This chapter examines Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys (2018) and, more briefly, Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian (2019). It argues that each of these novels offers a reassessment of the First World War in Mesopotamia (contemporary Iraq) and Palestine, and its ongoing repercussions in the region. This chapter argues that these books should be read as resistant forms of cultural production, which assert the humanity of populations that were often reduced to racialized types or caricature in First World War representations of them. In contrast, these authors draw attention to the imperial roots of contemporary conflict in the Middle East; to the rich cultures, histories, and traditions of its people; and to the impact of violence on ordinary Arab lives, especially those of women and children. As such, they not only offer a new perspective on the First World War, but also challenge the perverse logic of twenty-first-century conflicts in which the deaths of Iraqi and Palestinian civilians continue to be seen as acceptable “collateral damage.”

Food in the era of the First World War was much more than a military necessity. The shortages of foodstuffs profoundly shaped states and societies during the conflict and beyond. Hunger in war was not a new phenomenon, but its experience during the First World War led to three main changes. First, it changed the social contract between citizens and the state. People who had suffered serial nutritional deprivation came to believe more forcefully than before that a primary responsibility of the state was to provide a bare minimum of supplies for their survival. States, too, understood that being able to provide foodstuffs for their citizens was essential for their legitimacy. Second, hunger in the era of the First World War brought a new emphasis on “nutritional sovereignty”: the idea that states must be able to produce their food supplies themselves, rather than import them. Finally, hunger in the era of the First World War was a turning point in the development of international aid. While international charitable aid had existed long before the War, the amount of aid given the number of different groups and institutions grew exponentially.

Food insecurity during the First World War made hungry civilians around the continent search for alternative modes and means to fight hunger in war and post-war Europe. A transnational comparison of survival strategies, employed by individuals throughout Europe, demonstrates how ordinary civilians responded to the shortcomings of official food provisioning. The chapter explores how civilians turned to home-based agricultural production, made trips to the countryside or participated in black market. As regular circuits for obtaining food were very restricted, individuals circumvented official distribution means by relying on the alternative economies of grey and black markets. Bartering, especially, became an important means to cope with the economy of shortages. Relying on informal channels, as this chapter demonstrates, the hungry population traded jewellery for potatoes or furniture for meat. Civilians sometimes even resorted to illegal and criminal activities such as fraud and theft to meet their basic needs. In Eastern and Western Europe, individuals of course took actions in different forms, depending on the severity of the food scarcity, but, as this chapter argues, the strategies they used also shared many similar features and delineated new modes of social interactions, and new relationships to the licit and the illicit in wartime.

The chapter explores US–Russia relations in the years before Russia entered her second revolution in February 1917 and America joined the First World War in April 1917. This period was complicated by discrimination against Jews and other ethnic minorities in Russia, by ideological differences between American democracy and Russian autocracy, and by geopolitical disagreements. Yet these elements of conflict did not hamper the two states’ rapprochement, which began at the end of 1914 and at times resembled the euphoria of a honeymoon. This chapter emphasizes that the surprising thaw in US–Russia relations cannot be explained only by the convergence of the two governments’ interests: namely, that the Russian Empire desperately needed to buy American supplies for its armed forces, while Americans were eager to sell their surplus products. Interactions between Imperial Russia and the United States call for more comprehensive consideration, with a particular focus on the changes in mutual representations and the intensified process of Russians and Americans studying each other. This is precisely what this chapter sets out to provide.

While many European countries had used rationing and price ceilings to respond to emergency hunger situations before the First World War, these measures had been limited in their scope to cities and smaller areas, and were of short duration, generally lasting weeks or months. The long-term experience of hunger in the First World War era shattered civilian expectations of state responsibility and pushed governments to act in new and different ways. This chapter examines how a variety of states chose to respond to the changing experiences of insufficient food supplies and hunger faced by their citizens as they realized that their previous plans, or lack of planning, were insufficient. This chapter is the first comparative analysis of the technical and political aspects of food distribution systems in the First World War for a wide range of different states. The timing and practices implemented by different governments differed for both practical reasons – food did not disappear at equal rates everywhere – and for political reasons.

For contemporaneous writers on Debussy, the First World War presented a persistent problem, with many choosing to omit or minimise these years in their portrayals of the composer, or French music in general. Drawing on work in collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs and successive generations of scholars, I consider the ways in which such portrayals were constructed and speculate on the reasons for why they endured. This chapter presents three narratives and examines them in terms of the types of memory at work, the motivations of the groups sustaining these memories, and the actions undertaken by these groups to promote their visions of the past. Each narrative subscribed to a particular collective remembering of recent French music, while each was consistent in what it overlooked: that is, they all contributed to a general collective forgetting with regards to Debussy’s late works and the war years.

