The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

their political survival was also owed to the fact that they had deep reserves of popular support to draw on and that their political class managed to respond to the crisis of the war in a way that the Central Powers did not, by promising a further widening of democracy at home and greater enfranchisement in the colonial sphere.

With democracy in Russia fighting for its life, there were voices in London and Washington that favoured sacrificing France’s obstinate demand for the return of Alsace-Lorraine to achieve a quick settlement.

In the end, despite continued harassment in the Chamber of Deputies, Clemenceau took two Socialists into his government not as cabinet members but as commissioners. Meanwhile, the trade union leadership, with whom Clemenceau entertained workman-like relations, were given the clear signal that rather than making appeals for peace, they should vent the frustration of their members in demands for wage increases. For Clemenceau inflation was a small price to pay for a united national war effort.

Clemenceau’s insistence on ‘war, nothing but war’ was intended to silence not only the pacifists. He was no more patient toward contentious discussions of over-ambitious war aims.

In 1916, facing the full force of the Verdun assault, the cabinet of Aristide Briand had cheered itself by weighing up a partition of Germany between a French-sponsored Rhineland and a Russian land-grab in the East. But for the collapse of Tsarism in March 1917, this objective might well have become established as official policy.

Whereas Clemenceau successfully silenced discussion of the post-war order, Italian politics between 1915 and 1919 was torn apart by a clash between different visions of its place in the future international system.10 Under the terms of its pre-war alliances Italy in 1914 ought to have entered on the side of the Central Powers. Instead, in the London Treaty of 1915 it obtained generous promises of imperial gains from the Entente.

In thousands of villages and towns Italian-American friendship was celebrated in improvised processions not infrequently featuring the Virgin Mary with the Stars and Stripes in her hand.

On 13 February 1918 these fears were fully confirmed when the full text was read out in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The effect was explosive. There was outrage even on the government benches, as ministers learned for the first time of the discreditable, annexationist demands for which Italy had been fighting. Giovanni Giolitti, the pre-war leader of Italian liberalism, who had opposed the alliance with the Entente in 1915, demanded that the war be brought to an end immediately.

If only it abandoned its old-fashioned and unrealistic imperialist ambitions, pro-Entente socialists and liberals saw no reason why Italy’s strategic interests could not be made compatible with the new era of self-determination.

The furore over the London Treaty drove him into the arms of the right. In a mirror image of the extremist Patriotic Party in Germany, 158 deputies, a third of the chamber, banded together in support of Sonnino in the so-called Fascio for National Defence, determined to prevent any backsliding.

If the contradictions between democracy and empire were becoming a source of political tension by 1917–18, one might have expected Britain to be their most notable victim. And both at home and in the empire, London certainly did face enormous challenges.

It was Britain that emerged from the conflict with its political system most intact and with the majority of its strategic objectives met. Between 1916 and 1922 Britain was to occupy perhaps the most prominent position of leadership in both world and European affairs in its history.

Britain was beyond the immediate reach of the Central Powers and had the resources of its empire to fall back on. But this triumph was also a testament to the adaptive capacities of the British political class. Lloyd George, like Clemenceau, was the advocate of a full-throated war effort. The harassment of those suspected of non-conformity or resistance on the home front was relentless. On the Western Front, discipline in the British ranks was notoriously harsh.

Between 1906 and 1911 in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Asquith, it had been Lloyd George who had carried the radical flag, taking the fight to the House of Lords and breaking their veto over the budget, pushing through redistributive taxation, introducing a social insurance sys...

In 1901, in the midst of the Boer War, speaking to a raucous crowd in Birmingham, the heartland of jingoist nationalism, he had demanded that the empire must free itself of ‘racial arrogance’. It must reshape itself as a realm of ‘fearless justice’ held together by a common commitment to national freedom.

Despite the repeated cycles of promise and disappointment that littered its history, the seemingly contradictory idea of a ‘liberal empire’ was not empty nor, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was it historically moribund. The fact that Lloyd George could initiate dramatic change, in wartime, at the head of a coalition in which most of the key positions were occupied by Tories, is testament to imperial liberalism’s renewed relevance in an age of dramatic global transition.

