A EUROPEAN QUARREL SETS THE GLOBE ALIGHT

On the morning of 3 August 1914 the crisis was a quarrel among European powers over Serbia and Belgium. Within weeks it was being fought in West Africa, the Pacific and the Yellow Sea. The reason lay in the way the continent had arranged itself over the previous forty years.

Empires at war

By 1914 European states, and their offshoots, ruled most of the globe. The British Empire alone covered about a quarter of the world's land and held about a quarter of its people; France ruled the second-largest empire; Germany, a latecomer to the scramble of the 1880s, held colonies in Africa, China and the Pacific; Belgium held the Congo, and Portugal Angola and Mozambique. When King George V declared war on 4 August, the declaration bound the whole empire. India and the Crown colonies were at war automatically; the self-governing dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland) were formally at war too, though each decided for itself how much to send.

The German colonies were small, scattered and almost indefensible. Their garrisons were tiny colonial police and native Schutztruppe forces, and no German fleet could reach them. The British Admiralty's first request to the Dominions was therefore not for armies but for expeditions to seize the German wireless stations at Kamina in Togoland, Windhoek in South West Africa, Rabaul in New Guinea, Apia in Samoa and Tsingtao in China. Wireless was how German cruisers on the open ocean were directed and supplied, and without it their commerce raiders would be blind.

The sea lanes

The world economy of 1914 depended on ships, and the Royal Navy ruled the sea lanes. German cruisers, among them the Emden in the Indian Ocean, the Königsberg off East Africa and Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron in the Pacific, were a threat to British shipping, and a campaign to hunt them down spread the war to every ocean (see chapter XI). The sea battles of Coronel off Chile on 1 November 1914 and of the Falkland Islands on 8 December were fought on the far side of the planet from the quarrel that caused them.

Japan and the Ottomans

Two non-European powers made the choices that turned the war global. Japan, bound to Britain by an alliance first signed in 1902, saw its opportunity to remove Germany from China's Shandong peninsula and the Pacific islands. On 15 August 1914 it issued an ultimatum demanding that Germany hand over the port of Tsingtao; it declared war on 23 August. The Ottoman Empire made a different choice for different reasons: its leaders, chiefly Enver Pasha, feared Russian designs, resented decades of European interference and hoped that a German alliance would restore their power. A secret treaty was signed on 2 August 1914; the German warships Goeben and Breslau reached Constantinople (Istanbul) on 10 August and were nominally "sold" to the Ottomans; and on 29 October they bombarded Russia's Black Sea ports. On 14 November, in Constantinople, the Sultan-Caliph proclaimed a holy war, a jihad, against the Entente. Germany hoped it would raise Muslims in British India, Egypt and French North Africa against their rulers, and even built a mosque at the "Half Moon Camp" in Wünsdorf, near Berlin, for Muslim prisoners of war. The great Muslim uprising never came, but the call forced Britain and France to garrison the Middle East and North Africa heavily.

By 1918 about 30 states were at war, and fighting had touched every continent except Antarctica. The rest of this chapter follows the war outward from Europe, one theater at a time.

Germany's colonies in West and South West Africa fell to the Allies and the South African Union in the first two years of the war. The fighting was small by European standards, but it decided who would rule these lands for the next half century.

Togoland: the first shot

The smallest German colony in Africa was also the first to go. On 7 August 1914, near Nuatja (Notsé), a Gold Coast Regiment patrol came under fire from a German-led police force, and Regimental Sergeant Major Alhaji Grunshi returned fire, becoming, by the army's own record, the first soldier in British service to fire a shot in the war. The acting governor, Major Hans-Georg von Doering, had no hope of holding the colony against British forces from the Gold Coast and French forces from Dahomey. He fell back on Kamina, where the powerful wireless station linked Berlin with Germany's colonies and ships. After a battle at the Chra river on 21–23 August, Doering ordered the station blown up on the night of 24–25 August and surrendered on 26 August 1914. Each side lost a few dozen men. Togoland was divided between Britain and France, and became a League of Nations mandate in 1922.

