All posts tagged Verdun

Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001)

al-asl huwa ‘l-hurriya
‘The basic principle is liberty’

Traditional Islamic jurisprudence assumes that everyone is free, based on the dictum: ‘The basic principle is liberty’ (al-‘asl huwa ‘l-hurriya). On this basis was slavery was an exceptional, and undesirable, condition.

Ronald Segal

Ronald Segal lived from 1932 to 2008. He was a white South African, born into a rich Jewish family. He became a committed socialist and anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. He was a political activist, writer and editor, founder of the anti-apartheid magazine Africa South and of the Penguin African Library. He wrote 17 books, including a biography of Leon Trotsky, though he is best known for The State of the World Atlas (first edition, 1981), co-founded with Michael Kidron. Islam’s Black Slaves was his last book. It was conceived as a companion to his previous book, 1995’s The Black Diaspora: Five centuries of the black experience outside Africa.

The link with McLynn and Jeal

I was moved to buy this rather expensive book because my reading of Frank McLynn and Tim Jeal‘s histories of European (mostly British) explorers in nineteenth century Africa sparked my interest in a number of issues, among them their repeated descriptions of the impact of the non-white Arab slave trade on East and Central Africa. (They also piqued my interest in a) the large number of white slaves captured by Islamic slave traders and b) the central role of the Royal Navy in quelling the sea-borne slave trade after 1833, both subjects I hope to explore soon.)

Islam’s Black Slaves

Both Jeal and Adam Hochschild‘s accounts show that the capturing of black slaves in East Africa was a bloody, brutal business, with entire villages laid waste and thousands murdered for every hundred or so slaves (mostly women and children) who were finally transported down the slave trails to the east coast of Africa (specifically to the slave trading island of Zanzibar, owned and run after 1840 by the Sultan of Oman on the Persian Gulf).

Eye witness descriptions of widespread devastation and the brutality of the slavers on pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161.

The Atlantic slave trade

Slavery was probably part of pre-Islamic Arab life and economy.

Whereas the Atlantic slave trade only got going after 1500 as European explorers (at first mainly the Portuguese) visited the west coast of Africa, the slave trade in the realm of Islam existed since the 7th century, 900 years earlier. Whereas the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, many Arab countries only formally banned slavery in living memory, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, Oman in 1970.

According to the BBC, Muslim traders exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.

However 1) the Islamic trade in African slaves was always a lot smaller than the Atlantic slave trade, especially when the latter was at its height in the 18th century:

There was no extensive and long-sustained commitment of black slave labour to the scale of commercial plantation agriculture that absorbed so many millions of black slaves in the Americas. (p.42)

In part this was due to memories of the Zanj Rebellion (869 until 883) when black African slaves who were put to work draining the salt marshes around then present-day city of Basra in southern Iraq, rebelled, gathering more and more followers, slaves and free, and presenting a major threat to the Abbasid Caliphate (pages 43 to 44).

The rebellion had a lasting impact. The use of a large number of black slaves in plantation agriculture and irrigation schemes sharply declined; it was considered too dangerous. (p.44)

2) The Islamic attitude to black slaves was markedly different from that of white Europeans, in a number of ways.

The Atlantic slave trade, particularly as it escalated in the 18th century, was a key element in the development of industrial capitalism, generating the profits from sugar and tobacco plantations which was then invested in new technologies in Britain (p.106; cf Eric Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire). But what makes capitalism different from all other social and economic models is the relentless focus on profit. If you take this as the be-all and end-all of social effort, then human beings can quickly come to be seen as mere units of productivity or consumption, totted up on dry accounts books.

Thus, according to Segal, African slaves were treated as units of productions, like donkeys, horses or steam engines, stripped of any individuality, faceless drones whose lives and deaths meant nothing to their owners.

The treatment of slaves in Islam was overall more benign, in part because the values and attitudes promoted by religion inhibited the very development of a Western-style capitalism, with its effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit. (p.5)

He then discusses slavery’s place in Christianity, which is highly problematic. If Jesus meant what he said about the brotherhood of man and so on then slavery was an outrageous blasphemy against Christian teachings. This had two broad consequences.

1) Slave owners and their propagandists scoured the Bible to try and find justifications for slavery (blacks being the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah who cast him out and curses him after Ham, saw his father drunk and naked, etc); or they simply denied that blacks were fully human, using any pretext which presented itself to argue that Africans were animals, savages, lower down the evolutionary scale etc.

2) The other consequence was those brave Christians who applied Jesus’s teachings consistently and so opposed the slave trade, generally evangelical ‘low’ Christians who formed the backbone of the Abolitionist movement and whose story is told in Adam Hochschild’s moving book Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.

Islam’s treatment of slaves

By contrast, slavery was accepted by the Prophet Mohammed and his successors but, being openly acknowledged, was provided for. Mohammed goes out of his way to insist that slaves be treated humanely. A slave’s master was enjoined:

not to show contempt for a slave
to share his food with a slave
to provide a slave as good clothes as his own
to set a slave moderate and achievable work
not to punish a slave excessively but forgive him ‘seventy times a day’

Of course slavery of any form is a wicked denial of the basic human rights of human beings as we now, in 2023, conceive of them. But Mohammed’s explicit insistence that slaves should be treated well established a venerable standard which all Muslim slave owners could be held to. Thus:

Slaves in the Ottoman empire were differently regarded and treated [than in the West]. In conformity with Islamic teaching and law, slaves were people who had stipulated rights. (p.106)

Two routes to slavery

According to the Prophet there were only two legitimate route to slavery: birth to a slave mother or capture in warfare (p.36). Warfare could only be against non-Muslims or infidels, as Muhammed assumed that Muslim would never fight Muslim, brother against brother. Enslavement of captives in war went some way towards repaying the losses of warfare but was also a means of assimilating and converting non-Muslims who could, ultimately, be freed.

Obviously these rules were flouted repeatedly through history, but at least there were rules, they were clear, and rulers could be held to account against them.

Islam’s anti-racism

There are other key distinctions between the two traditions. It follows from point 1) above, that the anxiety felt by European Christian slave traders and owners created and fuelled a vast ideology of racism. Christian slave owners could only square their consciences if they held to the view that black Africans were not fully human, less than human, or even a different species. Many, many commentators claim the legacy of these scandalous opinions lingers on today in numerous institutions and organisations and individuals.

The point is that the Prophet Muhammad explicitly forbade racism.

The Koran expressly condemns racism along with tribalism and nationalism. (p.6)

According to Arabist Bernard Lewis:

pagan and early Islamic Arabia seems to have shared the general attitude of the ancient world, which attached no stigma to blackness. (quoted p.46)

In his Farewell Sermon Muhammed said:

‘O people, your Lord is one and your father [Adam] is one. There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; no superiority of a white person over a black person, nor superiority of a black person over a white person – except in righteousness.’ (quoted p.46)

Indeed, the first official muezzin, personally appointed by Muhammed to proclaim adhan in Mecca, was Bilal ibn Ribah, an African slave who was emancipated when Abu Bakr (who was to be the first caliph or successor to the Prophet) paid his ransom on Muhammad’s instruction (p.46).

This, as I imperfectly understand it, is one of the great appeals of Islam through the ages. When a convert submits to Allah he or she joins the great international ulema, regardless of ethnicity or skin colour. This, as I understand it, explains the surge of interest in Islam among American black activists of the later 1960s such as Malcolm X, who thought the Christian tradition espoused by the Reverend Martin Luther King, was hopelessly compromised by its profound involvement in the slave trade for centuries.

Forty years later James Fergusson dwelled on the appeal of Islam to Somalis in his book ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’. He cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, who said:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens.

[Islam] continued to encompass slavery long after slaves had been freed throughout Christendom. But while slavery was practiced in Christendom and Islam alike, the freeing of individual slaves by their owners was much more frequent and widespread in Islam. This was of particular relevance to the social assimilation of blacks. As slaves, they were subject to no special racial discrimination in law; and, once freed, they enjoyed in law equal rights as citizens. (p.9)

Something very much not true of freed blacks in America and their descendants, arguably, to this day.

However, that was the theory, and Segal goes on to describe how Islamic social practice and attitudes often fell far short. He traces the emergence of anti-black attitudes which might be attributed to 1) the Zanj rebellion; 2) contempt for the mainly manual labour many black slaves were condemned to in a culture which prized intellectual achievement.

