Militarized Cultural Encounters In The Long Nineteenth Century

This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.

The ‘Macedonian question’ has been much studied in recent years as has the political history of the period from the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. But for a variety of reasons, connected with the political division of Greece and the involvement of outside powers, the events at and behind the Macedonian front have been side-lined. The recent commemorations of the centenary of the end of the First World War in the UK illustrate how by comparison with the enormous and moving emphasis on the western front, Macedonia has been not wholly but largely ignored. This volume illuminates this comparatively neglected period of Greek history and examines the strategic and military aspects of the war in Macedonia and the political, social, economic and cultural context of the war.

This volume gathers an international cast of scholars to examine the unprecedented range of colonial encounters during the First World War. More than four million men of color, and an even greater number of white Europeans and Americans, crisscrossed the globe. Others, in occupied areas, behind the warzone or in neutral countries, were nonetheless swept into the maelstrom. From local encounters in New Zealand, Britain and East Africa to army camps and hospitals in France and Mesopotamia, from cafes and clubs in Salonika and London, to anticolonial networks in Germany, the USA and the Dutch East Indies, this volume examines the actions and experiences of a varied company of soldiers, medics, writers, photographers, and revolutionaries to reconceptualize this conflict as a turning point in the history of global encounters. How did people interact across uneven intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, religion and language? How did encounters – direct and mediated, forced and unforced – shape issues from cross-racial intimacy and identity formation to anti-colonial networks, civil rights movements and visions of a post-war future? The twelve chapters delve into spaces and processes of encounter to explore how the conjoined realities of war, race and empire were experienced, recorded and instrumentalized.

This collection explores the role of military masculinity in shaping nineteenth-century British culture and society. It covers a period that was framed by two of the greatest wars the world had ever known, and punctuated by many smaller conflicts. Bringing together contributions from a diverse range of leading scholars, it offers fresh, interdisciplinary perspectives on an emerging field of study. The chapters draw upon historical, literary, visual and musical sources to demonstrate the centrality of the military and its masculine dimensions in the shaping of Victorian and Edwardian personal and national identities. Focusing on both the experience of military service and its imaginative forms, it examines such topics as bodies and habits, families and domesticity, heroism and chivalry, religion and militarism, and youth and fantasy. Reflecting the two principle areas of investigation for scholars working in the field, the book is divided into two sections: 'experiencing' and 'imagining' military masculinities. The section on experience considers the realities of military life in this period, and asks to what extent they produced a particular kind of gendered identity. The second section moves on to explore the wider impact of martial masculinities on culture and society, asking whether nineteenth-century Britain can be regarded as a warrior nation. These two sections ultimately demonstrate that the reception, representation and replication of masculine values in Britain during this period were far more complex than might be assumed. This collection will be required reading for anyone interested in the cultures of war and masculinity in the long nineteenth century.

A cultural, military and imperial history of the Black soldiers of Britain's West India Regiments.

During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, more Europeans visited the Middle East than ever before, as tourists, archaeologists, pilgrims, settler-colonists and soldiers. These visitors engaged with the Arabic language to differing degrees. While some were serious scholars of Classical Arabic, in the Orientalist mould, many did not learn the language at all. Between these two extremes lies a neglected group of language learners who wanted to learn enough everyday colloquial Arabic to get by. The needs of these learners were met by popular language books, which boasted that they could provide an easy route to fluency in a difficult language. Arabic Dialogues explores the motivations of Arabic learners and effectiveness of instructional materials, principally in Egypt and Palestine, by analysing a corpus of Arabic phrasebooks published in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian) and in the territory of twenty-five modern countries. Beginning with Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte (1798–1801), it moves through the periods of mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, concluding with the Second World War. The book also considers how Arab intellectuals understood the project of teaching Arabic to foreigners, the remarkable history of Arabic-learning among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking immigrants in Palestine, and the networks of language learners, teachers and plagiarists who produced these phrasebooks.

The first full-length study of the experience and memory of British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia during WWI.

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe “Superb analysis.”—William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army’s military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army’s leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization—both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology. In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Huw J. Davies traces the British Army’s accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from war zones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.