnote 32 Newer accounts have challenged such stark depictions of 1914 as a break with globalization.Footnote 33 They argue that the war – whose actual economic details are typically passed over quickly in larger narratives of deglobalization – did not put pre-existing integrating trends into full reverse, but instead led to reconfigurations of the world economy along new axes of power.Footnote 34 While there is little question that the total volume of global trade fell during and after the war, this did little to fundamentally transform the nature of global economic interdependence. This corrective has opened the way for new approaches to writing the global history of the war, focusing, in detail, on how the world economy actually functioned during the war and how it adapted and evolved after July 1914, looking at the war's uneven effects on economies and societies far beyond the battlefields.

What might a global economic history of the war look like, and what existing scholarship would it build from? Beginning with the domain of finance, there are various contexts to be explored outside the well-known topics of inter-Allied loans and the collapse of the gold standard. Compared to the many thousands of books on strategic decision-making during the July Crisis, for example, there are few studies of the financial crisis that broke out just after Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914. At most, there are two standalone books on this topic – one focused on the United States, the other on Britain.Footnote 35 But the crisis was profoundly global. It led to bank runs, stock exchange closures, and payment moratoria around the world, from Brazil to the Dutch East Indies to Australia. In South America, a liquidity crunch led to severe dislocations in urban and rural areas, resulting in depression-like conditions and fiscal crises.Footnote 36 A run on banks from Istanbul to Jerusalem was widely felt across the Ottoman economy.Footnote 37 The global financial crisis of 1914 and its effects on employment, production, agriculture, and political struggle awaits extensive historical treatment, as do the related liquidity and banking problems that persisted in many places after the war's outbreak, with far-reaching effects, including across Africa.

The war's economic effects were also globalized through the spread of price shocks, even into isolated rural pockets on opposite sides of the earth. In some places, severe inflation appeared early in the war, as the blockade cut off primary producing countries and colonies from continental European markets. Alongside shipping reductions, this led to a slump in their volume of imports and rising prices for many goods. The war's strains on shipping and supply chains pushed up costs of living in import-dependent countries and colonies around the world. In South Africa, consumer prices rose by over 15 per cent over the war.Footnote 38 In the Gold Coast, the effects were even more dramatic: as the cost of living rose around 50 per cent, wages did not keep pace, and the purchasing power of many workers collapsed.Footnote 39 In Brazil, rising costs of living led to widespread labour actions; in Trinidad, where wages similarly failed to keep up with rising prices, a mass strike broke out in 1919.Footnote 40 Serious wartime inflation has been documented throughout most of Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Ottoman empire, as well as in Iran, India, and Southeast Asia. What could we see if we joined these regional histories together, to make sense of what may have been, to this point, the most widely experienced single crisis in human history (one that was rivalled perhaps only by the contemporaneous influenza pandemic)?Footnote 41 Research on the war's inflationary effects can illuminate how such crises are transmitted through supply chain disruptions and reorient the scales of analysis applied to the war's history. Recently, Melvin Page has called for a ‘global microhistorical’ approach in a pathbreaking comparative study of rural communities in Nyasaland and western Kentucky, which – despite their countless differences – faced structurally similar crises of inflation and influenza.Footnote 42 Such global microhistories can show how the everyday life of non-combatants nearly everywhere was affected by shocks transmitted from afar.Footnote 43

Moving the focus of the war's economic history from industrial mobilization to primary production can also reveal other aspects of its global nature. Despite common reference to the fact that the belligerents drew on the resources of their colonial empires – and that the outcome of the war was, in great part, decided by Allied material supremacy – the war's impact on primary production in European colonies is still understudied. Again, the literature is best developed in the case of the French empire. But there are no trans-imperial economic histories of the war, or continent-wide accounts of the war's economic effects in Africa, for example.Footnote 44 The story of wartime primary production cannot be told exclusively through the colonial lens, moreover – not least because the contribution of colonial resources, at least in the French case, was concentrated overwhelmingly on foodstuffs, not on the many other goods needed for the war effort.Footnote 45 Histories of the mobilization of colonial producers must be situated alongside the history of producers in formally sovereign countries as well.

A small but vibrant literature has explored wartime primary production in Latin America – a region that for a long time sat outside the mainstream of the war's history, in large part because there was little direct conflict there and because the Latin American countries that did join the war made negligible contributions to Allied military campaigns.Footnote 46 Yet the war was a profound economic event in Latin America. Nationally focused studies on the war's effects, particularly on South American countries, took off at the turn of the 1970s, principally in the context of debates about dependency theory. The question was whether the war's rupturing of a European-centred world economy provided a fillip to development and a prelude to later methods of import-substitution-industrialization. The view that it did was challenged by numerous scholars in local and national case-studies claiming that the war, if anything, held back industrialization in many parts of the region.Footnote 47 In the case of Argentina, for example, Roger Gravil claimed that the war did little to break Argentina's dependence on external economic actors; instead, it worsened its terms of trade, led to falling real wages, and contributed, overall, to a decline of Argentina's national income.Footnote 48 The obvious long-term winner in the region was the United States, which over the war wrested markets from European competitors, gained territory, and exited the war ready to expand its commercial empire southwards.Footnote 49

The most comprehensive account of the war's effects on the political economies of Latin American countries remains Bill Albert's 1988 study of the ABC countries and Peru, which argued that the war had more negative than positive effects on industrialization, and that the exclusive focus on this debate had distracted from the uneven effects of the war on South American countries, which remained profoundly dependent on their pre-existing export trades and vulnerable to the interference of foreign powers in their domestic economies.Footnote 50 Albert's work remains a point of reference for a vibrant wave of newer work on Latin America's war.Footnote 51 While not all of it focuses directly on economic questions, this work has shed new light on the complex interplay of South American, US, European businesses and officials in the region. Just as it did in many places, the economic war involved intense struggle in Latin America between merchants, producers, bankers, and officials, which provide an exciting terrain for further study.Footnote 52