He then goes on to cite an impressive roster of medieval Islamic scholars who authoritatively declaimed a series of hair-raisingly racist generalisations against black Africans. A lot of this was repetition with elaboration of Galen’s founding racist generalisations from the third century of the Christian era.

By the Middle Ages the Arabic word ‘abd had come to denote black slave and mamluk to mean white slave (p.49).

A last point about the racism or absence arising from the Islamic slave trade. As mentioned, the Atlantic slave trade a) prioritised men, for hard manual labour and b) the European owners erected a severe race barrier, which involved legal and cultural denigration of Africans.

By contrast, the Islamic trade prioritised female slaves which led to greater miscegenation or inter-breeding. I wonder if anyone’s done research to discover how much ‘black DNA’ is present in the Arab population. I came across this website online: it claims the DNA of the typical Egyptian contains 3% of African genes, Kuwaitis are 7% African, Lebanese are 2% East African and so on. I’ve no idea if this is correct or scientifically meaningful.

But Segal definitely asserts that over 1,000 years of interbreeding between black Africans and Arabs produced a population many of whose members are racially indistinguishable – in stark contrast to the situation in North America where the visual distinction between black and white was fiercely enforced until well into the 20th century and so remains, to this day, much more prominent and problematic.

Islam’s slaves in the service sector

Slaves in the Atlantic system were, classically, regarded as units of production in a brutally capitalist system, worked to death on plantations. Thus it’s calculated that the slaves were transported in a ratio of 2 men to every woman, because sheer brute strength was required on the plantations.

Whereas slaves in the Islamic world tended to be employed in the name of consumption, often very conspicuous consumption, as Segal’s profiles of numerous immensely rich caliphs and Muslim rulers indicate. The very rich tended to have vast numbers of concubines, servants, attendants and whatnot, many of whom were slaves. Segal tells us that Ahmad b Tulun, the Tulunid ruler from 868 to 884, left at his death 24,000 white slaves and 45,000 black ones (p.54).

Essentially, the distinction between Western and Ottoman – indeed Islamic – slavery was that between the commercial and the domestic. (p.107)

Thus it is that the gender ratio was reversed, with an estimated two female slaves transported into the Islamic world for every male, as slaves were most commonly used for household work (most conspicuously, concubinage, which modern scholars might describe as sex slavery).

Lower down the social order, many slaves worked in the service sector as cooks, porters, secretaries and so on. There is much evidence that, although their capture in Africa was a violent and traumatic experience, once they ended up in Arab Muslim households, many slaves were treated well.

Slaves in Islamic armies

Some slaves were trained to serve as soldiers. This was the case with the Mamluks, an Arabic word which literally means ‘owned’ or ‘slave (p.31). These were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world.

Mamluks became a powerful military knightly class in various Muslim societies that were controlled by dynastic Arab rulers. Particularly in Egypt and Syria, but also in the Ottoman Empire, Levant, Mesopotamia, and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, Mamluk factions seized the sultanate centred on Egypt and Syria, and controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate from 1250 to 1517. The Mamluk Sultanate fought the Christian Crusaders in 1154 to 1169 and 1213 to 1221, effectively driving them out of Egypt and the Levant (p.31).

Segal’s discussion of slaves in Islamic armies pages 45 to 46.

Talking of one-time slaves rising to power, the longest reigning of the Fatimid Caliphs, al-Mustansir (1036 to 1094) was the son of a black Sudanese concubine, whose mother, because he only came to power when he was seven, was the real ruler of the Caliphate for the 15 years of his minority (p.51); and Segal gives other instances of Africans who rose to positions of high power, especially black eunuchs.

Islam’s releasing of slaves

The technical term in English is ‘manumission’, from the Latin, meaning simply ‘release from slavery’.

The Koran teaches that it is virtuous to free slaves. It says one of the uses of zakat, a pillar of Islam, which can be translated as ‘alms’, is to pay for the freeing of slaves:

‘Alms-tax is only for the poor and the needy, for those employed to administer it, for those whose hearts are attracted to the faith, for freeing slaves, for those in debt, for Allah’s cause, and for needy travellers. This is an obligation from Allah. And Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.
( Surah At-Tawbah 9:60)

Freeing your slaves can offset sins you have committed and hasten your entry to heaven.

‘The man who frees a Muslim slave, God will free him from hell, limb for limb.’ (quoted p.35)

The Koran describes a particular type of legal contract, the mukataba, which it encouraged slave owners to make with slaves, whereby they could work towards their freedom (p.36).

The Koran says slave owners can have sex with female slaves, but places on them an injunction to marry them off to male slaves, whereupon the husband has sole right. The Koran allots praise to a slave owner who educates his female slave, frees then marries her (p.36). Unlike America and other European colonies, it was expressly forbidden to separate slave mothers and their children.

Eunuchs

Islam expressly forbids mutilating the human body which is the image of God.

‘Whoever kills his slave, we will kill him; whoever mutilates (his slave), we will mutilate him; and whoever castrates his slave, we will castrate him.’ (Sunan an-Nasa’i 4736; Book 45, Hadith 31)

Nonetheless, eunuchs became an engrained part of wealthy Islamic culture and pious Muslims got around the ruling by having infidels do the castrating. Thus during the Middle Ages Prague and Verdun became castration centres supplying eunuchs to the Islamic market (p.40).

Possession of eunuchs was just one sign of the extraordinary conspicuous consumption which distinguished medieval Islam. Thus, Segal tells us, at the start of the 10th century, when Alfred the Great’s muddy successors were still fighting the invading Danes in East Anglia, the Caliph in Baghdad had seven thousand black eunuchs and 4,000 white ones, in his palace (p.41).

Vivid, stomach-turning description of castrating a boy (p.171).

Numbers and routes

There were three main routes of black African slaves into Islam:

across the Sahara
from Ethiopia across the Red Sea
from East Africa

Segal cites the calculations of scholars like Ralph Austen and Paul Lovejoy who estimate that the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century as 11 to 12 million. Raymond Mauvy calculates 14 million. This is directly comparable to the 11 or so million calculated to have been transported in the far shorter period of the Atlantic slave trade (pages 55 to 57). Scholar H.J. Fisher is quoted as saying the total number of black slaves transported in the Islamic slave trade was probably larger than the number involved in the Atlantic slave trade (p.61).

Segal points out that enormous though these numbers sound, the 14 million figure ‘only’ works out 10,370 slaves per year. All scholars agree that the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in volume in slave trading (in 1838 an estimated to 10 to 12 thousand slaves were arriving in just Egypt, each year), so the chances are that the figures for the previous 11 centuries are lower, a guesstimate of maybe 7,000 per annum (p.60).

Importantly, these numbers exclude the internal black-on-black slave trade, the intra-Africa slave trade. So, controversially, they don’t include the vast numbers of slaves captured in East Africa and transported to Zanzibar, owned by an Arab elite, to work on the clove plantations. Segal cites the figure of about a million black slaves set to work in Zanzibar during the nineteenth century. If you included the intra-African trade, the total would go up by at least 2 million.

If you add the Atlantic and the Islamic trades, you end up with a figure of around 25 million black Africans captured and taken off into slavery.

We will never know the precise numbers. All we can do, in this as so many other aspects of human history, is marvel, or reel, at the thought of so much human suffering.

Non-black slaves

Most of the above concerns black slaves. But Islamic rulers conquered and enslaved or bought slaves from many other ethnicities. Thus countless numbers of Turkish and Circassian people were enslaved, as were Slavs and others from the Balkans. Someone somewhere must have done research into this. Segal only mentions it in passing.

Chapters

The foregoing summarises the first 70 or so pages of the book, dealing in general principles, overall numbers and so on. Subsequent chapters deal with:

Chapter 5. The Farther Reaches

China

Segal brings together fleeting references to black people in medieval and early modern sources. Chinese porcelain has been found in ruined trading towns on the East African coast. There’s no records of an organised trade.

India

Islam expanded into north-west India through armed conquest. It brought black slaves, mainly for military service. They called themselves Sayyad, corrupted to Siddis who, when liberated, set up small kingdoms of their own, became employed as security on Muslim ships, some rose to become admirals. The story of the rise to power of Malik Ambar (1548 to 1626), a military leader who rose to the office of Peshwa of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in the Deccan region of India, his military and cultural achievements.

