1st Edition
After the Armistice Empire, Endgame and Aftermath
A century after the Armistice and the associated peace agreements that formally ended the Great War, many issues pertaining to the UK and its empire are yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Accordingly, this volume presents a multi-disciplinary approach to better understanding the post-Armistice Empire across a broad spectrum of disciplines, geographies and chronologies. Through the lens of diplomatic, social, cultural, historical and economic analysis, the chapters engage with the histories of Lagos and Tonga, Cyprus and China, as well as more obvious geographies of empire such as Ireland, India and Australia. Though globally diverse, and encompassing much of the post-Armistice century, the studies are nevertheless united by three common themes: the interrogation of that transitionary ‘moment’ after the Armistice that lingered well beyond the final Treaty of Lausanne in 1924; the utilisation of new research methods and avenues of enquiry to compliment extant debates concerning the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; and the common leitmotif of the British Empire in all its political and cultural complexity. The centenary of the Armistice offers a timely occasion on which to present these studies.
Introduction: After the Armistice: Empire, Endgame and Aftermath
1. ‘Britannia Pacificatrix’: Re-Imagining a post-Armistice Empire
Michael Walsh and Andrekos Varnava
Part 1: Imperial Endgames
2. ‘Imperial Coercion in Ireland and India 1919–1921: Insights for Irish Australians.’
Stephanie James
3. ‘Germans on the British Imperial Peripheries: Lagos and Tonga 1914–1919’
Peter J. Yearwood
4. ‘Imperial Masculinity and Racial Pacification: "Martial Bengalis" in the Great War’
Rajarshi Mitra
5. ‘Society and Identity in the former Ottoman World: Encounters between Cypriots and Armenians of the Légion d’Orient in Cyprus in 1917–1918’
Andrekos Varnava
6. ‘Mary Booth’s Nationalism at the end of the Great War’
Bridget Brooklyn
7. ‘"The True Story of Ah Q": British decline, American power, the rise of Chinese nationalism 1918-1923 and reflexive contemporary centenary commemoration in China’
Tom Sear
8. ‘An Empire man on the road to Dominion independence: Robert Randolph Garran’s experience of the Armistice "blunder" and its aftermath’
Colin Milner
Part 2: Cultural Aftermaths
9. ‘The threshold of the British Empire’: Accommodation, coercion and the commemoration of a national Australian narrative of war at an imperial site of memory
Matthew Haultain-Gall
10. ‘A deathless monument of valour’: The national memorialisation of Anzacs as ancient Greek citizen-soldiers from the war’s aftermath to the centenary Dawn Service at Gallipoli
Sarah Midford
11. ‘If Not In This World’: memorialising the personal narrative of micro-history with music
Andrew C. B. Harrison
12. ‘Pleasant Remembrances and Foreboding Futures’: Glorifying Representations of Empire and their Opposition within Britain’s National Cinema during the 1930s
Ellen Whitton
13. ‘Reconciliation through Commemoration’: Ireland, Empire, and the 1987 Enniskillen Armistice Day Bombing
Murphy Temple
14. ‘We’re here because we’re here’: The emotive power of the dominant cultural imaginary of the Tommy in post-Brexit Britain’
Kristin O’Donnell
Part 3: Coda
15. ‘The Hall of Remembrance’
Richard Cork
Biography
Michael J. K. Walsh is Chair of the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University Singapore and is Professor of Art History. He has published widely on culture at the time of the Great War and has a particular interest in painting and music.
Andrekos Varnava, FRHistS, is an Associate Professor in History at Flinders University, South Australia, and an Honorary Professor in History at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is the author of four monographs, eight edited volumes and 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