When they were swept into office in 1906, the Liberals had been committed to making good on Gladstone’s long-deferred promise of Home Rule – autonomy for Ireland within the United Kingdom. This gained them the support of the parliamentary party of moderate Irish nationalism, who after Asquith’s electoral setbacks in 1910 actually held the balance of power in the House of Commons.

By the spring of 1914, the Irish crisis was tearing the British state apart. With the encouragement of the Tory Party and the covert endorsement of the British monarch, the army in Ireland gave notice that regardless of the will of Parliament, they would not impose Home Rule on Ulster.

Despite the open threat of mutiny in August 1914, the Asquith government pushed Home Rule through Parliament, but immediately suspended implementation. The postponement was a sop to the Unionists at the expense of Irish nationalism, but believing that the war was the first test of responsible Home Rule, Redmond threw his party behind the war effort.

On Monday 24 April 1916, Dublin was laid waste by rifle and artillery fire as extreme Irish nationalists launched a suicidal assault on British power.23 It took a week of bitter fighting to quell the rebellion.

Though the uprising was crushed, the result, as the insurgents had hoped, was a strategic disaster for British rule. At a stroke they had restored Britain’s fading image as the brutal oppressor and destroyed the credibility of Redmond and the moderates.

As in Ireland, the search for a liberal answer to the question of imperial overlordship in India had been given new energy by the accession of a Liberal government in 1906. In 1909 a system of legislative councils had been introduced to incorporate a larger part of the Indian elite into running the Raj.

This cooperation was consolidated in December at Lucknow when an agreement was reached under which the rights of the Muslim minority would be protected by means of separate electoral colleges.25 These inter-communal agreements were profoundly unsettling to the British. Protecting the 80 million Muslims of the subcontinent was one of the fundamental justifications for British rule.

As a further concession, in early March 1917 the government of India announced to general applause that it had secured the right to impose a protective tariff on the import of British manufactures of cotton goods, one of the most eagerly anticipated benefits of self-rule. For British liberals this undermined the entire logic of empire.

By the summer of 1917 the first steps in this disastrous delegitimizing cycle were already being acted out by the overstretched governors of Indian provinces, who ruled territories the size of European countries.

On 16 June Pentland placed Besant under house arrest.30 This played directly into the hands of the radicals. Home Rule agitation spread across the Indian political class. Mohandas Gandhi, recently arrived from South Africa, threw himself into the struggle, calling for a petition with a million peasant signatures.

The strikes of early May, involving hundreds of thousands of workers in defiance of the official trade union leadership, were unprecedented. The government’s response was to arrest the leading shop stewards under pre-emptive Defence of the Realm powers.33 In January the Independent Labour Party had cheered Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ speech, and in the summer their conference in Leeds passed resolutions supporting a negotiated peace on the basis of the Petrograd formula, by a majority of two to one.

There had not been an election in Britain since 1910. A poll would be postponed until the end of the war, but before then the parties would have to decide on which electorate their mandate would be based.

In 1910 not quite two-thirds of the male population was entitled to vote, with disenfranchisement in poor urban districts rising to over 60 per cent.34 After a war that had taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of men from those same districts, this was no longer a sustainable position.

unlike in Imperial Germany, the democratization of Britain was not allowed to become a matter for ruinous confrontation between democratic and anti-democratic forces. In February 1918, with barely a ripple of public argument, Britain passed the largest franchise reform in its history.

By early 1917 the cross-party conference had already agreed on manhood suffrage. Within a matter of months it agreed a compromise formula on female suffrage that would enfranchise millions of women, but maintain an overall male majority in the electorate.

Ick just give women the vote

What allowed a fundamental process of constitutional change to appear as little more than a procedural adjustment, ‘pre-chewed political baby food’, as one conservative fundamentalist commented?36 Beneath this idealized image of discursive agreement lay something more fundamental: a clear commitment by the leadership of both established parties to secure the legitimacy of the political process by ensuring that the reforms appeared neither as a bribe nor as a concession extracted by coercive threats.