Spain

North African Muslims invaded Spain in 611, overrunning almost the entire peninsula (apart from Galicia) by 620. The resulting kingdom of al-Andalus grew to legendary wealth. Black slaves were imported from Africa, but the realm was also famous for exporting white slaves from Gaul and Galicia. It became a centre for castrating male slaves to provide eunuchs (p.80). The career of the black poet and arbiter of taste, Ziryab (789 to 857).

Chapter 6. Into Black Africa

A very detailed look at the different routes of slave traders and the slave trade into the Islamic world, from Ethiopia across the Red Sea, from the coast of East Africa. Segal gives a long complicated account of the rise and histories of various black African empires in west Africa – the empires of Ghana, Mali, the Kanem and Songhai empires – many of whose rulers converted to Islam, and the complex history of black slaving along the major trans-Sahara slaving routes. It’s a complex, unfamiliar history.

Chapter 7. The Ottoman Empire

Of all the empires that rose and fell within the Islamic world, the Ottoman was the largest and longest lasting. Segal uses the Ottoman empire to really point the difference in attitudes to slavery between the Christian West and the Muslim East. Although many slaves may have held domestic positions in the Americas and some been released, the fundamental difference was the slaves in the West were used as units of production by fast-evolving capitalism. Whereas in the East, although some slaves were used in labour-intensive plantations and proto-factories, the majority were for domestic consumption. Plus the East had a more generous policy of freeing slaves. Many civil servants or soldiers who were, technically, slaves of the Sultan rose to become generals and governors (p.106).

He makes the simple crucial point that while the West pursued a model of nationalistic capitalism which encouraged aggressively competitive trade and enshrined in law the unbridled pursuit of profit, the Ottoman Empire cleaved to Islam’s disdain for trade, prioritising of military glory or scholarly achievement and its active discouragement, in law, of the kind of profit-seeking sought in the West. Merchants accumulated capital but their culture mandated them to use it charitably, to establish schools or hospitals. Lacking a central bank, or banks in general, which could be used to redistribute capital from its owners to speculative ventures, lacking the complex legal framework and definitions of property and company law which enabled Western capitalism, the Ottoman Empire condemned itself to slow decline.

While social, political and, above all, economic innovation swept the West, the Ottoman empire remained steeped in sterile ceremonial. (p.116)

Segal gives a lot of detail of Ottoman history, especially the role of black eunuchs at the highest level of the Ottoman court. As to general black slavery, there was a substantial and continuous trade but records are scanty.

He credits the British in particular for pressuring the Ottoman Turks to end slavery in their empire. In 1846 the slave market in Constantinople was closed. In 1855 moves to ban slavery throughout the empire led to a violent revolt in Arabia, led by an imam who declared the ban unIslamic. The revolt was put down but when the ban was promulgated, it made Arabia an exception, to the area continued to be a base for slavers. Slavery was banned in 1889 but kept its place in Sharia law. In 1923 the modern state of Turkey replaced the empire, with secular law banning slavery.

Chapter 8. The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran

Segal gives a thumbnail sketch of Persia’s resistance to Arab rule which came to be embodied in its espousal of a distinct brand of Islam, Shia Islam or Shiaism. There is scant evidence of black slavery in Iran; what there is suggests black slaves enjoyed good treatment and high status in households, especially of the wealthy. An English lady traveller speculated that between two and three thousand African slaves were imported each year (p.123).

A scholar estimates the number of slaves in mid-19th century Iran as 80,000. As late as 1898 the Anti-Slavery Society estimated up to 50,000 slaves in Persia. As with the Ottoman Empire, from the 1820s onwards the British brought pressure to bear to end the slave trade, but the exemption of Arabia allowed it to continue as a conduit of African slaves into Iran. Only in 1882 did the Persian government renounce slavery in a treaty signed imposed by Britain (p.126). Only in 1907 did the new National Assembly enact a law ensuring universal freedom.

Segal makes the interesting point that, as in the USA, colour prejudice might have intensified after the abolition of slavery.

Chapter 9. The Libyan Connection

The black slave trade into the semi-Ottoman state of Tripolitania. In 1818 a Royal Navy captain, G.F. Lyon, observed that the ruling Bey waged war on all his neighbours and carried away 5,000 slaves a year. Segal cites scholar Ralph Austen whose detailed calculations suggest that from 1550 to 1913 some 784,000 black slaves were transported through Libya. Given a 20% death rate on the journey from the South, this suggests 942,000 black Africans were kidnapped and enslaved by Arab and Muslim traders working the Tripoli route (there were numerous other routes).

In 1930 a Danish traveller to Libya reported that there was a slave market every Thursday in Kufra and a good adult slave cost £15.

Chapter 10. The Terrible Century

The nineteenth century saw an increase in volume and intensity of Islamic slaving across north and east Africa. In 1808 Britain withdrew from the slave trade and set about persuading other European nations to do the same. Britain also began to intervene in the Muslim world to abolish the trade, but tentatively, mindful of Muslim sensibilities.

East Africa

A European visitor stated that, around 1810, almost the entire income of the state of Oman derived from taxes on the slave trade. In 1840 the Sultan of Oman moved his court to the island of Zanzibar, main entrepot on the west of the Indian Ocean, principle outlets for black slaves captured in the interior.

By the 1840s up to 15,000 slaves a year were being trade. The Sultan himself needed huge numbers to work his clove plantations. In the 1850s it’s estimated that Zanzibar’s population included 60,000 slaves. A quarter of the Sultan’s income was said to derive from the trade.

The British protected the Sultan as their client but brought consistent pressure on him to abolish the trade. He signed a series of treaties to that effect but in the 1860s the British consul reported that 30,000 slaves were arriving annually at the coastal ports, some for Zanzibar, some shipped north to the Gulf. He also reported that for every slave who reached the coast alive, one had died en route. Other accounts claimed a far higher number.

Many of the slavers, the leaders of expeditions to attack and massacre African settlements, then take away prisoners in chains, were either Arab or, very commonly, of mixed Afro-Arab ethnicity. Segal, again, draws the distinction between the behaviour of the slavers, which was brutal and murderous, and slaves’ treatment in their destination households, which was often kind as per Islamic lore.

Sudan and Egypt

Khartoum was originally a small fishing village at the junction of the White and Blue Niles. After Sudan it was conquered by the Ottoman viceroy, Muhammed Ali, in 1840, it was turned into a major entrepot for African slaves. By 1838 12,000 black slaves were being imported into Egypt annually. Beyond the reach of the Egyptian authorities operated the Ja’aliyin, who raided west into Darfur and south into tropical Africa until well into the 1890s.

Huge enclosures for slaves were established in Cairo, where many died of smallpox and other infectious diseases. For every slave that made it to Cairo, it’s estimated that 5 died along the way (p.151). General Gordon calculated that in the area of Bahr el-Ghazal between 1875 and 1879, up to 100,000 slaves had been exported north. European explorers found entire areas which had been devastated and emptied of their populations by slavers (pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161). Only in 1883, when Britain occupied Egypt, were they able to start cracking down on the trade. By 1904 the Viceroy, Lord Cromer, could claim that the systematic slave trade had been eradicated.

Ethiopia and Arabia

Slavery in Ethiopia thrived for centuries. Up to 500 slaves were sold at the market at Gallabat every day. King Menelik was alleged to take a 10% cut in the trade i.e. gifted one slave in ten. Most were sent across the sea to Arabia. After the Ottoman Sultan banned it, the trade increased because it was no longer taxed. A British reporter estimated in 1878 that 25,000 slaves a year were sold in Mecca and Medina and the trade continued into the early 1900s.

The trade through Kenya was ended when the British created the East Africa Protectorate in 1895. Slavery was only legally abolished in Zanzibar in 1897.

West Africa

Segal describes a confusing profusion of kingdoms and rulers, Muslim jihads, insurgencies, overthrows and new rulers, all across west Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. The point is all of them engaged in the slave trade, sending slaves north into Muslim Arab lands, or collecting them for their own grandeur. As the nineteenth century raiding became more intense and destructive, not least due to growing access to Western arms, which resulted in the devastation of entire regions. It’s instructive to learn that black on black slave trading continued energetically right to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. A French agent on the Senegal river reported that in 1889 some 13,000 slaves were transported along the river.

Chapter 11. Colonial Transactions

Northern Nigeria

The British claimed the former Sokoto Caliphate in 1906, naming it north Nigeria. Segal describes the economic, legal and social reforms which led to the erosion of slavery, not only the banning of the institution but the economic development of the colony which gave peasants paid work.