Kamerun: a long campaign

Kamerun (Cameroon) was a larger prize and a harder fight. British forces from Nigeria, French forces from Equatorial Africa and Belgians from the Congo invaded from several sides. A naval and land operation seized the main port of Duala on 27 September 1914. The German commander, Carl Zimmermann, withdrew inland to the highlands, where thick forest, heavy rains and malaria hindered the Allies as much as the defenders. The Allies, commanded by the British Brigadier General Charles Dobell and the French General Joseph Aymerich, took the interior capital Yaoundé on 1 January 1916. Several thousand people, among them about 1,000 Germans, fled with their African soldiers, families and carriers over the border into Spanish Río Muni in early 1916; the Germans were interned in Spain. The last German stronghold, the fort on Mora mountain in the far north, held out until 18 February 1916. Cameroon, like Togoland, was divided between Britain and France.

South West Africa and the Boer rebellion

South Africa, a nation formed only in 1910, had barely a decade earlier fought a savage war against Britain. When London asked Pretoria in August 1914 to seize the German wireless stations in South West Africa, the Prime Minister Louis Botha and his Defence Minister Jan Smuts, both former Boer generals, agreed. Many Afrikaners were furious at being asked to fight for Britain against a country that had sympathized with the Boers. A South African column suffered a defeat at Sandfontein on 26 September 1914. Then the commander of the border forces, Lieutenant Colonel Manie Maritz, went over to the Germans on 9 October. The old Boer general Christiaan de Wet and the former commandant-general Christiaan Beyers took up arms. In all, perhaps 11,000 Afrikaners rebelled, against many more loyal troops, most of them also Afrikaners. Botha personally led the government commandos and crushed the rebellion by early 1915; de Wet was captured in December 1914, and one rebel officer, Jopie Fourie, was executed, becoming a martyr in Afrikaner memory. The rebellion left scars in Afrikaner politics that lasted for generations.

With the rebellion over, Botha landed at Walvis Bay and Swakopmund in the north while Smuts advanced from the south. Outnumbered, the Germans retreated into the interior, and Windhoek fell on 12 May 1915. The German governor surrendered at Khorab, near Otavi, on 9 July 1915. Both Africans and whites worked and fought for the Union; non-white South Africans were officially barred from bearing arms and served as laborers and drivers. South West Africa became a South African mandate in 1920, and Namibia achieved independence only in 1990.

The longest campaign of the war was fought in German East Africa (now Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi) between August 1914 and November 1918, and was in large part the achievement of a single man.

Tanga: the battle of the bees

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a Prussian officer who had arrived in the colony in January 1914, took command of about 260 Germans and 2,500 African askari. The governor, Heinrich Schnee, wanted to keep the colony neutral; Lettow-Vorbeck wanted to tie down as many British troops as possible, and the two clashed throughout the war. The British decided to take the northern port of Tanga with a force of Indian Army troops, Expeditionary Force B under Major General Arthur Aitken, about 8,000 men. The landing on 2–3 November 1914 was badly bungled: the troops were put ashore in poor order, unaware of the enemy's position, and attacked through mangrove swamp and coconut plantations into the fire of Lettow-Vorbeck's reinforcements, who arrived by railway. Swarms of angry bees, disturbed by the shooting, attacked soldiers on both sides. The British re-embarked on 5 November, leaving behind hundreds of casualties and a great deal of equipment that Lettow-Vorbeck's askari put to use. The Tanga fiasco, which the British official history called one of the most notable failures in British military history, convinced the British that East Africa could not be taken cheaply.

Königsberg, Lake Tanganyika, and Smuts

Meanwhile the German cruiser Königsberg, hiding in the maze of the Rufiji delta, was bottled up by the Royal Navy and finally destroyed by British monitors in July 1915. Her crew and guns were taken inland to strengthen Lettow-Vorbeck's army. On Lake Tanganyika, the British adventurer Geoffrey Spicer-Simson took two motorboats, Mimi and Toutou, from Britain by sea to South Africa and then thousands of miles by rail, river and bush to Lake Tanganyika, where in 1915–16 they captured one German steamer and sank another, an exploit said to have inspired C. S. Forester's The African Queen. In February 1916 General Jan Smuts, fresh from South West Africa, took command of a large multinational Allied army, including South Africans, Indians, Nigerians, Gold Coast troops, King's African Rifles, Belgians from the Congo and Portuguese. His columns advanced from the north, west and south. Dar es Salaam fell on 4 September 1916, and the Belgians took Tabora on 19 September. Lettow-Vorbeck, however, refused to fight a pitched battle and melted into the bush.

