by Bob Seery

Created on: July 13, 2010

What were the root causes of this great and wasteful conflagration? Was it tension in the Balkans or the stirrings of new nationalisms, German expansion threatening Britain's predominance with Willhelm II's naval policy, or the "New Imperialism" with rivalries over trade routes to the Far East and elsewhere - or, was it, as Blackadder said, just too much bother not to have a war? More generally, what were the prevailing ideologies and 'structures of feeling' which contributed to the pre-war zeitgeist?

The rise in anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1880's and 90's (Dreyfuss affair, Polish pogroms etc.) would suggest a strong causative link with the effect and therefore the potency of other racialist theories who had as their purpose the legitimisation of empire (Kipling's white man'sburden etc.). This would in turn imply that the ideology necessitated by the expansion of empire had the further effect of enflaming pre-existing nationalist feelings in perhaps undesirable and unpredictable directions. It is clear that the representation, misrepresentation or underrepresentation of the 'black' and 'yellow' races all furnish us with further insights into how the imperial cultures viewed themselves in relation to this world beyond their door and by implication also their preparedness to go war either to consolidate their dominance of this world or to further approprate it for their own ends.  

 The colonies issue is the classical Leninist//Luxemburg position which is counteracted by the argument that the colonies weren't particularly lucrative to begin with. Export/import data is then rolled out to confirm the hypothesis but the versions I've read of it seem very shaky to me - it's perfectly plain that overseas territories were most often viewed as strategic bridgeheads for long-term advantage whose usefulness wouldl inevitably become apparent, and this is excluding consideration of the transparent lucrativeness of the prominent colonies in Egypt, Africa, the Middle and Far East. You need only look at the meteoric rise of Japan in the years after it defeated Russia (1900-05) in the first major resource war of the Far East to see how absurd this argument is. Those who oppose the colonies issue as a central fuse, such as Edward Thomson (in "Europe since Napoleon"), will then typically argue that the securing of a particular port was done only in terms of gaining an important bargaining chip - but if the port/routeway/territory has power

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