French Soudan

In 1848 the French National Assembly abolished slavery in all her colonies. But it wasn’t until 1905 that the Governor-General of French West Africa decreed an end to the slave trade and any person losing their liberty (p.181). The data suggests that slaves made their way back to their former towns and villages.

Mauritania

As the cost of accepting French rule (1905 to 1910), the leaders of inland tribes in this part of north-west Africa demanded that traditional tribal laws about slavery remain. Colonial attitudes and Islamic law favoured masters in this largely nomadic population. Drought and famine in the 1930s then again after the war, forced many to offer themselves as slaves in order to secure food.

Somalia

Italy seized part of Somaliland in 1892. They made noises about banning slavery but in 1903 a third of the population of Mogadishu were slaves. In 1906 when Italy took full control of the colony, they estimated the slave population at 30,000. When they freed the slaves in the city, the Italians discovered it led to unemployment and beggary, so were slower to act in the countryside. A complicated mesh of laws followed until the Fascists took power in 1922 and passed laws designed to liberate slaves but force them into low-paid labour on plantations.

Zanzibar and the Kenyan Coast

In 1890 the British declared the Sultanate a Protectorate but it wasn’t until 1897 that they passed legislation allowing slaves to claim their freedom and then take-up was patchy because for many ‘freedom’ meant loss of employment and home. Employers and ex-slaves had to negotiate new relations. Employers raised pay, many ex-slaves squatted on waste land or the edge of plantations. The authorities struggled with increased vagrancy, drunkenness and delinquency. The British supported the Arab minority, as small as 5% of the population, because they owned the land and the clove plantations. Resentment against this privileged minority would boil over at independence.

In Kenya Segal describes the long-running problem of ex-slaves who became squatters, had families, established squatter settlements, especially along the coast where there was likely to be more work, a problem which troubled the British authorities and carried on past independence in 1963.

In Zanzibar and along the coast anti-Arab feeling grew and in 1961 there were violent African-Arab riots which left 68 dead. In the election held after the British left, the Arab party won a majority through blatant vote-rigging. This led in January 1964 to an outbreak of politically-motivated African violence which massacred Arabs and seized property, overthrowing the Arab Sultan for good. As many as 4,000 Arabs were killed in the streets. President of Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, offered the revolutionary leadership a union with their mainland neighbour and so the country of Tanzania was born.

Chapter 12. Survivals of Slavery

Stories of the ongoing existence of black slavery in Arab states such as Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Muscat. As recently as 1982 accusations that black Africans travelling to Mecca are captured and sold. On the west coast, evidence that African girls are trafficked to Lebanon.

Mauritania

At the time of writing the secretive government of Mauritania kept up slavery, with as many as a third of the population of about 2.5 million enslaved. Segal moves into the present era with a description of the racist activities of the Arab Islamic Mauritanian government in deporting, arresting, executing and generally harassing Mauritanians of black ethnicity. Especially the 1989 Mauritania–Senegal Border War which led to the expulsion of some 70,000 sub-Saharan African Mauritanians from the country. Wikipedia:

Modern-day slavery still exists in different forms in Mauritania. According to some estimates, thousands of Mauritanians are still enslaved. A 2012 CNN report, ‘Slavery’s Last Stronghold’, documents the ongoing slave-owning cultures. This social discrimination is applied chiefly against the ‘black Moors’ (Haratin) in the northern part of the country, where tribal elites among ‘white Moors’ (Bidh’an, Hassaniya-speaking Arabs and Arabized Berbers) hold sway. Slavery practices exist also within the sub-Saharan African ethnic groups of the south.

Sudan

The civil war in Sudan between the Arab north and the African Christian or animist south lasted for 40 years after independence in 1956. In 1972 the south was granted regional autonomy. South Sudan finally became an independent country in July 2011. Segal masters evidence for the ongoing practice of slavery in Sudan, generally practiced by Arabs on black Africans (pages 216 to 222). He mentions Christian Solidarity International which undertakes missions to buy slaves their freedom. At the time of writing CSI had freed more than 20,000 slaves, at an average price of $50 each.

Epilogue. America’s black Muslim backlash

This was by far the easiest part of the book to read and for a reason I often remark on – because it’s about America and we in the UK are bombarded with American culture, history and values. So when he writes about racism in Detroit or Harlem, about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, these are people and places and issues I feel superfamiliar with, from books and TV shows, documentaries and radio programmes and movies, exhibitions, art and photography.

Whereas the information about the trans-Sahara slave routes or the rise and fall of the various empires of west Africa or even the history of Islamic Spain were just some topics I knew next to nothing about and found very informative indeed, and all the more rewarding for being so radically unfamiliar.

Reading the stuff here about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X reminded me of watching the movie starring Denzel Washington, plus documentaries, plus articles, all (over)familiar stuff. Whereas I know nothing about the Fulani or the Hausa kings, about the Oyo empire or the royal court of Bornu, about Usman dan Fodio or Muhammed al-Amin al-Kanami or Yusuf Pasha of Tripoli. Here is a huge subject (the history of north and west Africa) of which I am pitifully ignorant, and need to learn more.

Thoughts

The biggest, general thought prompted by the book is the ubiquity of slavery, among all nations and all ethnicities, throughout most of history. The chapter on the Ottoman Empire routinely describes the numbers of white slaves seized from the Balkans in the Sultan’s palace, or more broadly. The chapter on Iran mentions that Iranians were themselves taken as slaves by the Ottomans to the West or the Uzbeks to the north. Iranians in turn seized Christian Armenians or Circassians.

Next is the Big Idea that slavery in Islamic was qualitatively different than the Western and Atlantic form, as described above.

Third thing is the leading role played by Britain throughout the nineteenth century in trying to stamp out slavery, across North Africa, in the Turkish heartlands, in Iraq and Persia, and along the East African coast. In all these places British diplomats, backed up by the Royal Navy, tried to stamp out the Arab slave trade.

Lastly, and tangentially, Segal’s passage about West Africa and its empires (chapter 10) was illuminating in itself, but also made me wish I could find a good, affordable account of France’s empire in Africa, not just the well-covered Algeria, but countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger and Gabon, French Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad, which we in the Anglosphere never hear about.

Credit

Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal was first published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2001. All references are to the 2002 paperback edition from the same publisher.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) and multi-ethnic societies

Mutual suspicion, brinkmanship, arrogance, belligerence and, above all fear were rife in the halls of power across Europe in the summer of 1914. (p.8)

I’m very surprised that this book won the ‘2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History’ and the ‘Society of Military History 2015 Distinguished Book Award’ because it is not really a military history at all.

It’s certainly an epic book – 788 pages, if you include the 118 pages of notes and 63 pages of bibliography – and it gives an impressively thorough account of the origins, development and conclusion of the First World War, as seen from the point of view of the politicians, military leaders and people of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

More social than military history

But I found it much more of a sociological and economic history of the impact of war on German and Austro-Hungarian society, than a narrative of military engagements.

Watson gives a broad outline of the German invasion of Belgium and northern France, but there are no maps and no description of any of the vital battles, of the Marne or Aisnes or Arras or Ypres. Instead he spends more time describing the impact on Belgian society of the burning of villages and the atrocities carried out by the Germans – in retaliation for what they claimed were guerrilla and francs-tireurs (free-shooter) attacks by civilian snipers.

I was specifically hoping to learn more about the famous three-week-long battle of Tannenberg between Germany and Russia on the Eastern Front, but there is no account of it at all in this book.

Instead Watson gives a detailed description of the impact on society in Galicia and East Prussia of the ruinous and repressive Russian advance. Little or nothing about the fighting, but a mass of detail about the impact on individual villages, towns and cities of being subject to Russian military administration and violence, and a lot about the impact of war on the region’s simmering ethnic tensions. I hadn’t realised that the Russians, given half a chance, carried out as many atrocities (i.e. massacring civilians) and far more forced movements of population, than the Germans did.

Watson does, it is true, devote some pages to the epic battle of Verdun (pp. 293-300) and to the Battle of the Somme (pp. 310-326), but it’s not what I’d call a military description. There are, for example no maps of either battlefield. In fact there are no battlefield maps – maps showing the location of a battle and the deployment of opposing forces – anywhere at all in the book.