The long retreat

Smuts, declaring the campaign effectively won, went to London in January 1917, and his successor Jacob van Deventer inherited a war that had barely begun. At Mahiwa in October 1917 Lettow-Vorbeck inflicted some 2,700 casualties on a British force while losing around 500 men himself. He then marched south into Portuguese Mozambique, living off the land and captured stores, and in 1918 swung back north into Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). On 25 November 1918, at Abercorn, he surrendered, having learned of the armistice only days earlier. He still commanded about 150 Europeans and over 1,100 askari, along with porters. The most successful guerrilla commander of the war had never been defeated in battle.

The price paid by Africans

The East African campaign was fought by armies that could not live off the land and could not use pack animals, since the tsetse fly killed horses and mules. Everything had to be carried on the heads of men. The British Carrier Corps and its equivalents recruited more than a million porters in all, some willingly, many by pressure of chiefs and officials; estimates of how many died run to roughly 90,000 to 100,000 (Edward Paice gives at least 95,000), mostly of disease, exhaustion and hunger rather than combat. Beyond that, requisitions, burned granaries and disrupted harvests brought famine to civilian populations, and some estimates put the total of African civilian deaths from war-related hunger and disease in the region at 300,000 or more. Neither Germany nor Britain kept accurate figures. The numbers are among the most contested in the war, and it was African, not European, lives that paid most of the price.

The war in Asia and the Pacific was fought by sailors, soldiers from the dominions and above all Japan, whose ambitions grew with every German outpost it took.

Japan takes Tsingtao

The German leased territory of Kiautschou, with its naval base at Tsingtao (Qingdao), had been taken from China in 1898. Its governor, Captain Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, had about 3,600 defenders. Japan's ultimatum of 15 August 1914 demanded the base's surrender, supposedly with a view to returning it to China; when Germany did not reply, Japan declared war on 23 August. About 23,000 Japanese troops, with 1,500 British soldiers (the 2nd South Wales Borderers and a detachment of the 36th Sikhs), began the siege on 27 August. The Japanese landed on the north shore on 2 September and advanced slowly in the rain, then dug the kind of siege works familiar from the Russo-Japanese War, bringing up heavy howitzers. The bombardment began on 31 October, and the Germans surrendered on 7 November 1914. Japan lost more than 700 killed; the Germans about 200. Several thousand German prisoners were shipped to Japan, where they were held in camps until 1920; at Bandō in 1918 they gave what is regarded as the first complete Japanese performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

The islands

In the Pacific, the dominions did Britain's bidding. New Zealand's expeditionary force occupied German Samoa on 29–30 August 1914 without a shot. Australia's Naval and Military Expeditionary Force landed near Rabaul in German New Guinea on 11 September and fought a sharp action at Bita Paka against German-led Melanesian police, in which seven Australians and about 30 of the defenders were killed; the German governor surrendered on 17 September. On 14 September the Royal Australian Navy lost its submarine AE1 with all hands off New Guinea; the wreck was found only in 2017. Australia took Nauru on 6 November. Japan meanwhile occupied Germany's islands north of the equator, the Marianas (except American Guam), Carolines and Marshalls, in October 1914, a conquest that Britain accepted and that would be confirmed by mandates after the war.

The Emden

Karl von Müller's light cruiser SMS Emden detached from Admiral Spee's squadron in August 1914 and for three months terrorized the Indian Ocean. She sank or captured 17 merchant ships, shelled the oil tanks at Madras on 22 September, and on 28 October sank a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer in the harbor of Penang. Her gentlemanly conduct towards captured crews made Müller a legend. On 9 November 1914 she attacked the cable station on North Keeling in the Cocos Islands and was caught and destroyed by the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney; about 130 of her crew died. A landing party under Lieutenant Hellmuth von Mücke escaped in a sailing schooner, reached Arabia, and made its way overland to Constantinople.