Crucially, a solid coalition between democratic feminists, the Labour Party and the trade union movement made clear that any measure to enfranchise soldiers and male war workers that did not include votes for women would be unacceptable.

The sense that they faced an unstoppable inevitability led the Tories to take the initiative themselves. In August 1916 it was the patrician Lord Salisbury who introduced the emotively entitled Trench Voting Bill.

Meanwhile, the Tory leadership worked hard to silence embarrassing outbursts of openly anti-democratic sentiment from within their own ranks.38 The press, with Lord Northcliffe leading the way, rallied to the democratic consensus.

the contrast with the struggles over the great Reform Act of 1866 was stark. Then, both sides of the argument had assumed ‘that fitness’ for the franchise ‘had to be proved’, Now, ‘when one talks to the young sentimental woman suffragist he [sic] sees no relevance in the enquiry whether the great mass of women know or care anything about politics. It is quite enough for him that they are human beings. As such they have a right to vote.’

As the ‘mother of parliaments’ Westminster took no lessons from foreigners. That ‘foreign’ influences were abroad in British politics at all was indicative of the seriousness of the crisis. But despite this strategic parochialism, by 1917 international concerns were more or less openly entering into the discussion of the British constitution.

Montagu still believed that self-government was a project that would be realized over ‘many years . . . many generations’.45 Such qualifications were the staple of nineteenth-century justifications of empire. But as Montagu took office the credibility of this gradualist approach to reform was fraying.

As Montagu admitted to Chamberlain, if they had simply promised ‘self-government’, that might have been construed to mean that India could be placed under a ‘Hindu dictator’. ‘Responsible government’ clearly meant that any such ruler would have to be ‘responsible to some form of parliamentary institution’.

In the autumn of 1917 it was not London but the cause of Home Rule that claimed a great victory. December 1917 saw the incongruous spectacle of Besant, an elderly Anglo-Irish woman presiding triumphantly over the most agitated mass meeting the patrician Indian National Congress had ever witnessed.

Governmental authority in India was divided between a central executive, provincial governments and local authorities. Central and provincial governments were to be answerable to legislative councils constituted in part through nomination and in part through electorates of varying size. Significantly, by 1922, the British relinquished all official control over local government in India and the urban franchise was rapidly expanded.

As Montagu and Chelmsford acknowledged, these compromises were far from any liberal ideal. But they were not merely reactionary either, as is evidenced by the solution adopted for the female franchise. This was to be determined at a provincial level, with the result that in the elections to the Madras state legislature more women were entitled to vote than in all but a handful of the most liberal European nations.

Responsible government must be the goal of British rule in India, the report insisted, because it was the ‘best form of government’ that the British themselves ‘knew’.

Upholding a racial double standard in India was not tenable in the long run. Despite the differences that segmented Indian society, its unity was growing. Illiterate peasants were maturing into responsible citizens.

Meanwhile, the troublesome nationalists should not be repressed, but acknowledged as Britain’s own ‘children’. Their desire for ‘self-determination’ was the ‘inevitable result of education in the history and thought of Europe’.

Paternal much

Down to the end of the war Gandhi could be found travelling across India, recruiting volunteers for the war effort of the liberal empire. Home Rule, he insisted, meant not independence, but that Indians ‘should become . . . partners in the Empire’, like Canada and Australia.

When the great popular uprising against British rule began in 1919, it was not triggered by discontent at the inadequacy of the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals. It was sparked by outrage at the fact that the trust which the Indians had once more placed in that settlement had been violated by precisely the kind of draconian measures that liberals such as Montagu were desperate to avoid.

appealing as it may be to construct a ‘Wilsonian moment’ in India, it existed, if it existed at all, in the minds of no more than a handful of nationalists.56 What would link Indian politics to the world was the internal politics of the empire – London, Ireland and imperial policy

In 1916 there was no public more susceptible to the appeal of Sinn Fein than the Irish community of the United States.57 And if there was any population in the United States to which Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ stance made immediate and intuitive sense it was Irish Americans.

In his speech to Congress on 2 April 1917 Wilson placed the United States on the side of democracy against untrustworthy autocracies. But he left open where the Entente were to be situated.