Instead, what you do get is lots of graphs and diagrams describing the social and economic impact of war – showing things like ‘Crime rates in Germany 1913-18’, ‘Free meals dispensed at Viennese soup kitchens 1914-18’, ‘German psychiatric casualties in the First and Second Armies 1914-18’ (p.297) and so on. Social history.

Longer than the accounts of Verdun and the Somme put together is his chapter about the food shortages which began to be felt soon after the war started and reached catastrophic depths during the ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1916-17. These shortages were caused by the British naval blockade (itself, as Watson points out, of dubious legality under international law), but also due to the intrinsic shortcomings of German and Austro-Hungarian agriculture, compounded by government inefficiency, and corruption (all described in immense detail on pages 330-374).

So there’s more about food shortages than about battles. Maybe, in the long run, the starvation was more decisive. Maybe Watson would argue that there are hundreds of books devoted to Verdun and the Somme, whereas the nitty-gritty of the food shortages – much more important in eventually forcing the Central Powers to their knees – is something you rarely come across in British texts. He certainly gives a fascinating, thorough and harrowing account.

But it’s not military history. It’s social and economic history.

A lot later in the book Watson gives a gripping account of the German offensive of spring 1918, and then the Allied counter-offensive from July 1918 which ended up bringing the Central Powers to the negotiating table.

But in both instances it’s a very high-level overview, and he only gives enough detail to explain (fascinatingly) why the German offensive failed and the Allied one succeeded – because his real motivation, the meat of his analysis, is the social and political impact of the military failure on German and Austrian society.

Absence of smaller campaigns

Something else I found disappointing about the book was his neglect of military campaigns even a little outside his main concern with German and Austro-Hungarian society.

He gives a thrilling account of the initial Austrian attack on Serbia – which was, after all, the trigger for the whole war – and how the Austrians were, very amusingly, repelled back to their starting points.

But thereafter Serbia is more or less forgotten about and the fact that Serbia was later successfully invaded is skated over in a sentence. Similarly, although the entry of Italy into the war is mentioned, none of the actual fighting between Austria and Italy is described. There is only one reference to Romania being successfully occupied, and nothing at all about Bulgaria until a passing mention of her capitulation in 1918.

I had been hoping that the book would give an account of the First World War in the East, away from the oft-told story of the Western Front: the war in Poland and Galicia and the Baltic States he does cover, but in south-eastern Europe nothing.

The text – as the title, after all, indicates – is pretty ruthlessly focused on the military capabilities, mobilisation, economy and society of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Ethnic tension

If there’s one theme which does emerge very clearly from this very long book it is the centrality of ethnic and nationalist divisions in the Central Powers themselves, and in the way they treated their conquered foes.

Throughout its examination of the impact of war on German and Austro-Hungarian society – on employment, women’s roles, propaganda, agriculture and industry, popular culture and so on – the book continually reverts to an examination of the ethnic and nationalist fracture lines which ran through these two states.

For example, in the food chapter, there are not only radical differences in the way the German and Austro-Hungarian authorities dealt with the crisis (the effectiveness of different rationing schemes, and so on) but we are shown how different national regions, particularly of Austria-Hungary, refused to co-operate with each other: for example, rural Hungary refusing to share its food with urban Austria.

What emerges, through repeated description and analysis, is the very different ethnic and nationalist nature of the two empires.

Germany

Germany was an ethnically homogeneous state, made up overwhelmingly of German-speaking ethnic Germans. Therefore the fractures – the divisions which total war opened up – tended to take place along class lines. Before the war the Social Democrat Party (much more left-wing than its name suggests) had been the biggest socialist party in Europe, heir to the legacy of Karl Marx which was, admittedly, much debated and squabbled over. However, when war came, Watson shows how, in a hundred different ways, German society closed ranks in a patriotic display of unity so that the huge and powerful SDP, after some debate, rejected its pacifist wing and united with all the other parties in the Reichstag in voting for the war credits which the Chancellor asked for.

Watson says contemporary Germans called this the Burgfrieden spirit of the time, meaning literally ‘castle peace politics’. In effect it meant a political policy of ‘party truce’, all parties rallying to the patriotic cause, trades unions agreeing not to strike, socialist parties suspending their campaign to bring down capitalism, and so on. All reinforced by the sense that the Germans were encircled by enemies and must all pull together.

Typical of Watson’s social-history approach to all this is his account of the phenomenon of Liebesgaben or ‘love gifts’ (pp.211-214), the hundreds of thousands of socks and gloves and scarves knitted and sent to men at the front by the nation’s womenfolk, and the role played by children in war charities and in some war work.

He has three or four pages about the distinctive development of ‘nail sculptures’, figures of soldiers or wartime leaders into which all citizens in a town were encouraged to hammer a nail while making a donation to war funds. Soon every town and city had these nail figures, focuses of patriotic feeling and fundraising (pp. 221-225).

Watson is much more interested by the impact of war on the home front than by military campaigns.

Austria-Hungary

The spirit of unity which brought Germany together contrasts drastically with the collapse along ethnic lines of Austria-Hungary, the pressures which drove the peoples of the empire apart.

The Empire was created as a result of the Compromise of 1867 by which the Austrians had one political arrangement, the Hungarians a completely different one, and a whole host of lesser ethnicities and identities (the Czechs, and Poles in the north, the Serbs and Greeks and Croats and Bosnians in the troublesome south) jostled for recognition and power for their own constituencies.

Watson’s introductory chapters give a powerful sense of the fear and anxiety stalking the corridors of power in the Austro-Hungarian Empire well before the war began. This fear and anxiety were caused by the succession of political and military crises of the Edwardian period – the Bosnia Crisis of 1908, the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1911 and 1912, the rising voices of nationalism among Czechs in the north and Poles in the East.

To really understand the fear of the ruling class you have to grasp that in 1914 there was a very clear league table of empires – with Britain at the top followed by France and Germany. The rulers of Austria-Hungary were petrified that the collapse and secession of any part of their heterogenous empire would relegate them to the second division of empires (as were the rulers of Russia, as well).

And everybody knew what happened to an empire on the slide: they had before them the examples of the disintegrating Ottoman and powerless Chinese empires, which were condemned to humiliation and impotence by the Great Powers. Austria-Hungary’s rulers would do anything to avoid that fate.

But Watson shows how, as soon as war broke out, the empire instead of pulling together, as Germany had, began dividing and splitting into its component parts. Vienna was forced to cede control of large regions of the empire to the local governments which were best placed to mobilise the war effort among their own peoples.

This tended to have two consequences:

One was to encourage nationalism and the rise of nationalist leaders in these areas (it was via wartime leadership of the Polish Legions, a force encouraged by Vienna, that Józef Piłsudski consolidated power and the authority which would enable him to establish an independent Poland in 1918, and successfully defend its borders against Russian invasion in 1920, before becoming Poland’s strongman in the interwar period).
The second was to encourage inter-ethnic tension and violence.

The difference between homegeneous Germany and heterogeneous Austria-Hungary is exemplified in the respective nations’ responses to refugees. In Germany, the 200,000 or so refugees from Russia’s blood-thirsty invasion of East Prussia were distributed around the country and welcomed into homes and communities all over the Reich. They were recipients of charity from a popular refugee fund which raised millions of marks for them. Even when the refugees were in fact Polish-speaking or Lithuanians, they were still treated first and foremost as Germans and all received as loyal members of the Fatherland (pp. 178-181).

Compare and contrast the German experience with the bitter resentment which greeted refugees from the Russian invasion of the Austro-Hungarian border region of Galicia. When some 1 million refugees from Galicia were distributed round the rest of the empire, the native Hungarians, Austrians or Czechs all resented having large number of Poles, Ruthenians and, above all, Jewish, refugees imposed on their communities. There was resentment and outbreaks of anti-refugee violence.

The refugee crisis was just one of the ways in which the war drove the nationalities making up the Austro-Hungarian empire further apart (pp. 198-206).

Two years ago I read and was appalled by Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, which describes the seemingly endless ethnic cleansing and intercommunal massacres, pogroms and genocides which took place in the area between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s.

Watson’s book shows how many of these tensions existed well before the First World War – in the Balkans they went back centuries – but that it was the massive pan-European conflict which lifted the lid, which authorised violence on an unprecedented scale, and laid the seeds for irreconcilable hatreds, particularly between Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and Jews.