The war had seismic effects on production in many other regions. As in Latin America, the war's outbreak led to an immediate crisis in Africa, as the credit crunch coincided with the closure of continental European markets, leading to glut and falling prices for many export goods. In French West African colonies like Senegal, a pileup of unmarketable peanuts coincided with drought, famine, and the outbreak of smallpox and plague.Footnote 53 The collapse in exports and shipping bottlenecks led to a fall in imports and rising prices, and dried up the principal source of government revenue: customs and duties. In Nigeria, the loss of German export markets, where around 80 per cent of pre-war palm products had been sold, was catastrophic. Even as British demand for margarine and glycerin grew, palm prices in Nigeria stayed low, setting the stage for the outbreak of a series of uprisings.Footnote 54 The almost overnight disappearance of the German market – the largest for many West African producers – was almost certainly one of the most profound immediate consequences of the British blockade. But this fact is rarely mentioned in histories of the blockade that focus overwhelmingly on British strategy and German consumers.Footnote 55

Histories of the war told from the vantage point of primary production can shed light not only on the war's effects on regions outside Europe, but also illuminate connections and similarities between them. This provides a rationale for a kind of history that goes beyond an imperial or transnational framing to one that is more globally encompassing. In both colonial Africa and in Latin America, the impact of the war on producers, after the initial shock of the outbreak of the war and the inauguration of the blockade, depended on the perceived strategic importance of the commodity in question. Producers of what were deemed non-essential goods, like coffee, whether from Brazil or Kenya, suffered; others recovered more quickly.Footnote 56 In Chile, the negative shock of 1914 gave way by late 1915 to surging demand for copper and nitrate, the latter vital for the manufacture of explosives. Unlike the Germans, the Allies lacked a reliable method for fixing atmospheric nitrogen, leaving them dependent on sources from the Atacama desert, where nearly all of the world's natural nitrate was mined. In the case of commodities that were this important to the Allied war effort, complex interdependencies existed between manufacturing in Europe and the United States and the domestic political economy of commodity-exporting countries and colonies. In the case of Chile, the story of nitrate has been told in detail by historians Juan Ricardo Couyoumdjian and Michael Monteón. Similar studies for other goods can provide new perspectives on Allied strategy and diplomacy, as well as on labour histories of the war.Footnote 57 While a new wave of scholarship has reconsidered the experiences of workers from India, Egypt, and China, more is needed on the work of non-combatants, including women and children, involved in the production of export goods at home.Footnote 58

Histories of wartime raw material production in general present a clear opportunity for globalizing the war's history. Those that exist tend to focus on the strategic decision-making of the major belligerent countries regarding specific minerals like tungsten and manganese.Footnote 59 The literature is best developed in the US case, though most histories of US strategic raw material policy begin during the Second World War, not the First.Footnote 60 There is less work on this topic for Britain, despite the desperate attention given to raw material problems in London throughout the war and in its wake.Footnote 61 In the German case, Fischer's accounts of the German push into Ukraine and the Caucasus in pursuit of minerals has yet to be put into a broader account of the unfolding of the raw material strategies of the Central Powers.Footnote 62 Georges-Henri Soutou's magisterial L'Or et le sang stands out as one of the only studies of the economic dimensions of the war aims of all of the major belligerents and provides a framework for further research on the intersections of, and competition between, official strategy and business interests.Footnote 63 Histories of raw materials told from the perspective of consumers (in this case, governments and militaries) provides an incomplete picture without corresponding attention to producers.Footnote 64 One model for bridging these perspectives is offered in recent work on platinum in Colombia, which became the leading exporter of a mineral crucial for the manufacture of spark plugs and radar after the October Revolution in Russia.Footnote 65 Similar studies on the interplay between the raw material strategies of the Great Powers and the political economy of producers would be helpful for other goods, including copper, bauxite, mica, chromite, zinc, and nickel. Compared to the countless studies on the new technologies of the war – airplanes, tanks, and submarines – the wartime histories of the materials involved in their manufacture is less robust.

Two goods, in particular, stand out as potential sites for new scholarship: tin and rubber. One reason for the underdevelopment of their wartime histories is because the war's impact on British Malaya, a major producer of both, is rarely considered in accounts of the conflict's extra-European dimensions. In the case of tin, histories of Malayan mining tend to pass over the war years quickly, despite tin's importance to the manufacture of automotive components, munitions, and the cans from which Allied soldiers ate bully beef in the trenches.Footnote 66 In the case of rubber, there is no comprehensive account of its wartime history, despite its centrality to the manufacture of truck tyres and gas masks, and its rise to prominence after the war as one of the world's most sought-after strategic goods.Footnote 67 Reconsidering the wartime histories of resource-rich colonies like Malaya also can bring insight to a larger phenomenon yet to be put into a trans-imperial frame: the emergence of colonial government controls over the production, requisitioning, and export of primary goods.Footnote 68 In many places, the resource demands of the war transformed the economic powers of colonial government – a process that was, in certain respects, analogous to the corresponding expansion of state controls over industry and trade in Europe and the United States. One place where these new powers are being traced is in histories of wartime legal innovations, including the Trading with the Enemy Acts, which facilitated the expropriation of the property of enemy nationals in British and US territories, as well as in neutral countries.Footnote 69

