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Abstract
The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has refocused the attention of historians not just on the processes that led to war but also on the multitude of ethnicities who participated in the conflict. This coverage reflects not just the ‘global turn’ in the historiography of the war but also an acknowledgement that the contribution of African, Caribbean and Asian servicemen has not received sufficient attention in previous studies. Organizers of official commemorations of the war have taken great care to make ceremonials more inclusive. Despite the renewed efforts of historians and politicians, the memory of the service of Black troops from former British colonies remains marginalized, in particular, those from Africa and the Caribbean. In this article, using mostly government archives, I argue that the origins of present day marginalization lie in the decisions made by politicians, military and colonial officials charged with the cultural remembrance and commemoration of African and Caribbean servicemen in the aftermath of the war. I will argue that, in the landscape of the symbolic centre of the former imperial metropole, officials deliberately constructed a memory of the war as a ‘white man's war’, fought with the assistance of loyal Asians, with the service of Africans and Caribbeans expressly excluded. This cultural construction of whiteness presents an obstacle in the present day to a full understanding of the extent of Black colonial participation in the war.
ORCiD
John Siblon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6888-8689
Notes on Contributor
John Siblon is a History Teacher in Islington, London. He has published material on Black British History and is currently a PhD Candidate at Birkbeck College researching the commemoration of Black Colonial troops in the aftermath of the First World War.
Notes
1 Correspondence with the Assistant Keeper of Muniments, Westminster Abbey, 20 March 2015.
2 ‘Colonial Troops for Imperial Service in War: Memorandum by the Colonial Defence Committee, prepared by Lt-Col E. A. Altham (Assistant Quartermaster General) & J. E. Clauson Sec, CDC, (Department of the HQ staff)’. June 1902, The National Archives, thereafter TNA (UK): CO 14682; WO 091/2242 No. 293 M.
3 War Office, Manual of Military Law (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1914), 242.
4 C. Koller, ‘The Recruitment of Colonial Troops in Africa and Asia and their Deployment in Europe during the First World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 26, 1–2 (2008), 111–133.
5 C. Hall, White Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), 209–212.
6 C. Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader. Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3–11.
7 C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 7–8.
8 F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 3–4.
9 D. Killingray, ‘All the King's Men? Blacks in the British Army in the First World War, 1914–1918’ in Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History 1780–1950, ed. by R. Lotz and I. Pegg (Crawley: The Rabbit Press, 1986), 175.
10 I have used ‘Black’ to describe African and Caribbean troops in place of ‘colonial’ which was used to describe all subject peoples of the British Empire but which later came to mean just those from the ‘dependent’ territories. In colonial times, the term ‘native’ or ‘negro’ was used to describe Black Africans and ‘coloured’ to describe Caribbeans.
11 J. Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 2.
12 War Cabinet, Peace Celebrations Committee, 9 May 1919, TNA (UK), CAB 27/52.
13 B. Schwarz, Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man's World (Oxford University Press, paperback edition, 2013; first published 2011), 98; S. Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2007).
14 War Cabinet to Colonial Office, 5 May 1919, TNA (UK), CO 323/813/23.
15 Hansard, House of Lords Debates, 9 April 1919, Volume 34 cc242-3.
16 ‘Peace Celebrations Report’, 9 May 1919, TNA (UK) CO 323/804/14.
17 Minute by Major A. Beattie, ‘Peace Celebrations Report’, 9 May 1919 TNA (UK), CO 323/804/14.
18 Minute by Sir G. Grindle, ‘Peace Celebrations Report’, 9 May 1919 TNA (UK), CO 323/804/14.
19 Minute by Sir H. Lambert, ‘Peace Celebrations Report’, 9 May 1919 TNA (UK), CO 323/804/14.
20 R. Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 136–137.
21 J. Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain, 158.
22 J. White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: Vintage, 2015, first published by The Bodley Head, 2014), 208–209.
23 War Cabinet, ‘Peace Celebrations Committee, Minutes of Meeting held on 9 May 1919’, TNA (UK), CAB 27/52.
24 ‘Peace Celebrations Report’, 9 May 1919, TNA (UK), CO 323/804/14.