The perils of multi-ethnic societies

Although I bet Watson is a fully paid-up liberal (and his book makes occasional gestures towards the issue of ‘gender’, one of the must-have topics which all contemporary humanities books have to include), nonetheless the net effect of these often harrowing 566 pages of text is to make the reader very nervous about the idea of a multinational country.

1. Austria-Hungary was a rainbow nation of ethnicities and, under pressure, it collapsed into feuding and fighting nationalities.

2. Russia, as soon as it invaded East Prussia and Galicia, began carrying out atrocities against entire ethnic groups classified as traitors or subversives, hanging entire villages full of Ukrainians or Ruthenians, massacring Jewish populations.

3. The to and fro of battle lines in the Balkans allowed invading forces to decimate villages and populations of rival ethnic groups who they considered dangerous or treacherous.

Austro-Hungarian troops hanging unarmed Serbian civilians (1915) No doubt ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’

In other words, everywhere that you had a mix of ethnicities in a society put under pressure, you got voices raised blaming ‘the other’, blaming whichever minority group comes to hand, for the catastrophe which was overtaking them.

Unable to accept the objective truth that their armies and military commanders were simply not up to winning the war, the so-called intelligentsia of Austria-Hungary, especially right-wing newspapers, magazines, writers and politicians, declared that the only reason they were losing must be due to the sabotage and treachery of traitors, spies, saboteurs and entire ethnic groups, who were promptly declared ‘enemies of the state’.

Just who was blamed depended on which small powerless group was ready to hand, but the Jews tended to be a minority wherever they found themselves, and so were subjected to an increasing chorus of denunciation throughout the empire.

Ring of Steel is a terrible indictment of the primitive xenophobia and bloodlust of human nature. But it is also a warning against the phenomenon that, in my opinion, has been ignored by generations of liberal politicians and opinion-formers in the West.

For several generations we have been told by all official sources of information, government, ministries, and all the media, that importing large groups of foreigners can only be a good thing, which ‘enriches’ our rainbow societies. Maybe, at innumerable levels, it does.

But if you import several million ‘foreigners’, with different coloured skins, different languages, cultures and religions into Western Europe – and then place the societies of the West under great economic and social strain thanks to an epic crash of the financial system, well..

You get the rise of right-wing, sometimes very right-wing, nationalist parties – in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, in Italy, in France, in Britain and America – all demanding a return to traditional values and ethnic solidarity.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying the evidence seems to be that human beings are like this. This is what we do. You and I may both wish it wasn’t so, but it is so.

In fact I’d have thought this was one of the main lessons of history. You can’t look at the mass destruction of the Napoleonic Wars and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the appalling suffering created by industrialisation and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the mind-blowing racist attitudes I’ve been reading about in the American Civil War and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the mad outbreak of violence of the First World War and the stubborn refusal to give in which led to over ten million men being slaughtered and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the Holocaust and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’.

We cannot be confident that human nature has changed at all in the intervening years.

In just the last twenty years we have all witnessed the savagery of the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the genocide in Darfur, the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure of the Arab Springs and the civil wars in Syria and Libya, the rise of ISIS, the war in Yemen, the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, renewed civil war in Sudan and now the war in Ukraine.

If all these conflicts prove anything, they prove that —

WE ARE STILL LIKE THAT

We are just like that. Nothing has changed. Given half a chance, given enough deprivation, poverty and fear, human beings in any continent of the world will lash out in irrational violence which quickly becomes total, genocidal, scorched earth, mass destruction.

In the West, in Britain, France, Germany or America, we like to think we are different. That is just a form of racism. In my opinion, we are not intrinsically different at all. We are just protected by an enormous buffer of wealth and consumer goods from having to confront our basest nature. The majority of the populations in all the Western nations are well off enough not to want, or to allow, any kind of really ethnically divisive politics or inter-ethnic violence to take hold.

Or are they?

Because creating multi-ethnic societies has created the potential for serious social stress to exacerbate racial, ethnic and nationalist dividing lines which didn’t previously exist. When I was growing up there was no such thing as ‘Islamophobia’ in Britain. 40 years later there are some 2.8 million Muslims in Britain, some 5% of the population – and I read about people being accused of ‘Islamophobia’, or Muslims claiming unfair discrimination or treatment in the media, almost every day.

It’s not as if we didn’t know the risks. I lived my entire life in the shadow of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland which were based entirely on ethnic or communal hatred. And now not a day passes without a newspaper article bewailing how Brexit might end the Good Friday Agreement and bring back the men of violence. Is the peace between the ethnic groups in Northern Ireland really that fragile? Apparently so. But British governments and the mainland population have always had an uncanny ability to sweep Ulster under the carpet and pretend it’s not actually part of the UK. To turn our backs on 40 years of bombings and assassinations, to pretend that it all, somehow, wasn’t actually happening in Britain. Not the real Britain, the Britain that counts. But it was.

Anyway, here we are. Over the past 40 years or so, politicians and opinion makers from all parties across the Western world have made this multicultural bed and now we’re all going to have to lie in it, disruptive and troubled though it is likely to be for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Although it certainly includes lots of detail about the how the societies of the Central Powers were mobilised and motivated to wage total war, and enough about the military campaigns to explain their impact on the home front, overall Watson’s book is not really a military history of the Central Powers at war, but much more a social and economic history of the impact of the war on the two empires of its title.

And in the many, many places where he describes ethnic and nationalist tensions breaking out into unspeakable violence, again and again, all over central and eastern Europe, Watson’s book – no doubt completely contrary to his intentions – can very easily be read as a profound historical argument against the notion of a multicultural, multi-ethnic society.

First World War reviews

Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) A synopsis

Ring of Steel sets out:

to explore how popular consent for the First World War was won and maintained in Austria-Hungary and Germany from 1914 to 1918
to explain how extreme and escalating violence radicalised both German and Austro-Hungarian war aims, leading to the institution of slave labour and the stripping of agricultural and industrial resources in the occupied territories, and encouraging plans for the permanent annexation of Belgium, northern France and west Russia
to describe the societal fragmentation caused by the war, especially in an Austria-Hungary already deeply fissured by ethnic tensions and which eventually collapsed into a host of new nation states; Germany was more ethnically homogenous and had been more socially unified in support of war so the end, when it came, unleashed a flood of bitterness and anger which expressed itself not along ethnic but along class lines, leading to street fighting between parties of the extreme left and right: the communists were defeated, the Nazis were born

1. Decisions for war

The conspirators

Elements in the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry and military had been waiting for an opportunity to suppress little Serbia, located just on the empire’s border and endlessly fomenting nationalist unrest. When Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian (A-H) throne was assassinated on 28 June in the Serbian capital, Sarajevo, the Austrians blamed Serbia and spent most of July devising an ultimatum so extreme that they, and everyone else in Europe, knew it could not be fulfilled. Germany, not that concerned, gave A-H unqualified support, the so-called ‘blank cheque’. Both countries changed their tune when they realised that Russia was mobilising to support the Serbs, their fellow Slavs.

War of existence

Why was the Austro-Hungarian hierarchy so harsh on Serbia? A review of the many tensions tearing the Austro-Hungarian empire apart. ‘The actions of Austro-Hungarian rulers in the summer of 1914, although secretive and aggressive, were motivated less by belligerence than a profound sense of weakness, fear and despair’ (p.14).

The miscalculated risk

The pressures on German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg reflected a nation anxious about the growing might of Britain and France, the industrialisation of Russia, but well aware of the risk of world war. Hollweg gambled that a) the Austrians would defeat Serbia quickly, within a week and b) that Russia would be so slow to mobilise that the conflict on the ground would be over and the whole thing handed over to international mediation. He was wrong on both counts.

World war

Russia mobilised out of fear that an A-H victory over Serbia would:

give the whole Balkan region to Germanism
demolish Russia’s traditional claim to lead the Slav peoples
relegate Russia out of the league of Great Powers.

Fear and anxiety led Russia to full mobilisation. Hearing of this, German Chancellor Bethmann panicked and tried to curtail Austrian aggression. Too late.

Mobilising the people

Assassination

The impact of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on public opinion i.e. increased racial tensions across the Austro-Hungarian empire (p.57) Germans attack Czechs, Poles attack Germans.

The July crisis

Austria-Hungary issues its ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July. 27 July Serbia rejects it. 28 July Austria-Hungary declares war. The emperor Franz Joseph issued a proclamation to his people defining it as a defensive war. This excuse would be echoed by the German authorities and the Kaiser, who sincerely felt they were pushing back on a decade of slow encroachment by France and Russia, against a series of Balkan wars and international crises in all of which Germany had been ganged up on by France and Britain and Russia.