China and the Twenty-One Demands

Japan's real ambitions were on the mainland. On 18 January 1915 its minister in Beijing presented the Chinese President Yuan Shikai with twenty-one demands in five groups. Group I would transfer Germany's Shandong rights to Japan; Group II would extend Japanese leases in southern Manchuria and Inner Mongolia to 99 years; Group III would give Japan a stake in China's largest iron and coal complex; Group IV barred China from ceding any coast or island to a third power; and Group V, which Japan called "wishes", would place Japanese advisers in the Chinese government, police and armies, effectively making China a protectorate. When news leaked, Britain and the United States protested, and Japan dropped Group V. On 7 May 1915 it delivered an ultimatum on the rest; China gave in on 9 May and signed the treaties on 25 May. The date was commemorated for decades as a "national humiliation day", and the episode launched a boycott of Japanese goods and a surge of Chinese nationalism.

China itself entered the war on the Allied side on 14 August 1917, hoping to win a place at the peace table. It sent no combat troops but, as described below, sent some 140,000 laborers to Europe. Japan sent destroyers to the Mediterranean in 1917 to escort Allied troopships, and in 1918 sent far more troops to Siberia than agreed, as part of the intervention against the Bolsheviks.

The Ottoman Empire fought four years on more fronts than any other combatant. Gallipoli is covered in chapter IV; here are the others, from the snows of the Caucasus to the sands of Sinai.

The Caucasus: Sarikamish to Trebizond

The war on the Russo-Turkish frontier opened with a catastrophe. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war, personally planned an encirclement of the Russian army at Sarikamish (Sarıkamış) in December 1914. He sent the Third Army up icy mountain passes in midwinter in light clothing. Frostbite and typhus did more damage than the Russians: from 22 December 1914 to 17 January 1915 the army lost most of its strength, with estimates running to 60,000 or more dead. The Russians, under General Nikolai Yudenich, then went onto the offensive, taking Erzurum on 16 February 1916 and Trebizond (Trabzon) on 18 April after an amphibious operation. This campaign was the backdrop to the Armenian genocide of 1915 (see chapter IV). When Russia collapsed in 1917 the front dissolved. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 returned Kars, Ardahan and Batum to the Ottomans, who occupied Baku on 15 September 1918, shortly before their own collapse.

Mesopotamia: from Basra to Kut to Baghdad

An Indian Army expedition landed at Fao, at the head of the Persian Gulf, in November 1914 to protect the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's refinery at Abadan, in which the British government had bought a controlling stake only months earlier in order to fuel the Royal Navy. Basra fell on 22 November 1914. Tempted onwards, the British advanced up the Tigris under General Charles Townshend, and were stopped at Ctesiphon in November 1915. Townshend fell back to Kut-al-Amara, where the Ottomans besieged him from 7 December 1915. Repeated relief attempts cost tens of thousands of casualties in the floods and mud of the Tigris valley. On 29 April 1916, after 147 days, Townshend surrendered with about 13,000 men, the biggest British capitulation since Yorktown. The prisoners were marched hundreds of miles to Anatolia, and thousands died. The British reorganized under General Stanley Maude, who methodically advanced with Indian divisions and river steamers and took Baghdad on 11 March 1917. Maude died of cholera in November; British troops took Mosul only after the armistice.

Sinai and Palestine

An Ottoman force tried to cross the Suez Canal on 3 February 1915 and was repulsed. In 1916 the British, with Anzac mounted troops and a railway and water pipeline built across the desert, drove the Ottomans back across Sinai, winning at Romani on 3–5 August. Gaza resisted two attacks in March and April 1917. Under a new commander, General Sir Edmund Allenby, the British took Beersheba on 31 October 1917, in a charge by the Australian Light Horse, then Gaza, and Jerusalem, which surrendered on 9 December; Allenby entered the city on foot two days later. At Megiddo, 19–25 September 1918, a surprise attack shattered the Ottoman armies, and the cavalry took Damascus on 1 October.

