The Great War: An Imperial History (review)

John Morrow, Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia, is best known for his work on airpower in the Great War. In this work he expands his perspective significantly and successfully by addressing the synergies that developed between "the West and the rest" in the crucial years from 1914 to 1918. Morrow interprets the war's causes in the context of an imperialist mind-set, culminating in the nineteenth century, which reflected a fundamental determination to exploit the resources of a targeted region combined with a sense of superiority toward that region's inhabitants and their cultures. The result was a "might makes right" attitude, a glorification of war, and a growing fear of other "races," even European neighbors, as mortal threats that sooner or later must be confronted in arms. A toxic blend of fear and aggression suffused and undid Europe, leading its people to follow their governments into an orgy of violence and beginning the dual process of destroying Europe's hegemonic status and opening the door to freedom for the West's imperial victims.

The Great War was a paradox. On one hand its outcome depended essentially on events in a single region: northern France and Flanders, the traditional "cockpit of Europe." Only there, and in northwestern Europe generally, was the social, political, and economic infrastructure sufficiently developed to support and sustain high-tech warfare. Outside that zone, and particularly outside Europe, warmaking tended rapidly to revert to traditional models in everything from logistics through medicine to tactics. At the same time, the Great War was a global war, impinging more directly on non-Western cultures than any conflict in history. Airplanes flew above India's northwest frontier, and columns of Ford trucks traversed the deserts of Mesopotamia. Horses and armored cars cooperated in the Palestine campaign. Above all, a war begun in Europe, for European reasons, drew into its orbit the men and women of Africa and Asia.

Some were brought to Europe's stage center in uniforms; their grave markers and monuments stand yet, lonely and incongruous in the countrysides of Belgium and Picardy. Others were laborers behind the front lines, Chinese and African Americans; still others, replacements for European men on the farms and in the factories. As early as 1916, 10 percent of the workforce in France's crucial war industries were foreigners or colonials. Still other imperial subjects fought or labored in or near their own homelands, from Afghanistan to Morocco, at the behest of imperial masters. A forgotten but significant minority served in what were dubbed "secondary theaters," though they were no less deadly for that designation: Nigerians in East Africa, Gurkhas and Punjabis in Palestine, Vietnamese in Salonika. Black Americans, rejected by a segregated army, won glory in French uniforms under French colors.

Morrow is particularly successful in demonstrating the failure of those who led Europe's armed forces to understand the interrelations of specific technological factors that precipitated gridlock not only on the battlefield but at operational and strategic levels as well. The balance of mobility, protection, and firepower had shifted so drastically in favor of the latter that the only solution seemed to be: more of everything—but especially men.

Nor must the men be Europeans. Even before the war, France had planned to import soldiers from its North African colonies to counterbalance German superiority in numbers. Britain shipped an army corps halfway round the world from India. In both cases this was a shock and a challenge to imperialism's fundamental premise: the white man's inherent martial superiority. Outside of Europe the imperialist powers depended increasingly on their subjects to wage war at all. The numbers of white rank-and-file steadily declined, though officers' appointments remained a European prerogative. But the trenches consumed all colors, and the diseases of Africa and the Middle East spared none. Had the war lasted into 1919, non-Europeans would by necessity have played a much more significant part in all of...