Investigating raw materials like tin and rubber can also bring the wartime history of Southeast Asia more broadly into the picture – a region that, even more than Latin America, has traditionally received little attention in the war's histories. Recently, there has been a spate of work on Southeast Asia, focused primarily on German anti-British and -French activities and their interplay with local political developments, like the 1915 Singapore mutiny and the Ghadar movement, as well as on Indochinese soldiers and workers and the political legacies of their war experiences in Vietnam.Footnote 70 But the war's economic effects here are less well studied. One exception is Kees van Dijk's work on the Netherlands East Indies, which has shown how the war has similar economic consequences here as it did in Latin America and parts of Africa. The slump induced by the loss of German export markets in 1914 was alleviated as trade reoriented to new markets in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere, which allowed prices for tobacco, coffee, and tea to recover. But from late 1916, trade fell off again, largely due to shipping problems. As rice imports fell, food shortages and rising costs of living led to profound economic distress, setting the stage for a wave of strikes and growing nationalist resistance to Dutch rule.Footnote 71

While we still have much more to learn about the histories of what would soon become the leading Southeast Asian export commodities – tin and rubber – what is more surprising is the lack of a comprehensive study of oil during the war since the 1939 Erdöl im Weltkrieg by Ferdinand Friedensburg.Footnote 72 While the First World War is universally acknowledged in general histories of oil to have marked the beginning of its rise to global importance – as naval fleets abandoned coal, trucks replaced horses, and competition over Middle Eastern sources accelerated – an overarching account of the relationship between the emerging global oil economy and the waging of the First World War has yet to be written.Footnote 73

In the case of agricultural commodities, Avner Offer's pathbreaking 1989 study, The First World War: an agrarian interpretation – which linked the development of economic warfare to the emergence of a global agrarian economy on which Europe depended for food – remains canonical, at least for the treatment of grains and the British empire.Footnote 74 New work on wheat is adding more details to the picture. Nicolas Lambert has recently tied the British decision for the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 to rising food prices in the United Kingdom. One of the reasons for attacking Gallipoli, in his view, was to unblock an outlet for Russian grain. Lambert's approach is unique for focusing on how the war – far from unravelling a globalized trading system – was waged in ways that accounted for the constraints it placed on strategic decision-making.Footnote 75 Others have linked the blockade to questions of wartime grain supply in what is now a well-developed historiography on wartime food issues in Europe.Footnote 76 Not all food has been given the same attention, though. Research on meat offers a way to bring new light to the role of South American and African producers, the understudied technologies of the refrigerated ship and canning, and the war's effects on global animal populations.Footnote 77 A revealing example of the promise of this work is a recent study by Massimo Zaccaria showing how Italian demand for the meat products of a single Eritrean cannery nearly led to the eradication of the colony's livestock.Footnote 78 The wartime histories of non-comestible agricultural commodities, even those with well-developed literatures, is also ripe for further research. Wartime demand for sisal, for example, had important political ramifications from Mexico to East Africa. In Kenya, where production was dominated by settlers, the war facilitated their increasing economic dominance, as the value of coffee exports fell.Footnote 79 In Mexico, the establishment of a state monopoly pushed up prices for a good in high demand in the United States, leading business groups to lobby Washington to invade the Yucatán.Footnote 80 The case of sisal provides another example of how studying the wartime experience of a single commodity can link otherwise disparate sites into a shared interpretative frame.

Beyond illuminating connections between consumers and producers, studying wartime primary production has two further benefits. First, it lends itself to environmental studies of the war – a field in its early stages, but which has produced some of the most original work on the war's global dimensions. Production of war-related goods had profound ecological effects, leading to the despoilation of forests, rivers, and ecosystems.Footnote 81 Specific disease and weather events also affected production. In Brazil, for example, leaf blight caused by the Microcyclus ulei fungus took a heavy toll on wild rubber cultivation during the war.Footnote 82

Second, studying primary production during the war can help to reframe accounts of the evolution of the world economy after the ‘great specialization’ of the late nineteenth century, when a new global division of labour between manufacturers and producers of primary goods was entrenched.Footnote 83 It shows how the First World War was a crucial event in the global history of modern capitalism – though not because it led to an unravelling of an interconnected world economy. While many histories of commodity chains and primary producers have looked at prices and terms of trade over the long term, few consider in detail what actually happened to producers during the war. As scholars like Jeffrey Williamson have argued, one reason for the growing divergence in trajectories of economic growth between so-called core and periphery regions was the volatility of commodity prices from the late nineteenth century through the period of the world wars, which stymied long-term investment in places that relied on the export of primary goods.Footnote 84 Yet Williamson and other economic historians tend to describe the war and its aftermath as a period of ‘autarky’, thereby painting an overly stark depiction of 1914 as a break with the nineteenth-century world economy.Footnote 85 The First World War inaugurated a period of yet more dramatic fluctuations, as prices for most goods shot up precipitously in 1919 before crashing in the historic deflationary crisis of 1920–1. It delivered a brutal shock to a world economy that nonetheless remained highly integrated. While it provided a stimulus to industrialization in some places, nearly all of the countries and colonies that had been vulnerable to the volatility of prices for their export goods before 1914 remained so after 1918.Footnote 86

