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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
*
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 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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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.

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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.

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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.