The Arab Revolt

On 10 June 1916 Sharif Hussein of Mecca, whom the British had promised support, proclaimed a revolt against Ottoman rule. His sons Faisal and Abdullah led tribal forces, advised by a young British officer, T. E. Lawrence. They avoided set-piece battles, but raiding the Hejaz Railway tied down tens of thousands of Ottoman troops. On 6 July 1917 they took the Red Sea port of Aqaba by an overland attack from the desert side. Arab forces reached Damascus alongside Allenby's Australian cavalry.

Persia: neutral and ravaged

Persia declared neutrality in 1914, which nobody respected. Russia, which already had troops in the north, and Britain, which held the south and the oil, fought the Ottomans, German agents and local tribes there. Germany's agents, notably Wilhelm Wassmuss, stirred up tribes in the south, and Britain raised its own South Persia Rifles in 1916. The war, plus requisitioning and crop failures, brought famine in 1917–1919 that killed a very large number of Persians; most estimates are around 2 million, a far higher figure of 8 to 10 million has been proposed but is not widely accepted, and the toll remains contested.

The belligerents' colonial subjects fought and labored in numbers that astonished contemporaries. In France alone, by 1918, men from four continents served in the Allied armies and labor corps. For most of them it was a war they had not chosen, fought in climates and landscapes they had never imagined.

India

The Indian Army was the largest volunteer army in the world. About 1.3 million Indians volunteered for the army or for non-combatant service by 1918, and more than a million served overseas, the biggest commitment being in Mesopotamia, where nearly 700,000 served. Indian infantry and cavalry arrived in France in autumn 1914, just in time to hold the line at Ypres. Khudadad Khan of the 129th Baluchis won the first Victoria Cross awarded to an Indian, on 31 October 1914. Indian troops fought at Neuve Chapelle and Loos, then were redeployed to the Middle East in late 1915 because the climate and casualties had worn them down. At least 74,000 Indian soldiers died. The wounded were treated in Brighton's Royal Pavilion, turned into a hospital for the purpose. British censors read soldiers' letters, and the surviving extracts show homesickness, bewilderment and, at times, dissent.

West and North Africa

France drew on its empire more than any other power: some half a million colonial soldiers, plus around 200,000 colonial laborers. Among the soldiers were the tirailleurs sénégalais, who were not necessarily Senegalese: they came from throughout French West Africa. Some 200,000 served, more than 135,000 of them in Europe, many recruited under pressure from chiefs and administrators and some brought by force, and about 30,000 died, among them many in the disastrous attacks on the Chemin des Dames in April 1917, where General Charles Mangin, the champion of what he called the "black force", used them as assault troops. Blaise Diagne, the first black African elected to the French parliament in 1914, secured the Diagne Law of 1916 confirming the citizenship of the people of Senegal's four old communes. In January 1918 Clemenceau appointed him commissioner for recruiting in West Africa. His tour that year raised more than 60,000 men, in return for promises of better treatment, citizenship and reform that were largely unkept. Around 170,000 Algerians, and tens of thousands of Moroccans and Tunisians, also served.

The dominions

The ANZACs are famous. Of some 416,000 Australians who enlisted, about 330,000 went overseas and some 60,000 died; New Zealand sent about 100,000 and lost around 18,000, the highest losses relative to population of any dominion. Aboriginal Australians were officially barred from enlistment until the rules were relaxed in 1917, though perhaps a thousand served, and some 2,200 Māori served in the Pioneer Battalion. Canada sent some 620,000 men and lost about 61,000; they included indigenous soldiers such as the Ojibwe sniper Francis Pegahmagabow, credited with 378 kills, and the all-black No. 2 Construction Battalion. South Africa sent a brigade to France, which was nearly destroyed at Delville Wood in July 1916, and some 21,000 black South Africans to France as laborers in the South African Native Labour Corps. On 21 February 1917, the troopship SS Mendi was rammed in fog off the Isle of Wight; 646 men died, 607 of them black South African laborers.

