Archives and trails from the First World War: repurposing imperial records of North African and Indian soldiers in Palestine and Syria, 1917-1923

ABSTRACT

First World War scholars more or less agree on the limitations imposed by archival sources on the study of North African and Indian troops. Conventional methods to find ‘the voice’ of the soldier do not apply in this case and the scarcity of records partly explains why so little is written. So, what opportunities are there in such an endeavour? This article argues for the need to decolonise military archives from the Great War era. That is to say, to use information that was originally gathered to serve narrow military interests as a means to understand the war experiences of the colonial soldiers. These sources, largely official records, bearing stamps of the past regimes, cannot be separated from the context or intent of their production. Nonetheless, they must not be overlooked as new historiographical demands make it necessary to read colonial archives for evidence of their context. Failing to draw from, and reflect upon, colonial era records on the Great War, despite their shortcomings, is tantamount to condemning valuable aspects of global history to oblivion. In turn, acknowledging these shortcomings, paradoxically, lends greater value to such sources as the colonial context in which they were produced becomes observable.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• colonial knowledge and power
• First World War in the Middle East
• North African soldiers
• Indian soldiers

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Royal Historical Society and the University of St Andrews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Historian DeWitt Ellinwood had in fact conducted interviews with Indian Army veterans who served in the period 1914–1939, some of whom also participated in the Middle East campaigns. These records are now available at the British Library. Transcripts of interviews with former Indian soldiers who served in World War One and World War Two, Mss Eur F 729: 1967–1986, British Library (BL) London, UK.

2. Anthony Clayton, France, Soldiers, and Africa, Brassey’s Defence Publishers, London, 1988, p. 6.

3. Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918, JHU Press, Maryland, 2008, p. 19.

4. David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18, St Martin’s Press, Basingstoke, 1999, p. 17. Ethnically, they were not so much ‘Indian’ as South Asian but were known as such after the army they served. George Morton-Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, p. 2.

5. Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, p. 287.

6. Ricardo Roque and Kim Wagner, ‘Introduction’, in Ricardo Roque and Kim Wagner (eds), Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, pp. 7, 10.

7. ibid., pp. 9–10.

8. ibid., p. 10.

9. ibid., p. 22.

10. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in Donald Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interview/Michel Foucault, Cornell University Press, New York, 1977, p. 138.

11. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Pantheon, New York, 1972, p. 130.

12. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, Summer 1995, p. 6.

13. ibid.

14. Richard Harvey Brown and Beth Davis-Brown, ‘The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Construction of National Consciousness’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 11, no. 4, November 1998, p. 19.

15. Michael Lynch, ‘Archives in Formation: Privileged Spaces, Popular Archives and Paper Trails’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2, May 1999, p. 79. Although archives mostly give the perspective of the dominant actors, absolute control over information is impossible.

16. ‘Rapport de surveillance politique indigène, mai 1918, Notes et rapports sur l’état d’esprit de la population indigène pendant la première guerre mondiale, 1917–1918ʹ [‘Report on political surveillance of indigenous populations, May 1918, Notes and reports on the morale of the indigenous population during the First World War, 1917–1918ʹ], Series MN, Carton 0016, Dossier 0005, Piece 212, Archives Nationales de Tunis (ANT), Tunisia, p. 30.

17. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’, in Carolyn Hamilton et al. (ed.), Refiguring the Archive, Springer, Dordrecht, 2002, p. 98.

18. ibid., p. 91.

19. Jacques Frémeaux, Damien Heurtebise and Emmanuel Pénicaut, ‘Colonies et Protectorats dans la Guerre’ [‘Colonies and protectorates during the war’], in Coraline Coutant-Daydé, Mathieu Stoll and Philippe Nivet (eds.), Archives de la Grande Guerre: Des Sources pour l’Histoire [Archives of the Great War: Sources for history], Presse universitaire de Rennes, Rennes, 2014, pp. 295–6.

20. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009, pp. 27–8.

21. ibid., p. 36.

22. ibid., p. 45.

23. ‘Questions Musulmanes 1920–34, Priorité extrême urgent, 4 mai 1920ʹ [‘Muslim questions 1920–34, Extremely urgent priority, 4 May 1920ʹ], F127, Archives du Maroc (AM) Rabat, Morocco.

24. Frémeaux, Heurtebise and Pénicaut, p. 296.

25. Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, ‘Content and Use of Colonial Archives: An Under-Researched Issue’, Archival Science, vol. 16, no. 2, September 2014, p. 114.

26. Derrida, who speaks of ‘archival violence’, emphasises that the ‘archive takes place at the place of origin and structural breakdown of the said memory’. The authors therefore argue that archival violence occurs within the purview of colonialist power/knowledge and the archive. Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, ‘Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever’, Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring 2000, p. 31.

27. ibid., p. 25. While lost voices can be retrieved from existing texts through discourse analysis, lost texts pose far greater challenges to researchers.