Mobilisation

Millions of men were mobilised with bewildering speed. Companies large and small lost their workforces, producing a depression and unemployment. Families lost wage earners. Widespread fears of terrorism and spies. The Kaiser made the grand declaration that he no longer recognised political parties – we are all Germans now. Fear of invasion by backwards Russia persuaded leaders of the largest party in Germany, the million-strong supposedly left-wing SPD, to back the government. On 4 August the Reichstag voted overwhelmingly for war credits, establishing the Burgfrieden ‘fortress peace’, the sense of one nation united to defend its values. 250,000 men volunteered to fight in August alone. Networks of women’s support groups sprang up across Germany. Austria-Hungary was very different: loyalty to the emperor and Hapsburg dynasty aroused much loyalty, but each of the different nations and races considered their own positions and ambitions – the Hungarians, the Poles, the Czechs. The Poles set up a volunteer Polish Legion which was to form the seed of the independent Polish nation declared in 1918. Many local imperial leaders took the opportunity to lock up troublesome nationalists, inflaming nationalist tensions.

War of illusions

War plans

The German army only had one plan, the infamous Schlieffen Plan drawn up in the 1890s, which called for the army to knock out France with a lightning 6-week strike through Belgium, ensuring a swift capitulation (as in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War) before turning all its attention to Russia, which it was assumed would mobilise very slowly. Wrong. The attack through Belgium a) took too long b) guaranteed that Britain entered the war in defence of France and Belgium, with just enough soldiers to force the German advance to a halt. Meanwhile, in the east, the Russians mobilised faster than expected and invaded East Prussia. Everyone expected Austria to conquer little Serbia in weeks but due to ‘spectacularly incompetent’ leadership, its invasion not only failed but was repelled. Both nations, in other words, were scuppered right at the start by the ‘illusions’ and over-optimistic plans of their military leaders.

The Western Front

On the night of 1 August German forces secured Luxemburg’s railways. Deployment of 2 million men, 118,000 horses, 20,800 rail transports carrying 300,000 tons of material to the border with France and Belgium go like clockwork. But as soon as the large-scale invasion started things began to go wrong. The Belgians were better armed and more resistant than expected. The French stood their ground and even counter-attacked. Both sides were jittery. Suspicion of potshots by civilians, spies and franc-tireurs drew terrible revenge. Houses, sometimes entire villages were burnt down in revenge for supposed snipers. Civilians were taken as hostages, used as human shields, executed as spies or massacred. The Germans atrocities in Belgium were a propaganda gift for the Entente and sealed the German army’s reputation for brutality but Watson shows that, given half a chance, the French could match them. In any case, everything on the Western Front was dwarfed by the brutality of the Russian army as it invaded and occupied East Prussia.

The Hapsburg war

‘The Hapsburg army fought a vicious and unusually unsuccessful war in the summer of 1914’ (p.136). Watson explains in detail why the Austro-Hungarian army was repulsed from Serbia (‘a spectacular humiliation’) and, because of the changes of mind of supreme commander Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (‘indecisions and errors’ p.148) led to catastrophic defeat in Galicia, the Polish-speaking eastern border of the empire, which the Russians swiftly over-ran. In one month of terrible decisions, Conrad had nearly destroyed the entire Hapsburg army (p.156).

The war of defence

Invasion

News of the Russian sweep into Galicia and Eastern Prussia, and the atrocities they were committing, prompted fear and anxiety, and its corollary, patriotic fervour, across Germany.

Allenstein

Watson focuses on this town of 33,000 in East Prussia as an example of what happened when the Russians invaded i.e. the sudden threat of arbitrary violence which the mayor, police and other civil authorities desperately tried to fend off i.e. by handing over all the food the Russians demanded.

Russian atrocities

The Cossacks raped, burned and pillaged wherever they went. In the first two months some 1,500 civilians died. As in the west, a lot of the violence was fueled by the ordinary soldier’s fear of being shot by civilians, by spies, by the general terror created by this new kind of warfare. Preventing atrocities depended on the officers, and military discipline was more patchy in the Tsar’s army than in the western armies. 1 in 20 of those killed were cyclists. Bicycles were unknown in Tsarist Russia, so soldiers who saw bicycles assumed they were some kind of weapon, arrested the cyclists, smashed up the bikes and, more often than not, shot the cyclist on the spot. The Russians also deported tens of thousands of ‘suspect’ civilians into the Russian interior, often dumping them in makeshift camps, or just in the open steppes, where about a third died of illness and neglect. 800,000 refugees fled west and were distributed through the Reich and efficiently looked after, charity raising huge sums, and their stories helping to solidify Germany’s resolve to fight on. Russia’s atrocities in the first few months helped make the war last so long (thus helped the revolution).

Race war

Wherever they went, the Russians carried out pogroms against Jews.

Life in Great Russia

The Russians’ brutal and counter-productive efforts to make occupied Galicia (which straddles the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine) part of Mother Russia by suppressing nationalist Poles, Ukrainians and, especially, Jews.

‘Unwelcome co-eaters’

In Watson’s view the Russian occupation of Galicia sowed the seeds of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Galicia was the breadbasket of the empire; combined with the naval blockade which the Entente began to put in place, this ensured food shortages, slowly developing towards starvation over the next four years. But also, over a million refugees fled Russian-occupied Galicia into the Empire. But whereas a flood of Prussian refugees into the Reich cemented Germany identity, here the arrival of Poles, Ruthenians, Jews and other minorities in German-speaking, Hungarian or Czech lands bred ‘resentment and hostility, social tensions and racial antagonism’ (p.205). Watson quotes an Austrian civilian describing the penniless refugees as ‘unwelcome co-eaters’.

Encirclement

The long war

By Christmas 1914 it was clear this was a new kind of war, the stalemate in east and west was going to take time to beat down and, in the meantime, this would be a people’s war, requiring unprecedented levels of public support and consent.

A war of love

A description of the widespread volunteer activity in civilian Germany, including Liebestätigkeiten, ‘activities of love’, including sending Liebesgaben or ‘gifts of love’, i.e. socks and gloves and pants and scarves, to the millions of men at the front. In January the Reich set up its first propaganda campaign, to educate the population about Britain’s starvation blockade of Germany, and the need to ration food. The cult of nail figures.

Germany versus Britain

The German ruling class and intelligentsia were bitterly disappointed that Britain ended up joining the war against them – many had gambled that she would stay out – and, when Britain imposed a complete naval blockade of Germany – which had never been self-sufficient in food production – this resentment was focused by government propaganda into real hatred. Gott strafe England became a popular greeting. All this helped conceal the fact that the German authorities badly mismanaged the production and distribution of what food there was.

Austria-Hungary’s local wars

As soon as war started the Austro-Hungarian army, which turned out to be rubbish at fighting other armies – in Serbia or Galicia – turned out to be excellent at suppressing dissidents, spies and traitors in their own countries, waging what Watson describes as a ‘war on its own peoples and civil administrations’ (p.253). The inevitable result was that, over the next four years, all of those subject people lost faith in the Hapsburg administration and increasingly hankered after rule by their own kind. Watson’s descriptions of the Hapsburg army’s banning of Czech symbols and language in Bohemia has to be read to be believed, as an example of self-defeating heavy-handedness. On 23 May 1915 Italy, formerly their ally, declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. Italy had been bribed by France and Britain with the promise of extensive Austrian territory and with gold. The deep sense of bitterness and betrayal in the Central Powers was further exacerbated. Austria-Hungary now had to face war on a new front.

Security for all time

Mitteleuropa

In September 1914 Chancellor Bethmann Holweg approved a provisional ‘war aims’ plan. The goal was long-term security, which required pushing the borders with France and Russia further away, by permanently annexing Belgium and northern France and West Russia. These areas could then be turned into colonies, run by populations bred to supply the needs of the Reich. This had to be kept secret because the public was told it was a war of defence, but debate about whether it was, in actuality, a war of annexation, and just what should be annexed, and how and when, continued to exercise German leaders and politicians throughout the war.

Eastern utopias

In 1915 Germany counter-attacked against Russia and took back East Prussia and Galicia as well as conquering Tsarist Poland and the Baltic states. Watson describes the German plans to administer and exploit this large new territory, including the racialisation of the civil administration, and the asset stripping of most of Poland.