Deglobalization, if this is taken to mean a significant diminution of interdependence, was not an outcome of the war. This fact has been rightly emphasized in recent histories of shipping, particularly the work of Michael B. Miller, which have shown how the war, far from ushering in an era of autarky, encouraged adaptations of the infrastructures of exchange to meet its demands and reshaped global networks of merchants, shipping companies, and intermediaries, who emerged after 1918 ready to do business with new customers. In the case of shipping, in fact, the war clearly provided a fillip to the forces of integration, as once marginal national fleets expanded into new trading routes after its conclusion.Footnote 87 Wartime disruptions of shipping, moreover, did not make economies and societies that before the war depended on imports – including most of Europe's colonies – significantly more self-sufficient after its outbreak. Rather, these disruptions made their position of dependency far more painful, particularly for the working people and rural and urban poor forced to bear the costs of these disruptions in the form of rising prices, shortages, and famine. The war's conclusion saw nearly synchronized uprisings in many places that saw steep wartime increases in the costs of living – including Egypt, India, Belize, Trinidad, and Iraq – which were due, in large part, to disruptions to global supply chains and shipping.Footnote 88 These showed how much global interdependence under strain provided a material backdrop to new political movements of the immediate post-war, particularly those targeting foreign rule.

While the emerging global historiography of the First World War has transformed how the war is studied and taught, and affected how it is publicly commemorated as well, detailed research on its global political economy will bring further light to the profound transformations it had everywhere – ones that did not always neatly track the borders of empires.Footnote 89 The physical violence of the war, as catastrophic as it was, is rightly coming to be seen as a subset of a larger world crisis. Renewed attention to its material dimensions will bring this fact more clearly into view.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the helpful suggestions and comments of Mustafa Aksakal, Andrew Arsan, Katrina Forrester, Patrick Fridenson, David Painter, John Tutino, and two anonymous reviewers.

References

1 Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge history of the First World War (3 vols., Cambridge, 2014); 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin. Available at: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/home/. See also Oliver Janz, 14 – Der Große Krieg (Frankfurt, 2013); William Kelleher Story, The First World War: a concise global history (Lanham, MD, 2014); Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: a global history (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

2 It is telling that there have been far more edited volumes than monographs on the global war. See Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja, eds., The world in world wars: experiences, perceptions and perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden, 2010); Helmut Bley and Anorthe Kremers, eds., The world in the First World War (Mörlenbach, 2014); Maximilian Lakitsch, Susanne Reitmair-Juárez, and Katja Seidel, eds., Bellicose entanglements 1914: the Great War as a global war (Vienna, 2015); Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy, and Gearóid Barry, eds., 1916 in global context: an anti-imperial moment (Abingdon, 2018); Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt, eds., Revolutions and counter-revolutions: 1917 and its aftermath from a global perspective (Frankfurt, 2017); Ana Paula Pires, María Inés Tato, and Jan Schmidt, eds., The global First World War: African, East Asian, Latin American and Iberian mediators (Milton, 2021). Thomas W. Zeiler, David K. Ekbladh, and Benjamin C. Montoya, eds., Beyond 1917: the United States and the global legacies of the Great War (Oxford, 2017), focuses on US and to a lesser extent European foreign policy and internationalism.

3 Stevenson, David, ‘From Balkan conflict to global conflict: the spread of the First World War, 1914–1918’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 7 (2011), pp. 169–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Strachan, Hew, ‘The First World War as a global war’, First World War Studies, 1 (2010), pp. 3–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hew Strachan, The First World War, I: To arms (Oxford, 2001), pp. 694–819; Jenkins, Jennifer, Fischer's, ‘Fritz “Programme for Revolution”: implications for a global history of Germany in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2013), pp. 397–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 DeWitt C. Ellinwood and Satyendra Dev Pradhan, eds., India and World War 1 (New Delhi, 1978); Maurice Gontard, Madagascar pendant la première guerre mondiale (Tananarive, 1969).

7 Jacques Frémeaux, Les colonies dans la Grande Guerre: combats et épreuves des peuples d' Outre-mer (Paris, 2006); Marc Michel, L'appel à l'Afrique: contributions et réactions à l'effort de guerre en A.O.F. (1914–1919) (Paris, 1982).

8 On the imperial turn, see Andrew Tait Jarboe and Richard S. Fogarty, ‘Introduction: an imperial turn in First World War studies’, in Andrew Tait Jarboe and Richard S. Fogarty, eds., Empires in World War I: shifting frontiers and imperial dynamics in a global conflict (London, 2014), pp. 1–22; and Dónal Hassett, Mobilizing memory: the Great War and the language of politics in colonial Algeria, 1918–1939 (Oxford, 2019), especially pp. 1–15. For an earlier account, see John Morrow, Jr, The Great War: an imperial history (New York, NY, 2004).

9 Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at war, 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014), pp. 1–16, at p. 2.

10 Sean McMeekin, The Russian origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2011), p. 4.

11 Aksakal, Mustafa, ‘Perspectives on the Ottoman First World War’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14 (2014), pp. 334–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 334. See Aksakal's many other publications on the Ottoman war, most notably The Ottoman road to war in 1914: the Ottoman empire and the First World War (Cambridge, 2010). See also Leila Fawaz, A land of aching hearts: the Middle East in the Great War (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Eugene Rogan, The fall of the Ottomans: the Great War in the Middle East (New York, NY, 2015); Ryan Gingeras, Fall of the Sultanate: the Great War and the end of the Ottoman empire, 1908–1922 (Oxford, 2016). For a historiographical overview, see Kayalı, Hasan, ‘The Ottoman experience of World War I: historiographical problems and trends’, Journal of Modern History, 89 (2017), pp. 875–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Keith Jeffery, 1916: a global history (London, 2015); John Gallagher, The decline, revival and fall of the British empire (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 86–99. Relatedly, see Dal Lago, Healy, and Barry, eds., 1916 in global context.