Prior to the First World War, the operations of the British financial sector primarily fell under the jurisdiction of a banking aristocracy. The Old Guard, comprising prominent bankers and industrialists based in the City of London, oversaw a system of indirect regulation, characterized by the lack of direct government intervention and the self-sustaining operations of the classical gold standard. Yet the outbreak of the war fundamentally upended the traditional balance between the state and the economy. With the abandonment of the gold standard and the closure of the London Stock Exchange in 1914, the nation faced a series of unprecedented crises that threatened Britain’s hegemonic position in the global order. By war’s end, the Bank of England had begun to reconsider its position in the City, throughout Europe, and across the empire.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.

Over the last five years of the 1920s, Hemingway worked assiduously to consolidate his reputation, publishing stories in mainstream magazines and developing what would become a lifelong relationship with the Charles Scribner publishing company. He worked to balance literary experimentation and innovation in the short story and the novel (sometimes courting censorship by challenging the canons of “decency”) and to appeal to popular taste. His second collection of stories includes the classic “Hills like White Elephants,” a powerfully concise exploration of power dynamics and competing visions within a romantic relationship. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway brings a corrosive irony to the topoi of the wartime romance, complicating received notions of both martial heroism (the military centerpiece of the novel is a shambolic retreat) and heterosexual romance (suggested in Frederic Henry’s and Catherine Barkley’s repeated references to wanting not only to be with one another but to be one another). The novel also sees Hemingway experiment with new modes such as stream-of-consciousness narration.

How did peat become part of Russia’s industrial metabolism? This chapter traces the physical mobilization of peat in the late imperial period and during the early Soviet electrification campaign, highlighting the importance of regional perspectives for efforts to write an environmental history of Russia’s industrializing economy. From the late nineteenth century, peat played an increasingly important role as an industrial fuel, inspiring technical elites to consider it a source of electric power. This idea was subsequently incorporated into the GOĖLRO-plan for the Electrification of Russia, which firmly anchored peat in the power industry. The early Soviet energy system, with its emphasis on regionally available energy sources, was not solely a product of Bolshevik power. Instead, it must be situated within longer trajectories of regionalized fuel use and the experience of a war-related fuel crisis that predated the 1917 Revolution.

Starting from the Russo-Japanese War until the height of the Cold War era, Schoenberg’s adult life coincided with various wars during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Schoenberg navigated these events by surveying his correspondences with friends and pupils, his own writings and brief analyses of two overtly political compositions, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947). This chapter ends by considering the two war compositions as the composer’s statement and restatement against fascistic tendencies in Germany during World War II and, again, in the United States during the Cold War era.

In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book and tentatively goes beyond them. When it comes to thought and practice of fin-de-siècle colonial war and violence, we should emphasise essential comparability and connectivity instead of national particularities among the British, German and Dutch empires. It is suggested this research finding might apply to other Western colonial empires as well. At the same time, a number of smaller aspects in which we might actually find national differences is noted. Taking up the transimperial mobility of ideas and experiences of colonial warfare noted throughout the book, the conclusion then asks what questions these findings raise for thinking about the temporality and spatiality of empires more generally. Finally, it touches on continuities in war and violence beyond 1914, both in later colonial wars as well as in the fighting of the First World War in Europe. It tentatively suggests that continuities were considerable in the first case and much lower in the second case.

Literary modernism cognitivizes the gothic by engaging the counter-conversionary energies that James associated with the sick-soul’s awareness of the human potential for evil. Where psychological commentary on the First World War’s aftermath typically concerns “shell-shock,” this chapter highlights the period’s equal investment in the cognitively rehabilitative potentialities of modernist “techniques of dissociation” to disrupt dangerous excesses of affect and forestall identification with fascistic beliefs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), demonstrate how the various information streams—song lyrics, social commentary, and newspaper publicity—haunt their protagonists, producing self-estranging varieties of dissociation characteristic of the Jamesean sick soul, wherein soul-sickness indicates both a recognition of and resistance to dehumanizing beliefs.

In 1911, Italians living abroad constituted one-sixth of Italy’s population, numbering roughly five million people. However, the experiences of emigrant communities have not been incorporated into the narrative of Italy’s war. This chapter discusses the place of migration within the historiography of the First World War and of the war within migration history. It introduces the cohort of 300,000 emigrant soldiers who returned to Italy to complete their conscripted military service during the war, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. Scholars are divided as to whether this should be regarded as a success or a failure: I argue it is remarkable that so many made the journey considering that, in most locations, there were no coercive measures obliging them to do so. The chapter lays out the global micro-history approach adopted in the book and the decision to focus on four emigrant soldiers, each typical and atypical in different respects: Americo Orlando in São Paulo, Esterino Alessandro Tarasca in New York, Cesare Bianchi in London and Lazzaro Ponticelli in Paris.