How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth Of The First World War

Next November will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, known as the bloodiest war in European history. Perhaps less well known is the considerable impact that the first world war had on many former colonies, or its role in accelerating conflicts and political struggles across Asia and Africa.

In total, more than four million non-whites — most of them recruited into war by colonial powers — fought in the war; but even while they were recruited to fight, their growing presence on the continent also fuelled increasing racism, xenophobia, and exclusionary policies.

This article delves into the history of the “other” fighters in World War I, and their treatment by colonial powers — both at home and in Europe — and the construction of “white superiority” upon which colonial powers relied to justify the racist and genocidal politics that accompanied Western expansion.

Understanding this, the author argues, is critical to explaining the context of white nationalist movements today, “one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.”

“Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.”

Taken in this context, the movements we are seeing today — particularly the fear of refugees in Europe, and the swing to the right by many Western countries, shows a certain amount of continuity.