13 See, respectively, Thomas Hauner, Branko Milanovic, and Suresh Naidu, ‘Inequality, foreign investment, and imperialism’, unpublished working paper, Stone Center Working Paper Series (2017); Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial apocalypse: the Great War and the destruction of the Russian empire (Oxford, 2014); Susan Pedersen, The guardians: the League of Nations and the crisis of empire (Oxford, 2015).

14 See the special issue of the Journal of African History, 19 (1978); Melvin E. Page, ed., Africa and the First World War (Basingstoke, 1987); Geoffrey Hodges, The Carrier Corps: military labour in the East African Campaign, 1914–1918 (New York, NY, 1986). More recently, see Melvin E. Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War (Boulder, CO, 2000); Timothy J. Stapleton, No insignificant part: the Rhodesia Native Regiment and the East Africa Campaign of the First World War (Waterloo, ON, 2006); Edward Paice, World War I: the African front (New York, NY, 2008); Anne Samson, World War I in Africa: the forgotten conflict among the European powers (London, 2012); Elizabeth Wrangham, Ghana during the First World War: the colonial administration of Sir Hugh Clifford (Durham, NC, 2013); Michelle Moyd, Violent intermediaries: African soldiers, conquest, and everyday colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH, 2014); Hew Strachan's The First World War in Africa (Oxford, 2004) is a standalone section of To arms with a new introduction.

15 See, especially, Fogarty, Richard S. and Killingray, David, ‘Demobilization in British and French Africa at the end of the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50 (2015), pp. 100–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an earlier view, see Mathews, James J., ‘World War I and the rise of African nationalism: Nigerian veterans as catalysts of political change’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 20 (1982), pp. 493–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Albert Grundlingh, Fighting their own war: South African Blacks and the First World War (Johannesburg, 1987); Bill Nasson, Springboks on the Somme: South Africa in the Great War 1914–1918 (Johannesburg, 2007); Mohamed Bekraoui, Les Marocains dans la Grande Guerre 1914–1919 (Rabat, 2009); Hassett, Mobilizing memory; Shiferaw Bekele, Uoldelul Chelati Dirar, Alessandro Volterra, and Massimo Zaccaria, eds., The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa (1911–1924) (Addis Ababa, 2018), DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cfee.1024.

17 Moyd, Michelle, ‘Centring a sideshow: local experiences of the First World War in Africa’, First World War Studies, 7 (2016), pp. 111–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Nasson, Bill, ‘More than just von Lettow-Vorbeck: sub-Saharan Africa in the First World War’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 40 (2014), pp. 160–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Charles J. Balesi, From adversaries to comrades-in-arms: West Africans and the French military, 1885–1918 (Waltham, MA, 1979); David Killingray, ‘All the king's men? Blacks in the British army in the First World War, 1914–1918’, in Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg, eds., Under the imperial carpet: essays in Black history, 1780–1950 (London, 1986), pp. 164–81; Robin Kilson, ‘Calling up the empire: the British military use of non-white labor in France, 1916–1920’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard, 1990); Myron Echenberg, Colonial conscripts: the Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH, 1991); Chantal Valensky, Le soldat occulté: les Malgaches de l'armée française, 1884–1920 (Paris, 1995); Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the maelstrom: a Senegalese oral history of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH, 1999); Gregory Mann, Native sons: West African veterans and France in the twentieth century (Durham, NC, 2006); John Connor, ‘The empire's war recalled: recent writing on the Western Front experience of Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 1123–45; Jacqueline Jenkinson, ‘“All in the same uniform”? The participation of Black colonial residents in the British armed forces in the First World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (2012), pp. 207–30; Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War (Cambridge, 2012).

19 David Omissi, ed., Indian voices of the Great War: soldiers’ letters, 1914–1918 (London, 1999); Gajendra Singh, ‘India and the Great War: colonial fantasies, anxieties and discontent’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14 (2014), pp. 343–61; George Morton Jack, The Indian army on the Western Front: India's expeditionary force to France and Belgium in the First World War (Cambridge, 2014); Santanu Das, India, empire, and First World War culture: writings, images, and songs (Cambridge, 2018); Kaushik Roy, ‘Race and recruitment in the Indian army: 1880–1918’, Modern Asian Studies, 47 (2013), pp. 1310–47; Robert Upton, ‘“It gives us a power and strength which we do not possess”: martiality, manliness, and India's Great War enlistment drive’, Modern Asian Studies, 52 (2018), pp. 1977–2012; Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, The First World War, anticolonialism and imperial authority in British India, 1914–1924 (Milton, 2019); Radhika Singha, The Coolie's Great War: Indian labour in a global conflict, 1914–1921 (Oxford, 2020).

20 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The logistics and politics of the British campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–1922 (Basingstoke, 2011).

21 Glenford Howe, Race, war, and nationalism: a social history of West Indians in the First World War (Kingston, 2002); Richard Smith, Jamaican volunteers in the First World War: race, masculinity, and the development of national consciousness (Manchester, 2004); Richard Smith, ‘Loss and longing: emotional responses to West Indian soldiers during the First World War’, The Round Table, 103 (2014), pp. 243–52; Dalea Bean, Jamaican women and the world wars: on the front lines of change (Cham, 2018); Anna Maguire, ‘“I felt like a man”: West Indian troops under fire during the First World War’, Slavery and Abolition, 39 (2018), pp. 602–21.

22 Tyler Stovall, ‘The color line behind the lines: racial violence in France during the Great War’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), pp. 737–69. See also Richard S. Fogarty, Race and war in France: colonial subjects in the French army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD, 2008); Chad Williams, Torchbearers of democracy: African American soldiers and the era of the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).