The Caribbean, China, Indochina and Egypt

The British West Indies Regiment, formed in 1915, drew about 15,600 men from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and elsewhere. Used mainly as laborers and in Palestine, France and Italy, they were paid less than white soldiers and often given the dirtiest jobs; at Taranto in Italy in December 1918 men of the regiment mutinied, and about 60 were tried. The Chinese Labour Corps, recruited from Shandong from 1916, supplied about 100,000 men to the British and some 40,000 to the French, a total near 140,000, who dug trenches, repaired roads, unloaded ships and after the armistice cleared the battlefields. Official records count about 2,000 deaths, though some Chinese scholars believe the true toll was far higher. Around 90,000 Vietnamese came to France as soldiers and workers. Egypt, a British protectorate since December 1914, supplied labor and camels; the Egyptian Labour Corps and Camel Transport Corps carried supplies across Sinai, and the forced recruitment fed the rage that exploded in 1919.

The Americas stood largely outside the war for the first three years, and then one nation's decision to enter it changed the war's outcome.

The United States: from neutrality to war

President Woodrow Wilson asked Americans on 19 August 1914 to be "neutral in fact as well as in name" and "impartial in thought as well as in action". Public opinion leaned to the Allies, but a majority wanted no part of a European war. Germany's submarine campaign pushed the issue: on 7 May 1915 a U-boat sank the Cunard liner Lusitania with the loss of 1,198 lives, 128 of them Americans. After the sinking of the Sussex in March 1916 Berlin pledged in May to limit submarine attacks, and Wilson, reelected in November 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war", offered in January 1917 a "peace without victory". Germany answered on 31 January 1917 by announcing unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February, gambling that it could starve Britain before America could intervene. The United States broke relations on 3 February.

The decisive shock was the Zimmermann Telegram. On 16 January 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a coded message through Washington's own cables to the German minister in Mexico City. It said that if the United States did not remain neutral, Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico, with "generous financial support" and the recovery of "the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona". British naval codebreakers in Room 40 had broken the code; the telegram was handed to Washington on 24 February and published on 1 March. To the world's astonishment Zimmermann confirmed it on 3 March. Wilson addressed Congress on 2 April, declaring that "the world must be made safe for democracy", and the Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war on 4 April, and the House 373 to 50 on 6 April 1917. (The war itself is covered in chapters VI and VII.)

Mexico

Mexico was in the middle of its own revolution. President Venustiano Carranza, whose forces had clashed with American troops (Pershing's Punitive Expedition chased Pancho Villa through northern Mexico from March 1916 to February 1917), had little love for Washington, and German agents were active; German saboteurs had blown up the Black Tom munitions depot in New Jersey in July 1916. But Carranza's advisers told him that Mexico had no means of reconquering Texas, that Germany could not deliver the promised arms across a British-blockaded ocean and that an alliance would be suicidal. He refused. Mexico stayed neutral, and its new constitution of February 1917 claimed national ownership of subsoil resources.

Brazil and the rest of Latin America

Brazil was the largest country in Latin America to join the Allies. German submarines sank the Brazilian steamer Paraná in early April 1917; Brazil broke off relations on 11 April and, after further sinkings, declared war on 26 October 1917. It seized dozens of German ships in its ports, and in 1918 sent a naval division to patrol from West Africa, which was struck by the Spanish influenza at Dakar, with over a hundred deaths. Brazil also sent a medical mission and pilots, and sat at the peace table. Cuba and Panama followed the United States in April 1917, and Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti and Honduras declared war in 1918. Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay and Ecuador broke diplomatic relations. But Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Paraguay remained neutral. In Argentina, President Hipólito Yrigoyen refused to join even after the Luxburg affair in September 1917, when the United States published German telegrams advising that Argentine ships should be sunk without a trace. The war broke trade with Europe, and the United States, whose Panama Canal had opened on 15 August 1914, took over much of Latin America's commerce.

Beneath the armies' movements lay a global struggle over ships, grain and credit, and its outcome reordered the world.

Shipping and the closing of the straits

In 1914 the world trade system depended on British merchant ships, and the Royal Navy drove German vessels from the seas; hundreds of German ships were seized or stranded in neutral ports. The Ottoman closing of the Dardanelles in autumn 1914 cut Russia, a leading grain exporter, from its allies and its markets; Russian wheat exports collapsed and the Allied supply of Russian munitions slowed to a trickle. German submarines then attacked shipping everywhere: British losses alone ran to nearly 8 million gross tons. As losses mounted in 1917, the Allies introduced convoys (see chapter XI), pooled their shipping through the Allied Maritime Transport Council and built ships on a huge scale in American yards. By mid-1918, new construction exceeded losses.

