Imperial Capitals at War: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

London was one of six large imperial capitals in Europe (Berlin, Constantinople, Paris, St Petersburg, Vienna) which became focal points of total war during the First World War. In some respects, each of these capitals can be understood as undergoing a form of siege in which the endurance of the population at the heart of the combatant Empires was severely tested. London proved to have important resources which helped it to endure better than some of the others.

KEYWORDS:

• Bombing
• Empires
• Endurance
• First World War
• Berlin
• Constantinople
• Paris
• St Petersburg
• Vienna
• London

Notes on Contributor

Adrian Gregory is an Associated Professor at Oxford and Fellow of Pembroke College. He is the author of The Last Great War (Cambridge, 2008) and A War of Peoples (Oxford 2014).

Notes

1 See S. Abernethy, ‘Moving Wartime London: Public Transport in the First World War’, The London Journal, 41:3 (2016), doi:10.1080/03058034.2016.1213526

2 M. B. Barrett, Operation Albion: The German Conquest of the Baltic Islands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

3 H.G Wells first published The War in the Air in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1908.

4 A.P. Hyde, The First Blitz: The German Air Campaign against Britain in the First World War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword 2013); N. Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Transworld, 2010).

5 S. Grayzel, ‘“A Promise of Terror to Come”: Air Power and the Destruction of Cities in British Imagination and Experience, 1908-39’, in S. Goebel and D. Keene (eds.), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 47–62.

6 See Hanson, First Blitz, 500–30.

7 O. Nicolajsen and B. Yilmazer, Ottoman Aviation 1911-1920, <www.ole-nicolajsen.com> [accessed 10 June 2016]; see also Turkey in the First World War, <www.turkeyswar.com/aviation/airdefense.html> [accessed 10 June 2016].

8 See British Library, ‘Raid of Vienna: Major Gabriele D'Annunzio and his Pilot Natale Palli’, photograph, <www.bl.uk/collection-items/raidoverVienna> [accessed 10 June 2016]. There is an interesting Italian propaganda film of the raid, Il volo su Vienna, available on Youtube.

9 <Sbiii.com/ordsuper.html#parisgun> [accessed 10 June 2016].

10 R.B. McKean, St Petersburg Between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 335–44.

11 Ibid., 345–9.

12 M. Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33–5.

13 Ibid., 39–41, 46–53.

14 Ibid., 41–42.

15 B. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) is highly critical; K. Allen, ‘Sharing Scarcity: Bread Rationing and the First World War in Berlin, 1914-1923’, Journal of Social History, 32 (1998), 371–93 is more positive but narrower. G. Yaney, The World of the Manager: Food Administration World War One Berlin (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994) is a nuanced study of one bureaucrat.

16 C. Rollet, ‘The Other War II: Setbacks in Public Health’, in J .Winter, J.-L. Robert et al. (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 463.

17 This could be challenged S. Pamuk, ‘The Ottoman Economy in World War I’, in S. Broadberry and M. Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112–35 paints a damning picture but the severity of rural famine in Syria and Anatolia still seems to be worse.

18 One of the few useful discussions can be found at Y. Yanikdağ, ‘Ottoman Empire/Middle East’, 1914-1918 Online: International Encycolpedia of the First World War, <http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/ottoman_empiremiddle_east> [accessed 10 June 2016].

19 I. Lyster (ed.), Among the Ottomans: Diaries from Turkey in World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 24, 32.

20 R.J. Young (ed.), Under Siege: Portraits of Civilian Life in France during World War I (New York: Berghahn, 2000).

21 T. Bonzon and B. Davis, ‘Feeding the Cities’, in Winter, Robert et al. (eds.), Capital Cities, Vol. I, 305–34.

22 M. Lyster, ‘diary entry for 30 August’, in Lyster, Among the Ottomans, 61.

23 T. Stovall, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism, and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

24 A. Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994).