23 Xu Guoqi, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA, 2011). See also Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China's pursuit of a new national identity and internationalization (Cambridge, 2005); and Asia and the Great War: a shared history (Oxford, 2017).

24 Frederick R. Dickinson, War and national reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

25 David Stevenson, 1917: war, peace, and revolution (Oxford, 2017), pp. 273–98.

26 Aksakal, ‘Perspectives on the Ottoman First World War’, p. 337.

27 Jennifer Jenkins, Heike Liebau, and Larissa Schmid, ‘Transnationalism and insurrection: independence committees, anti-colonial networks, and Germany's Global War’, Journal of Global History, 15 (2020), pp. 61–79.

28 Friedrich Katz, The secret war in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago, IL, 1981); Touraj Atabaki, ed., Iran and the First World War (London, 2006).

29 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism (Oxford, 2007).

30 Urs Matthias Zachmann, ed., Asia after Versailles: Asian perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the interwar order, 1919–1933 (Edinburgh, 2017); Tosh Minohara and Evan Dawley, eds., Beyond Versailles: the 1919 moment and a New Order in East Asia (Lanham, MD, 2021); Mona L. Siegel, Peace on our terms: the global battle for women's rights after the First World War (New York, NY, 2020).

31 Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (London, 1977); Chris Wrigley, ed., The First World War and the international economy (Cheltenham, 2000); Hew Strachan, Financing the First World War (Oxford, 2004); Stephen N. Broadberry and Mark Harrison, The economics of World War I Cambridge (Cambridge, 2009); Stephen N. Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The economics of the Great War: a centennial perspective (London, 2018).

32 Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and history: the evolution of a nineteenth-century Atlantic economy (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke, Power and plenty: trade, war, and the world economy in the second millennium (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Strikwerda, Carl, ‘World War I in the history of globalization’, Historical Reflections, 42 (2016), pp. 112–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Philip Dehne, ‘The resilience of globalisation during the First World War: the case of Bunge and Born in Argentina’, in Christof Dejung and Niels P. Petersson, eds., The foundations of worldwide economic integration: power, institution, and global markets, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 228–48; Link, Stefan, ‘How might 21st-century de-globalization unfold? Some historical reflections’, New Global Studies, 12 (2018), pp. 343–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Zahra, Tara, ‘Against the world: the collapse of empire and the deglobalization of interwar Austria’, Austrian History Yearbook, 52 (2021), pp. 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Tooze, Adam and Fertik, Ted, ‘The world economy and the Great War’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 40 (2014), pp. 214–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further detailed work on how the world economy actually functioned on the global level is also needed for the Second World War.

35 Williams Silber, When Washington shut down Wall Street: the great financial crisis of 1914 and the origins of America's monetary supremacy (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Richard Roberts, Saving the city: the great financial crisis of 1914 (Oxford, 2013).

36 See, for example, Marcelo de Paiva Abreu et al., A ordem do progresso: cem anos de política econômica republicana 1889–1989 (Rio de Janeiro, 1990), pp. 41–3.

37 Zachary A. Foster, ‘Why are modern famines so deadly? The First World War in Syria and Palestine’, in Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid, eds., Environmental histories of the First World War (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 191–208, at pp. 205–6.

38 Albert Grundlingh, ‘The impact of the First World War on South African Blacks’, in Page, ed., Africa and the First World War, pp. 54–80, at p. 73; Gibbs, Pat, ‘Empire, dissidence and disease: the impact of the First World War on the Molteno district of the Eastern Cape, 1914–1919’, Britain and the World, 13 (2020), pp. 126–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 144.

39 David Killingray, ‘Repercussions of World War I in the Gold Coast’, Journal of African History, 19 (1978), pp. 39–59.

40 Winston Fritsch, External constraints on economic policy in Brazil, 1889–1930 (Basingtoke, 1988); Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘“Whenever society is in travail liberty is born”: the mass strike of 1919 in colonial Trinidad’, in Stefano Bellucci and Holger Weiss, eds., The internationalisation of the labour question: ideological antagonism, workers' movements and the ILO since 1919 (Cham, 2020), pp. 215–34.

41 See also Tooze and Fertik, ‘The world economy and the Great War’, pp. 222–5. For a regional account of inflation, see L. Schatkowski Schilcher, ‘The famine of 1915–1918 in Greater Syria’, in John Spagnolo, ed., Problems of the modern Middle East in historical perspective: essays in honour of Albert Hourani (Reading, 1996), pp. 229–58. On inflation in 1919, see Adam Tooze, The deluge: the Great War and the remaking of global order (London, 2014), pp. 353–73.

42 Melvin Page, ‘Up from the farm: a global microhistory of rural Americans and Africans in the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 16 (2021), pp. 101–21.

43 See, for example, Pascual y Diego Roldán, ‘La Gran Guerra y sus impactos locales: Rosario, Argentina, 1914–1920’, Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, 42 (2015), pp. 75–101.

44 Karin Pallaver's entries in 1914–1918-online are unique in their comprehensive regional scope. See Pallaver, ‘War and colonial finance (Africa)’, in: 1914–1918-online, ed. Daniel, Gatrell, Janz, Jones, Keene, Kramer, and Nasson, 2015-09-24, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10733, and ‘Organization of war economies (Africa)’, 2015-09-17, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10727. See also the special issue of afriche e orienti, 21, 3 (2019), edited by Pallaver and Massimo Zaccaria.

45 Frémeaux Les colonies dans la Grande Guerre, pp. 87–8; Richard Fogarty, ‘French empire’, in Gerwarth and Manela, eds., Empires at war, at p. 112.

