Capital/assets ratios in banking declined substantially during the two world wars. Three drivers severely impacted the capitalisation of banks. Banks invested heavily in government debt, which led to an expansion of balance sheets. High inflation ratios devalued the paid-up capital of banks. Moreover, formal and informal constraints restricted banks from issuing capital in wartime. The Second World War, in particular, had long-lasting effects on the evolution bank capital. The United Kingdom controlled capital issuances after 1939 and reinforced the financial repression of banks. The Swiss Banks operated in a regulated but much more liberal framework. In the United States, the belief in informal capital requirement guidelines was very pronounced. By the mid-1930s, the United States had already three federal bank supervisory agencies, which all had developed opinions on how capital adequacy was assessed. However, the rapidly growing government debt in banks’ balance sheets overturned these conventions, leading to the first risk-adjusted measurements for capital and triggering the development of new measurement approaches that became the forerunner of the Basel I guidelines.

This chapter turns its attention to the first years of the Great War. Commencing with a reading of James’s wartime correspondence, its first half charts how the aging author was tormented, in the latter stages of 1914, by the possibility that his life and works might be subjected to retroactive disavowal in light of the conflict he never saw coming. It then discusses two of James’s wartime works, The Middle Years (1917) and The Sense of the Past (1917), focusing on how these texts engage with and reflect upon the prospect of undoing and recasting formative experiences. In its second half, the chapter zooms out slightly and offers a broader investigation of the wartime critical climate within which James’s acts of creative self-interrogation took place. Noting that as the conflict raged on, authors and critics alike became caught up in debates about the purpose of reading in wartime, the chapter draws on Rebecca West’s reviews of James from 1915 and 1916 and analyses her Jamesian novel, The Return of the Solider (1918), to explore the psychological and ethical pressures that were placed on another form of counterfactual consolation: the world into which we can escape through fiction.

On the cusp of the First World War, the global transition from coal to oil as the predominant energy source for technological, military, and industrial purposes markedly augmented the strategic value of oil, a prominence it retained for subsequent decades. In reaction, the British government, which possessed a 51 per cent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, sanctioned a significant expansion of the industry within its sphere of indirect influence. As petroleum demand escalated during the conflict, this enlargement necessitated the prioritisation of workforce allocation and maintenance, essential for producing petroleum in its varied forms. In response, a novel labour recruitment policy was instituted in collaboration with the British Indian Raj, extending the scope of recruitment beyond the borders of Iran through the Persian Gulf. As the war intensified, the strategic significance of Iran – highlighted by its extensive oil reserves and the proximity of its oil fields and refinery to the Mesopotamian front – transformed it from a marginal theatre of war into a pivotal military operations centre, thereby rendering it a sustained zone of conflict. This shift profoundly affected the operations and security of the Iranian oil industry and markedly influenced the working and living conditions of the labour force throughout the duration of the war.

This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.

The war seemed to have destroyed all false hopes. From the very beginning, Jews felt joined with other Germans in the war efforts and uplifted by the promise of total brotherhood, as announced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the streets of Berlin. But later on, as the war became a rather hopeless trench war, little remained of this sense of togetherness. The Jews felt the atmospheric change in the return of antisemitism. Individuals experienced it directly in their various army units and the community as a whole was finally shocked and irritated by the decision to collect “Jewish Statistics,” measuring their presumably real part in defending the Fatherland, , in October 1916. Later on, Jews were overwhelmed, together with others, by more threatening dangers. After briefly telling the life-story of Albert Ballin, the great ship-owner from Hamburg, a “Kaiser-Jew,” and the way he experienced the lost war, the end of the empire, and the approaching revolution, the chapter moves on to tell of the great hopes entertained by other, less prosperous Jews, who experienced the end of the old order and the imminent establishment of a new republic in a far more positive light.

