After the Armistice: Empire, Endgame and Aftermath

Description

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. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1 ‘Britannia Pacificatrix’: re-imagining a post-Armistice empire Part I Imperial endgames 2 Imperial Coercion in Ireland and India 1919–21: insights for Irish Australians 3 Native Kings and German Traders on the British Imperial Peripheries: Lagos and Tonga 4 Imperial masculinity and racial pacification: ‘Martial Bengalis’ in the Great War 5 Society and identity in the former Ottoman world: encounters between Cypriots and Armenians of the Légion d’Orient in Cyprus in 1917–18 6 Mary Booth’s imperial nationalism in the aftermath of the Great War 7 Shanzhai 山寨 nationalism 中民民族主义: reflexive empires and digital commemoration in China from Ah Q to AI 8 An empire man on the road to Dominion independence: Robert Randolph Garran and the Armistice ‘blunder’ Part II 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 10 ‘A deathless monument of valour’: memorialising Anzacs as ancient Greek citizen-soldiers from the war’s aftermath to Julia Gillard’s 2012 Gallipoli Dawn Service speech 11 If Not In This World: memorialising the personal narrative of war and its aftermath with music 12 Pleasant remembrances and foreboding futures: Glorifying representations of empire and their opposition within Britain’s national cinema during the 1930s 13 Reconciliation through commemoration: Ireland, empire, and the 1987 Enniskillen Armistice Day bombing 14 We’re here because we’re here: participatory art and the mobilisation of First World War memory in post-Brexit Britain Part III Coda 15 The Hall of Remembrance Index