25 ‘War Cabinet, Peace Celebrations Committee’, 1 July 1919, TNA (UK), CAB 27/52.
26 ‘Ministry of Works, Ceremonial – Part 2 – Peace Celebrations 1919’, 23 June 1919, TNA (UK), Works 21/74.
27 Colonel Requin, ‘“The Valour of the Native” Describing the Paris Victory Parade and the Contributions of French Colonial Forces’, The Times, 6 September 1919, 30.
28 T. Stovall, Paris and the Spirit of 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178.
29 ‘Order of Battle of Troops from Great Britain taking part in Victory March Paris 14 July 1919’, TNA (UK), WO 32/5238; ‘Peace Conference: British delegation: Files 2139/1/1–2180/1/1’, Telegram dated 6 July 1919 shows 1098 British troops despatched from the Army of the Rhine to Paris, TNA (UK) FO 608/269/28.
30 Brigadier-General E. W. Costello, ‘Native Officers and Men – Deputation to England and the Colonies: Peace Celebrations 1919’, British Library – India Office Records, IOR/L/M/7/5873.
31 ‘War Cabinet, Peace Celebrations Committee’, 9 July 1919, TNA (UK), CAB 27/52.
32 The Times, Monday 21 July 1919, 15.
33 Ministry of Works, ‘Ceremonial Part 2: Peace Celebrations 1919’, Appendix GA, TNA (UK), Works 21/74; Official Programme of Peace Celebrations, TNA (UK) CAB 27/52.
34 ‘Sudan Loyalty: Chiefs’ deputation to the King’ The Times, 29 July 1919, 7.
35 See: S. Das ‘Indians at Home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918: Towards an Intimate History’ in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. by S. Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
36 H. N. Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory and R. Lydekker (eds.), The Living Races of Mankind: a Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feasts and Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind throughout the World, first published, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902 (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1990).
37 Killingray, ‘All The King’s Men?', 170.
38 Nigeria: Volume 5, 15 June–21 August 1919, TNA (UK), CO 583/76.
39 Ibid.
40 Nigeria: Volume 5, 15 September 1919, TNA (UK), CO 583/76/51430.
41 D. Olusoga, The World's War (London: Head of Zeus Ltd, 2014), 403.
42 V. Allen, West Africa, 11 October 1919.
43 Internal Colonial Office Memorandum by Sir G. Grindle, Assistant Under-Secretary, 7 October 1919, TNA (UK) CO 318/352.
44 For ‘whiteness’ as a contingent hierarchy, see S. Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2007), 64–78.
45 N. C. Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57.
46 Commonwealth War Graves Commission, thereafter CWGC, 24 January 1923, WG 1734/Pt.1.
47 ‘Omission of British West Indies from Tablets in Cathedrals:-complaint by Mr T Daley’, 7 September 1932, CWGC, WG 1734/3/1.
48 ‘Omission of British West Indies from Tablets in Cathedrals:-complaint by Mr T Daley’, 22 October 1932, September 1932, CWGC, WG 1734/3/1.
49 Garner, Whiteness, 4.
50 ‘Mercantile Marine: Memorials to Missing: Part I’, 7 November 1922, CWGC WG 998/2, Part 1.
51 Ibid., 7 November 1922.
52 Ibid.
53 M. Barrett, ‘Subalterns at War: First World War Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission’ in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. by R. C. Morris (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010), 157.
54 ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee on Memorials to the Mercantile Marine’. 1 October 1923, CWGC, SDC 79.
55 http://www.cwgc.org/find-a-cemetery/cemetery/90002/TOWER%20HILL%20MEMORIAL <accessed 4 July 2016>.
56 N. Lahiri, ‘Commemorating and Remembering 1857: The Revolt in Delhi and its Afterlife’, World Archaeology, 35, 1, The Social Commemoration of Warfare (2003), 35–60.
57 B. Schwarz, Memories of Empire, 10.
58 B. Schwarz, ‘Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible’ in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, ed. by F. Driver and D. Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 272.