Wheat

With the Black Sea closed, the Allies turned to North America, Argentina, Australia and India for wheat. Prices roughly tripled. Britain created a Royal Commission on Wheat Supplies in 1916 to buy centrally; the United States, after entering the war, guaranteed farmers $2.20 a bushel through the Food Administration under Herbert Hoover. The Allies pooled their purchases in an Inter-Allied Wheat Executive. A young French official named Jean Monnet worked on it and on the Allied Maritime Transport Council, and later said the experience of cooperation taught him that European states could pool their resources, an idea that eventually bore fruit in the European Community.

Loans and the shift of financial power

Britain paid for its own war and its allies'. The firm of J. P. Morgan acted as its purchasing agent in the United States from 1915, and an Anglo-French loan of $500 million was raised in New York in October 1915. By the time the United States entered the war, American banks had lent the Allies more than $2 billion, and American factories were making munitions and food for them. London sold perhaps a quarter of its overseas investments, and the pound was held at $4.76 only by American support. After April 1917 the United States Treasury lent directly: by 1920 the Allies owed it about $10 billion. America had gone from the world's largest debtor to its largest creditor. The Federal Reserve system opened in November 1914, and New York began to take over from London as the world's financial center, a shift that would shape the interwar years and the debt disputes that poisoned them.

Winners and losers

The neutral and distant economies boomed. Japanese exports more than tripled; its shipyards and cotton mills ran at full capacity, and it turned from a debtor into a creditor, though wartime inflation led to the rice riots of 1918. India's mills and Tata's steelworks at Jamshedpur supplied the army; India also announced a war contribution of £100 million. The British government bought the entire Australian wool clip, and Canada's munitions factories made a large share of the shells fired by British guns. In Latin America, Argentine meat and wheat, Brazilian coffee and Bolivian tin found new customers, while Chile's nitrate industry boomed on explosives demand and then collapsed as synthetic nitrates arrived. The losers were the blockaded Central Powers and Russia, and the poorest colonial populations, who paid in forced labor, taxes, inflation and requisitioned crops.

No region was more reshaped by wartime diplomacy than the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Within three years the British and French made three sets of promises about them that could not all be kept. (The postwar settlement that followed is told in chapter VIII; here is the diplomacy of the war itself.)

Promise one: the Arabs

In July 1915 Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca, the guardian of Islam's holiest cities, wrote to the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, asking for British recognition of an independent Arab state covering the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, from the Mediterranean to Persia. Britain, which needed a Muslim ally to counter the Sultan's call to jihad and to protect its communications with India, was ready to bargain. In ten letters between July 1915 and January 1916 McMahon agreed, with reservations. In his letter of 24 October 1915 he excluded "portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo" and areas where Britain was not free to act without damaging French interests, and wrote that Britain was prepared to recognize and support Arab independence in the remaining regions. The letter left deliberately vague whether Palestine was among the areas excluded. McMahon claimed later that it was; the Arabs insisted it was not. Hussein launched his revolt in June 1916 (see the Ottoman fronts section).

Promise two: Sykes-Picot

Meanwhile, the British diplomat Mark Sykes and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot negotiated a secret partition of the Ottoman Empire, concluded in notes dated 16 May 1916. France was to have direct control of a coastal strip from what is now Lebanon to Cilicia, with influence over inland Syria, including Damascus and Aleppo. Britain was to have direct control of southern Mesopotamia from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, with influence over the land between, from what is now Jordan to Kirkuk. Palestine was to have an international administration. Russia, which had already been promised Constantinople and the Straits in 1915, was to receive Armenian provinces in the east. The agreement ignored what Britain had told Hussein. After the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties from the Russian archives in late November 1917, the Ottoman Minister Djemal Pasha sent the text to Hussein's son Faisal, to try to split the Arabs from the British.

