Steve Pincus and James Robinson
Wars and State-Making Reconsidered: The Rise of the Developmental State
This article argues that the term “fiscal-military state” is a misnomer, particularly when applied to one of the paradigmatic cases of early modern state formation, Britain. Britain devoted a significantly smaller proportion of government revenues to military expenses than any other European state. Moreover, its overall expenditure included important non-military elements and massive investment in colonial development, a fact that standard accounts fail to take into consideration. The existing fiscal historiography also ignores large swaths of other types of state activity. Finally, the article argues that the British state—and quite probably other early modern states—was not forged in warfare. If war did not make the British state, this would explain why the British state was less narrowly focused on making war.
Olivier Compagnon and Pierre Purseigle
Geographies of Mobilization and Territories of Belligerence during the First World War
The global history of the First World War is still in its early stages. This article proposes to contribute to its development by “de-Europeanizing” the historiography of the conflict and suggesting some of the ways scholars can move beyond “centers” and “peripheries” to combine different spatial scales of analysis. First, it demonstrates the need to look beyond the European theaters of the war and investigate spaces hitherto deemed to be marginal: despite their distance from the epicenter of the combat, these regions were traversed by tensions directly linked to the conflict and witnessed major transformations between 1914 and 1918. Second, it invites researchers to focus on elements such as the environment, natural resources, or diasporas, which make it possible to break out of a national framework of analysis and to do justice to the global impact of the Great War. This twofold approach underlines the value of a new geography of mobilization and belligerence, one that matches the diversity of experiences and reflects the truly global dimension of the First World War.
Tait Keller
The Ecological Edges of Belligerency: Toward a Global Environmental History of the First World War
This article represents an initial foray into the global environmental history of the First World War and suggests new approaches that can change our understanding of the conflict. With ravaged farmlands, charred trees, and muddy quagmires as iconic images of the First World War, scholars have generally tended to overlook the place and the role of nature. Yet only by taking the environment into account can we fully understand the trauma of war and how this conflict in particular shaped the most basic levels of human existence for years to come. Armies in the First World War were both social and biological entities, which depended on a “military ecology” of energy extraction, production, and supply. To keep soldiers and machines in action, belligerent states commandeered food and fuel throughout the biosphere, extending the war's environmental reach far beyond the western front. Examining a number of the ways that war shaped the periphery—evolving disease ecologies in colonial Africa, tin extraction in Southeast Asia, and food production in Latin America—will show that the boundaries of belligerency were vast. These three regions also illustrate the different ways in which the preparation and pursuit of war transformed societies and the natural world. Seeing what George Kennan called the twentieth century's “seminal catastrophe” from an environmental perspective illuminates the global dimensions of the First World War. The conflict accelerated environmental change that had begun in the previous century and established the patterns of military-industrial production, human victimization, and environmental exploitation that defined the twentieth century.
Priya Satia
Sideshows at the Center: British Campaigns in the Middle East during the Great War
This article places the Middle East campaigns at the heart of the effort to understand the First World War's cultural impact in Britain. By doing so, it shows that the effects typically attributed to the western front—loss of faith in technology and heroism—were mediated in important ways by lessons emerging from the Middle Eastern fronts in Palestine and Mesopotamia, where the British found their faith in technology strengthened. By incorporating that cultural legacy, we can better understand why Britons remained committed to the war and why they maintained their faith in industrial development and imperial warfare after the war had ended. The heroic image of T. E. Lawrence and of the infrastructural development undertaken by the British military in Mesopotamia bolstered faith in technology and imperialism just when the western front was revealing their darker side. The article begins with a study of the unique military tactics the British adopted in the region, shaped by particular cultural notions about a largely imaginary “Arabia”: deception, irregular warfare, and airpower were used to an unprecedented degree in these campaigns. It goes on to show how the British government strove to capitalize on the propaganda effects of these “sideshows” as they became successful. In particular, they stressed the notion that the empire could find redemption in the restoration of the ancient “cradle of civilization.” Such ideas sustained idealistic notions even as the western front unleashed a new kind of cynicism.
Nicolas Delalande
Protecting the Credit of the State: Speculation, Trust, and Sovereignty in Interwar France
This article investigates the creation, in 1924, of a new offence in French law, aimed at punishing anyone found guilty of “breaching the credit of the state”—that is, of discourses or practices likely to damage the financial reputation of the French state. In the midst of a destabilizing budgetary and monetary crisis, surrounded by fierce political disputes, “the credit of the state” was legally defined as an essential attribute of sovereignty, to be defended against internal and external threats. However, the intellectual history of public credit and the analysis of archival material relating to this new offence show how difficult it was for courts to draw a line between the freedom of the market and the protection of public order. More broadly, this research emphasizes the interconnected role of material and immaterial elements in promoting public trust in the value of the papers (bonds and currency) issued by the state.
Juliette Cadiot
Accessory and Witness: The Profession of the Lawyer under Stalin (1945–1953)
Drawing on research conducted in Russian and Ukrainian archives, this article explores the legal profession in the late Stalin-era USSR, with a focus on the years following the Second World War. During this period, the number of cases dealt with in the courts grew considerably, and calls to rehabilitate “socialist legality” became more pressing. It is against this backdrop that the article details the different professional aspects—social trajectories and daily practices—of the criminal lawyer's craft. It concludes that while their influence remained relatively weak and was rarely anchored in their legal capabilities, Soviet lawyers did develop economic and networking capacities that enabled them to maintain their autonomy and to fully participate in the dynamics of the Soviet society that emerged in the aftermath of the war. Despite their weak position and the purges they had suffered, lawyers found ways to gain privileged information about ongoing cases, and some of them played an intermediary role between the apparatus of repression and Soviet notables—particularly by participating in the system of bribery and clientelism. Their actions exemplified the ways that Soviets acclimatized to Stalin's dictatorship, working to bend and improve the rules and to create spaces of protection, mutual assistance, and exchange at the heart of the state and the party.