The concluding Chapter 8 examines the commemorative afterlives of the West India Regiments in Britain and the Caribbean. Placing this within the wider context of the centenary of the First World War, including the ’culture wars’ that have occurred around how the British Empire is remembered, the chapter considers the acquisition, creation and display of the regiments’ material culture.

Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

In 1918, Prague became one of the new capital cities that appeared on the map of postimperial Europe. This Introduction suggests that examining urban streetscapes can fruitfully reveal the transformations in daily life caused by war and the transition from Empire to nation-state. It situates the book within a renewed historiography of the First World War and engages with recent approaches to the history of the Habsburg Empire. It also provides the theoretical framework that underpins the work, the rationale for the chosen focus on space, and the people who inhabit that space rather than separate national communities, and a brief discussion of the body of sources used.

War formed a backdrop to much of Vaughan Williams’s life, and his understanding of its effects – whether from his service in the First World War or as a civilian on the home front during the Second World War – evoked some of the most powerful and poignant musical responses of his career, including The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Pastoral, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies. These and other compositions incubated and emerged during tumultuous periods in the realms of musical performance, broadcasting, publishing, and patronage. Vaughan Williams’s navigation of these fields reveals a cross-section of major issues of concern to myriad composers, performers, and institutions, including the limits of political and ideological tolerance, the role of the state in artistic sponsorship, the responsibility of the artist to society, and the nature of musical memorialization.

This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand. It was a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. The chapter compares Vaughan Williams’s outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan in particular, tracing the ways in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape became emblematic of that feature of English political and legal history that tended towards incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of ‘continuity within change’ that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom and of national self-determination.

Early on in the First World War Sering was preparing for Germany to be starved by a British Blockade. Erich Keup was an early key contributor to Sering’s thinking about Eastern Europe during the war. Immanuel Geiss and the Border Strip story, the Wartheland, food security, blockades, submarines, and Tirpitz are all discussed, along with the slaughter of the pigs. The inner colonial thinkers suddenly saw Germany as full and turned their sights to the newly conquered East of 1915. Sering’s journey through Poland and Latvia in 1915 was followed by plans for the settlement of two million Germans in Latvia and Courland. Sering then journeyed east in 1916. The Kingdom of Poland, German freedom, Adolf Harnack, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and Otto Hintze are all covered here. Sering discussed the colonial potential of Belarus in the 1917 edited volume Western Russia and its Importance in the Development of Central Europe. Anti-semitism is discussed, along with Schwerin and Lindequist in the East. Schwerin very close to Ludendorff. It then covers Ober Ost, War Land on the Eastern Front, Liulevicius, Brest-Litovsk, a massive German colonial empire in the Eastin 1918, and Sering’s visit to Kiev. Land and people became race and space. The period ended in defeat.

This chapter reviews the ideas and reception of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It focuses on a single, as yet untold, aspect: how Economic Consequences fits into the context of debates about the construction of the memory of the Great War. It asks: ‘What role did Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace play in the formation of the “futility myth” which dominates British popular perception of the First World War to this day?’

This chapter shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany’s most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of secularism in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the “pure” council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and to Bolshevik party rule.

This introductory chapter deals with the positioning of post-war Western Europe in the ‘Atlantic Century’. During this period of emerging American leadership in international affairs—starting roughly around the time of the American intervention in the First World War—the United States not only gradually accepted the leadership of the free world, it also offered Western Europe protection under the umbrella of an ‘Atlantic Community’. These transatlantic realities offered material and moral comfort, which were indispensable for the reconstruction and resurrection of Europe. Moreover, this new community offered a world of rational policies and democratic politics that was immediately familiar to Europeans. These shared mores fortified the two most resilient beacons of freedom: capitalism and democracy. As such, this transatlantic community transcended national borders while at the same time respecting the concept of the nation-state as the basic model for a new world of cooperation aimed at peace, stability, and prosperity for all. This community of ‘liberal’ states and societies was perceived from the outset as ‘the progeny of Western Christendom’.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.