Promise three: Balfour

On 2 November 1917 Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild, a leader of British Jewry, for transmission to the Zionist Federation. The "Balfour Declaration" said that the government viewed favorably "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". At the time, Palestine had perhaps 700,000 inhabitants, of whom some 60,000 were Jews. The reasons were strategic as well as sentimental: British ministers hoped to win the sympathy of American and Russian Jews and to forestall a German bid for the same support, and some of them wanted Britain to control Palestine, next to the Suez Canal, after the war. The text carried a qualification which has been argued over ever since: nothing should prejudice "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

The other bargains

Other deals added to the confusion. In December 1915 Britain signed a treaty with Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud of Najd, a rival of the Hashemites, recognizing his rule and giving him a subsidy. In April 1917 the British, French and Italians agreed at St-Jean-de-Maurienne that Italy would receive a zone around Smyrna (Izmir), which later helped to start a Greek-Turkish war. A British message to Hussein in January 1918 assured him that the Arabs would be free to determine their own government, and an Anglo-French declaration of 7 November 1918 promised "national governments" in Syria and Mesopotamia. The war had ended with its promises tangled.

The empires that had asked their subjects to fight for freedom's sake had to explain, afterwards, why those subjects should not have it. Between 1917 and 1922 a series of nationalist movements shook the colonial world, partly in disappointment, partly in confidence.

India

Indian politicians had supported the British war effort on the expectation of political reward. In 1916 the Congress and the Muslim League signed the Lucknow Pact, and Annie Besant and B. G. Tilak launched Home Rule Leagues. In August 1917 the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, announced that the British aim was "the progressive realisation of responsible government" in India. The Government of India Act 1919 made a modest advance. But the wartime emergency laws were kept in peacetime by the Rowlatt Acts of March 1919, and on 13 April 1919 troops under General Reginald Dyer fired into an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing at least 379 by the official count. Mohandas Gandhi, who had returned from South Africa in January 1915 and recruited soldiers for the army in 1918, led the non-cooperation movement from 1920. Indian veterans, who had seen Europe and been treated for the first time as men rather than subjects, carried new attitudes home.

China

China declared war on Germany in 1917 and sent 140,000 laborers because it believed Wilson's talk of national self-determination meant it would recover Shandong. At Versailles the Allies instead awarded Germany's rights to Japan. When the news arrived, about 3,000 students marched on Tiananmen on 4 May 1919, and strikes and boycotts followed in the cities. The Chinese delegation refused to sign the treaty on 28 June, the only country at the conference to do so. The "May Fourth Movement" gave birth to modern Chinese radicalism; the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921.

Egypt

Britain declared a protectorate over Egypt in December 1914, deposed the pro-Ottoman Khedive, imposed martial law and hosted hundreds of thousands of troops. Villagers resented the recruitment of labor and camels, the requisition of crops and the inflation. On 13 November 1918, two days after the armistice, the politician Saad Zaghlul asked the British High Commissioner for permission to lead an Egyptian delegation (wafd) to London and Paris. When the British arrested him and sent him to Malta on 8 March 1919, Egypt rose in a nationwide revolution. Strikes and riots paralyzed the country, and hundreds of Egyptians were killed. Britain declared Egypt independent in 1922, though with reservations that kept British control of the Suez Canal, defense and foreign affairs.

Africa and elsewhere

In Africa, the war had already provoked revolts. The Baptist preacher John Chilembwe led an uprising in Nyasaland (Malawi) in January 1915 against forced labor and the recruiting of Africans for a white man's war; he was killed within two weeks. The Volta-Bani War of 1915–1916 in French West Africa, a revolt against conscription, was one of the biggest anti-colonial uprisings in the region. Diagne presided at the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in February 1919, organized by W. E. B. Du Bois. The League of Nations Covenant placed former German and Ottoman territories under "mandates", with Class A, B and C categories depending on a territory's supposed readiness for independence; Britain and France administered most of them, and South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and Japan the rest. In Korea, a nationwide independence movement began on 1 March 1919, inspired in part by Wilsonian rhetoric and brutally suppressed by Japan. In Paris, a young Vietnamese man who called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, sent a petition to the Allied delegates in 1919 asking for rights for his people.

The dominions took a different path. Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, and India as well, signed the Treaty of Versailles separately and became separate members of the League of Nations, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 completed their autonomy. The empires had won the war, but the war had broken their authority.