The war was a transforming force that weakened Europe's abiUty to
maintain its Asian and African empires, and it pointed toward a new
relationship between the developed and underdeveloped portions of the
globe. The participation of large numbers of Indian troops in the British war
effort was matched by the role that troops and laborers from French North
Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Indochina played in France's war effort. In
India, the need for that crucial part of the British Empire to cooperate with
the war effort had led to significant change. In August 1917, the British
made what historian Judith M. Brown called "a critical departure" by
announcing that they were committed to bringing Indians into every branch
of the administration and gradually developing institutions of self-government.
India was not, in the reformers' view, to become independent, but
rather to become similar to white portions of the empire in governing itself
under the supervision of the home country. In 1919 the promised reforms
got under way. Thus began "a process of adaptation which finally broke the
imperial bonds tying India to Britain."io
The transforming forces were also at work in Africa. As Robin Hallett has
put it, "Wartime service was a powerful solvent in breaking down the isolation
of many African communities, while the spectacle of white men trying to kill
each other served to erode the mystique of unquestioned white superiority."! i
In Egypt, a major staging ground for the Gallipoli operations in 1915 and then
for General Allenby's offensive against the Ottoman Empire, the stationing
of hundreds of thousands of British troops heightened prewar opposition to
the British presence and led to the founding of the important Wafd nationalist
party that would bid for Egyptian independence.
In the aftermath of the war, Germany's African possessions were transferred
to France, Britain, and Belgium as mandates under the authority of
the League of Nations. This served to put the governing role of the European
powers in question in regions such as British Tanganyika (formerly German
East Africa) under some international scrutiny, and they were now bound
to govern these territories with a view toward their eventual independence.
To the combination of a diminished Europe and colonial peoples aware of
their contribution to the war effort was added Woodrow Wilson's universalist
rhetoric about the self-determination of peoples. The outward form and
size of the colonial empires seemed intact, but the framework in which they
existed had now begun to change in a way not visible before 1914. It would
take the later impact of World War II—which weakened Europe even more
severely and again required the British and French governments to rely on
the populations of their empires—to bring the empires down by the 1960s.
World History