46 On the absence of the war from Latin American historiography, see Oliver Compagnon, ‘1914–1918: the death throes of civilization: the elites of Latin America face the Great War’, in Jenny McLeod and Pierre Purseigle, eds., Uncovered fields: perspectives in First World War studies (Leiden, 2004). For a national study, see Ricardo Weinmann, Argentina en la Primera Guerra Mundial: neutralidad, transición política y continuismo económico (Buenos Aires, 1994).

47 See, for example, Warren Dean, The industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin, TX, 1969), pp. 83–104.

48 Roger Gravil, The Anglo-Argentine connection, 1900–1939 (Boulder, CO, 1985), pp. 111–51. For reconsideration of Brazilian industry, see Ted Fertik and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, ‘La Première Guerre Mondiale et la restructuration des entreprises dans le monde’, in Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, Patrick Fridenson, Florence Descamps, and Laure Quennouëlle-Corre, eds., La rupture? La Grande Guerre, l'Europe et le XXe siècle (Paris, 2021), pp. 61–91.

49 Emily S. Rosenberg, World War I and the growth of the United States predominance in Latin America (New York, NY, 1987).

50 Bill Albert, South America and the First World War: the impact of the war on Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile (Cambridge, 1988).

51 Olivier Compagnon, L'adieu à l'Europe: l'Amérique Latine et la Grande Guerre (Argentine et Brésil, 1914–1939) (Paris, 2013); Ramón Tarruella, 1914: Argentina y la Primera Guerra Mundial (Buenos Aires, 2014); Stefan Rinke, Latin America and the First World War (Cambridge, 2017). For historiographical overviews, see the issues of Iberoamericana, 53 (2014), and Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, 42 (2015).

52 See especially Philip Dehne, On the far Western Front: Britain's First World War in South America (Manchester, 2009).

53 Michel, L'appel à l'Afrique, pp. 152–64.

54 Michael Crowder, ‘The First World War and its consequences’, in A. Adu Boahen, ed., Africa under colonial domination, 1880–1935 (London, 1985), p. 137. See also Akinjide Osuntokun, Nigeria in the First World War (London, 1979), pp. 21–63; Peter J. Yearwood, ‘The expatriate firms and the colonial economy of Nigeria in the First World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), pp. 49–71.

55 See, for example, Eric W. Osborne, Britain's economic blockade of Germany, 1914–1919 (London, 2004). On similar problems during the Second World War, see Jamie Martin, ‘The global crisis of commodity glut during the Second World War’, International History Review (2021): DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2020.1871053.

56 On Gold Coast cocoa, see Wrangham, Ghana during the First World War.

57 Michael Monteón, Chile in the nitrate era: the evolution of economic dependence, 1880–1930 (Madison, WI, 1982); J. R. Couyoumdjian, Chile y Gran Bretaña durante la Primera Guerra Mundial y la postguerra, 1914–1921 (Santiago, 1986). On inter-Allied controls of nitrate, see also Jamie Martin, The meddlers: sovereignty, empire, and the birth of global economic governance (Cambridge, MA, forthcoming 2022), ch. 1.

58 On this point, see Singha, The Coolie's Great War, p. 19.

59 Ronald Limbaugh, Tungsten in war and peace, 1918–1946 (Reno, NV, 2010); Tyler Priest, Global gambits: big steel and the U.S. quest for manganese (Westport, CT, 2003).

60 On US global mineral strategy, mostly after the First World War, see Jonathan Marshall, To have and have not: Southeast Asian raw materials and the origins of the Pacific war (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Meghan Black, The global interior: mineral frontiers and American power (Cambridge, MA, 2018). The most thorough account of mineral policy during the First World War remains a short chapter in Alfred E. Eckes, Jr, The United States and the global struggle for minerals (Austin, TX, 1979), pp. 3–25. For accounts written by those involved, see Bernard Baruch, American industry in the war: a report of the War Industries Board (Washington, DC, 1921); and Grosvenor Clarkson, Industrial America in the world war: the strategy behind the line, 1917–1918 (Boston, MA, 1923).

61 For brief discussion, see Roy MacLeod, ‘“The mineral sanction”: the Great War and the strategic role of natural resources’, in Tucker, Keller, McNeill, and Schmid, eds., Environmental histories, pp. 99–116. See also Roger Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis, Arming the Western Front: war, business and the state in Britain, 1900–1920 (London, 2017).

62 See Alison Frank, Oil empire: visions of prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 173–204.

63 Georges-Henri Soutou, L'Or et le sang: les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris, 1989). For new business histories, see, for example, Máté Rigó, ‘The Long First World War and the survival of business elites in East-Central Europe: Transylvania's industrial boom and the enrichment of economic elites’, European Review of History, 24 (2017), pp. 250–72.

64 See also David Edgerton, ‘Elements of a new global history of twentieth-century production’, unpublished working paper.

65 Claudia Leal León, ‘La Compañía Minera Chocó Pacífico y el euge del plantino en Colombia, 1897–1930’, Historia Crítica, 39 (2009): www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0121-16172009000400009; Jane M. Rausch, Colombia and World War I: the experience of a neutral Latin American nation during the Great War and its aftermath, 1914–1921 (Lanham, MD, 2014), pp. 54–5, 72.

66 See, for example, Yip Yat Hoong, The development of the tin mining industry of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, 1969). On Bolivian tin, see M. E. Contreras, ‘La minería estañífera boliviana en la Primera Guerra Mundial’, in Minería y economía en Bolivia (La Paz, 1984).