28. Archivists from the former colonies, quite understandably, now question the classical archival concepts, rooted in Europe’s written culture and systems of classification. Joan M Schwartz and Terry Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory’, Archival Science, vol. 2, no. 1, 2002, p. 10.

29. CR Pennell, ‘Digitised, Digital and Static Archives and the Struggles in the Middle East and North Africa’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 47, no. 2, 2019, p. 256.

30. Roque and Wagner, Engaging Colonial Knowledge, p. 24.

31. Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, p. 30.

32. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 47.

33. Omdahs were the local mayors. ‘The Rising in Egypt’, 17 April 1919, Papers of Walter Carne, PR03051, Australian War Memorial (AWM), Canberra, Australia.

34. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 7.

35. ‘Surveillance politique indigène, Tunis, 13 juin 1918, Notes et rapports de police sur les activités politiques suspectes dans les cafés, les restaurants, les bars et les souks, 1917–1922ʹ [‘Indigenous political surveillance, Tunis, 13 June 1918, Notes and police reports on suspicious political activity in cafes, restaurants, bars and souks, 1917–1922ʹ], Series MN, Carton 0017, Dossier 0002, Piece 146, ANT Tunis, Tunisia.

36. ‘Questions Militaires, Recrutement des Indigènes’ [‘Military questions, indigenous recruitment’], 1921, ALG GGA 3H/63, ANOM Aix-en-Provence, France.

37. Schwartz and Cook, p. 3.

38. Jean-François Moufflet, ‘Les Registres de Matricules Militaires’ [‘Military registration registers’], in Coutant-Daydé, Stoll and Nivet, pp. 55–6.

39. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 9.

40. To access the files at Pau, however, one needs to present the ‘Acte de Naissance’ of the soldiers which can be practically impossible to acquire for researchers interested in looking at more than a few selected files.

41. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald Bouchard, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1977, pp. 137–8.

42. ‘Questions musulmanes (septembre 1918 – juin 1919)’ [‘Muslim questions (September 1918 – June 19190)ʹ], 14 November 1918, 1 MA/15 635, CAD Nantes, France.

43. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 43.

44. ‘Au sujet du recrutement indigène tunisien en 1919, Lettre de le Résident général à le President du Conseil, Ministre de la Guerre à Paris, 30 octobre 1918, Armée Tunisienne, Recrutement de 1919, Opérations du recrutement, 1918–1920ʹ [‘On the subject of recruitment of indigenous Tunisians in 1919, Letter from the Resident General to the President of the Council, Minister of War in Paris, 30 October 1918, Tunisian Army, 1919 Recruitment, Recruitment operations, 1918–1920ʹ], Series E, Carton 479, Dossier 14, ANT Tunis, Tunisia, p. 4.

45. Roque and Wagner, Engaging Colonial Knowledge, pp. 6–7.

46. ibid., p. 9.

47. ‘Rapport mensuel du protectorat, Situation d’ensemble du protectorat, 1924 mois de septembre, Rapports mensuels du protectorat 1923–25 [‘Monthly report of the protectorate, Overall situation of the protectorate, September 1924, Monthly reports of the protectorate, 1923–1925ʹ], C 522, AM Rabat, Morocco.

48. Rapport mensuel du protectorat, Situation d’ensemble du protectorat, 1924 mois de octobre, Rapports mensuels du protectorat 1923–25, [‘Monthly report of the protectorate, Overall situation of the protectorate, October 1924, Monthly reports of the protectorate, 1923–1925ʹ], C 522, AM Rabat, Morocco.

49. BIB AOM B//3930, ANOM Aix-en-Provence, France.

50. Tunisie, Problèmes frontaliers et questions diverses, Questions politiques, Réformes Tunisiennes (décrets du Bey, 1922) Nationalistes (1923–26) [Tunisia, Border problems and other issues, Political issues, Tunisian Reforms (Bey decrees, 1922), Nationalists (1923–26)’], 1922, 1923–26, ALG GGA 25 H 32, ANOM Aix-en-Provence, France, p. 31.

51. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 6.

52. ibid.

53. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, p. 125.

54. ibid., p. 137.

55. ibid., p. 138.

56. ‘Contrôle postal de certaines correspondances militaires, 7 octobre 1920, Afrique 1914–18, Affaires Musulmanes’ [‘Postal control of certain military correspondence, 7 October 1920, Africa 1914–18, Muslim Affairs’], accessible as microfilm P/3532, 55 CPCOM 41, CAD La Courneuve, France.

57. ibid., Omissi.

58. Das.

59. ibid., p. 287.

60. ibid., pp. 275–6.

61. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sneha Reddy

Sneha Reddy is a doctoral student at the School of International Relations in the University of St Andrews, Scotland (2016–2020). Her thesis is a comparative study of North African and Indian Soldiers in the First World War in Palestine and Syria, 1917–1923.