67 For context, see J. H. Drabble's Rubber in Malaya, 1876–1922: the genesis of the industry (Kuala Lumpur, 1973), pp. 123–55.

68 Nicholas J. White, ‘Gentlemanly capitalism and empire in the twentieth century: the forgotten case of Malaya 1914–1965’, in Raymond E. Dumett, ed., Gentlemanly capitalism and British imperialism: the new debate on empire (New York, NY, 1999), pp. 175–95.

69 See, especially, Nicholas Mulder, ‘The Trading with the Enemy Acts in the age of expropriation, 1914–1949’, Journal of Global History, 15 (2020), pp. 81–99. See also Benjamin Coats, ‘The secret life of statutes: a century of the trading with the Enemy Act’, Modern American History, 1 (2018), pp. 151–72; Daniela L. Caglioti, War and citizenship: enemy aliens and national belonging from the French Revolution to the First World War (Cambridge, 2020).

70 This is the focus of what may be the only English-language book offering a comprehensive regional account of wartime Southeast Asia: Heather Streets-Salter's World War One in Southeast Asia: colonialism and anticolonialism in an era of global conflict (Cambridge, 2017). See also Kimloan Vu-Hill, Coolies into rebels: impact of World War I on French Indochina (Paris, 2011); and Harper, Tim, ‘Singapore, 1915, and the birth of the Asian underground’, Modern Asian Studies, 47 (2013), pp. 1782–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Kees van Dijk, The Netherlands Indies and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Leiden, 2007).

72 Ferdinand Friedensburg, Das Erdöl im Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1939). I am grateful to David Painter for bringing this point to my attention.

73 For an influential overview, see Daniel Yergin, The prize: the epic quest for oil, money and power (New York, NY, 1991), pp. 151–67. On aspects of oil's wartime history, see W. G. Jensen, ‘The importance of energy in the First and Second World Wars’, Historical Journal, 11 (1968), pp. 538–54; Frank, Oil empire, pp. 173–204; Anand Toprani, Oil and the Great Powers: Britain and Germany, 1914 to 1945 (Oxford, 2019), pp. 25–59, 137–68; Ediger, Volkan and Bowlus, John, ‘A farewell to king coal: geopolitics, energy security, and the transition to oil, 1898–1917’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), pp. 427–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Avner Offer, The First World War: an agrarian interpretation (Oxford, 1989).

75 Nicolas A. Lambert, The war lords and the Gallipoli disaster: how globalized trade led Britain to its worst defeat of the First World War (Oxford, 2021).

76 Most recently, see Mary Elisabeth Cox, Hunger in war & peace: women and children in Germany, 1914–1924 (Oxford, 2019).

77 On South American meat, see Dehne, Philip, ‘How important was Latin America to the First World War?’ Iberoamericana, 14 (2014), pp. 151–64Google Scholar.

78 Massimo Zaccaria, ‘Feeding the war: canned meat production in the Horn of Africa and the Italian Front’, in Bekele, Dirar, Volterra, and Zaccaria, eds., The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa.

79 Overton, John, ‘War and economic development: settlers in Kenya, 1914–1918’, Journal of African History, 27 (1986), pp. 79–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Katz, The secret war in Mexico, p. 502. See also John Tutino, The Mexican heartland: how communities shaped capitalism, a nation, and world history, 1500–2000 (Princeton, NJ, 2017), pp. 294–317.

81 See, above all, Tucker, Keller, McNeill, and Schmid, eds., Environmental histories; and Keller, Tait, ‘The ecological edges of belligerency: toward a global environmental history of the First World War’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 71 (2016), pp. 61–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On deforestation, see also McNeill, J. R., ‘Woods and warfare’, Environmental History, 9 (2004), pp. 388–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially pp. 398–9; and Chris Gratien and Graham Auman Pitts, ‘Towards an environmental history of the First World War: human and natural disasters in the Ottoman Mediterranean’, in Bley and Kremers, eds., The world in the First World War. See also Corey Ross, Ecology and power in the age of empire: Europe and the transformation of the tropical world (Oxford, 2017).

82 Warren Dean, Brazil and the struggle for rubber: a study in environmental history (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 67–86.

83 Findlay and O'Rourke, Power and plenty, pp. 365–428.

84 Jeffrey G. Willamson, Trade and poverty: when the Third World fell behind (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

85 David S. Jacks, Kevin H. O'Rourke, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Commodity price volatility and world market integration since 1700’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 93 (2011), pp. 800–13.

86 See, for example, Victor Bulmer-Thomas, ‘Post-war economies (Latin America)’, in: 1914–1918-online, ed. Daniel, Gatrell, Janz, Jones, Keene, Kramer, and Nasson, 2014-10-08, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10365. For a path-breaking recent account, see Mark Metzler, ‘The correlation of crises, 1918–1920’, in Zachmann, ed., Asia after Versailles, pp. 23–54.

87 Michael B. Miller, Europe and the maritime world: a twentieth-century history (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 213–44. See also Gelina Harlaftis, Creating global shipping: Aristotle Onassis, the Vagliano Brothers, and the business of shipping, c. 1820–1970 (Cambridge, 2019).

88 On the political effects on the cost-of-living crisis in Africa, see Yoshikuni, Tsuneo, ‘Strike action and self-help associations: Zimbabwean worker protest and culture after World War I’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15 (1989), pp. 440–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rashid, Ismail, ‘Epidemics and resistance in colonial Sierra Leone during the First World War’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 45 (2011), pp. 415–39Google Scholar.

89 On commemoration, see Isabella Kwai, ‘Fallen British empire soldiers were overlooked because of racism, inquiry finds’, New York Times, 22 Apr. 2021.