Crisis at the front

Blood

By the start of 1916 all sides knew they were in a war of attrition. The idea of bleeding the opponent white underpinned the three big offensives of the year, the Germans against Verdun, the British on the Somme, and the Russian Brusoliv offensive.

The Grognards

The armies of all the combatants were much larger than they’d been in 1914, much better armed and supplied, but had also changed social composition. Lots of the career officers had been killed, replaced by men of lower social classes. Combined with fewer keen volunteers, this led to more tension in the ranks.

Verdun

Verdun was a complex of forts which stuck out into the German trench line. General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, carefully planned co-ordinated attacks on the complex, designed to draw in an endless stream of French troops who could be massacred by the Germans facing them and controlling the flanks. In the event, both sides suffered immense casualties, about 300,000 men killed and wounded.

Brusilov’s offensive

The Russians stormed through the Austro-Hungarian Fourth and Seventh Armies in the East, ‘yet another blow to the sinking prestige of the Hapsburg monarchy’ (p.310).

The Somme

The Somme offensive failed because Field Marshall Haig broadened its at-first limited and carefully planned objectives into unacheivable over-reach. Watson thinks the Entente failed to deploy superior material and manpower in a focused enough way to secure a breakthrough. The biggest impact (apart from 100s of thousands of dead and maimed men) was the psychological blow to the German army which, for the first time, really felt the Entente’s superiority in men and materiel.

Outcomes

By the end of 1916, stalemate on all fronts. The Central Powers defeated and occupied Romania in autumn 1916. Late in the year a) German officers were posted to shadow their counterparts at all levels of the useless Austro-Hungarian army i.e. to help them b) in August the German General Staff was reorganised into a new body, the third OHL (see below).

Deprivation

Suffering and shortage

Rationing, ersatz food (bread made of sawdust or sand, sausages made from slime and water), foraging, the black economy.

The causes of shortage

An economic survey of the shortfall of agricultural production before and during the war.

Mismanaging shortage

Various impacts of rationing and food shortages ‘huge inefficiency and disastrous errors’ (p.359).

Shattered societies

In Germany the beginnings of class resentment, in Austria-Hungary further polarisation between nationalities and races (e.g. Hungary refused to share its food surpluses with starving Austria), rising crime, loss of faith in the authorities, youth rebellion. There were food riots and, for the first time in two years, strikes. The social compact which had helped the Central Powers enter the war, was breaking down.

Remobilisation

The Third OHL

29 August 1916 Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was appointed commander of the German army, with Erich Ludendorff as his Quartermaster General. OHL stands for Oberste Heeresleitung, Supreme Army Command. Over the next two years this pair gained total control of Germany’s war machine and, eventually, of its society, completely eclipsing the Kaiser and the civilian authorities

The Hindenburg Programme

The complete remodelling of German society from top to bottom, for Total War, refocusing agricultural and industrial output. Crucially, it represented an ideological shift from state authorities working through consent to working through compulsion.

Forced labour

In occupied Belgium, among prisoners of war in the Reich, and slave labour in Poland. ‘At war’s end 1.5 million prisoners were spread across 750,000 German farms and firms’ (p.389) about a third of them Poles.

The occupied territories

By 1916 the Germans had overrun 525,500 square kilometres and taken control of 21 million non-German citizens (p.392). The Germans stripped labour, agricultural goods and machinery from occupied lands, the worst case being the ‘Ober Ost’ region in the Baltic, under Ludendorff. The Belgians got off lightest because of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, organised by millionaire mining engineer and future U.S. president Herbert Hoover (p.406).

By far the most important thing to emerge from this analysis of German OHL attempts to militarise society, fleece occupied countries and create a mass semi-slave workforce was that it didn’t work – it did not succeed in either feeding the German population better or significantly increasing war output. A lesson the Nazis failed to learn.

U-boats

The worst decision of the war

In January 1917 the Reich declared ‘unrestricted’ U-boat warfare on merchant ships supplying Britain and France. This was bound to impact America, who made up over half the shipping. As American merchant ships began being sunk American public opinion became vociferous for war. On 6 April 1917 America entered the war on the Entente side, changing the Entente into ‘the Allies’. Watson explains the background to the German decision i.e. an authoritative report analysed the shipping Britain required, the tonnage U-boats could sink, and calculated that Britain’s food supplies could be driven into crisis and Britain forced to capitulate before the Americans entered. In other words it was yet another German gamble which, like the Schlieffen Gamble back in 1914, utterly failed.

The unrestricted submarine campaign

A fascinating account of the development of the U-boat fleet, the experience of sailing on a U-boat, the resilience of its crews, some amazing stories of miraculous escapes, then analysis of why the strategy failed; partly due to the Allies adopting a convoy system, to the use of mines, mostly because Germany never had enough submarines but most fundamentally – because the strategy was based on faulty calculations.

Wonder weapon blues

At first the German population was given a huge lift by publicity around the new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, putting its faith in this new ‘wonder weapon’ to end the war soon. Watson describes the enormous propaganda drive which surrounded subscription to the Sixth War Loan. America suspended diplomatic relations in February 1917, but German military leaders and intellectuals didn’t mind because of their confidence in the wonder weapon. But even patriots were dismayed when, on 1 March, allied newspapers published the notorious Zimmerman telegram in which the German Foreign Minister had offered an alliance with Mexico against America, in return for which the Mexicans would be handed the states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. To educated people it came as no surprise when America then declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. And it was no coincidence that a few weeks later Germany saw the first really large-scale strike of the war when 217,000 workers downed tools in Berlin (p.446).

In Watson’s opinion the decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare was the single biggest cause of the defeat of the Central Powers (p.449).

Dangerous ideas

Reactionary regimes

1917 brought big changes. The Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph died and was succeeded by the 29-year-old emperor Karl I, who turned out to be shallow and indecisive. The Austrian Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, who had overseen so many defeats, was replaced in February 1917. In March 1917 the Tsar of Russia was overthrown and replaced by an uneasy partnership between a middle-class Provisional Government and the Petersburg workers and soldiers’ soviet. President Woodrow Wilson’s announcement that America was fighting the military regime and not the people of Germany was cleverly devised to drive a wedge between population and rulers. Watson describes the response of the Kaiser, the third OHL, the socialists and the conservatives in the Reichstag to combat these political pressures.

Going for broke

Early in 1917 at a conference with the Chancellor and the Kaiser, Hindenburg and Ludendorff pushed through a policy of Maximum Annexation, with a view to permanent control of Belgium, northern France, Poland, the Baltic and the Balkans. In secret, the new young Austrian emperor had opened a channel of communication with the French and British, prepared to concede a peace ‘with no annexations and no reparations’. The Allied leaders were interested but the opportunity was crushed by the Italian Prime Minister who refused to abandon the promise he’d been made of gaining significant Austrian territory. Her peace overtures rebuffed, Austria found herself tied to an increasingly militant Germany.

Opposition

How the A-H nationalities – the Czechs, the Poles, the south Slavs and the Hungarians – distanced themselves from the failing Habsburg administration. In Germany there was a rise in strikes, and for the first time, mutinies, in the navy. Evidence that the example of the Petersburg Soviet had spread among politically-aware workers. The SPD split, with an Independent SPD pursuing calls for an immediate peace, and a tiny splinter group, the Spartacists, who would be involved in the post-war revolutionary uprisings.

The bread peace

Brest-Litovsk

The Bolsheviks staged their coup d’état in November 1917, taking control of the Russian government, and a few weeks later sued for peace. The armistice on the eastern front started on 15 December 1917. Peace talks were held at the town of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks delayed and played hardball, so the Germans attacked and moved forward 200 kilometres in five days. Panicking, Lenin signed a peace treaty on 3 March 1918, by which he conceded 2.5 million square kilometres of territory with 50 million inhabitants, 90 percent of Russian coal mines, 54 % of its industry and a third of its railways and agriculture (p.494). Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Ottakar Czernin made one of the greatest mistakes of the period by signing an independence deal with Ukraine which gave the new country much of southern Poland, in exchange for Ukraine sending urgently needed food supplies to the empire. In the event the grain never turned up, but the entire Polish provisional council and Hapsburg diplomats in Poland resigned in protest.

Goodbye Galicia

The ill-fated decision to cede Ukraine land traditionally associated with Poland finished all lingering loyalty to the Hapsburgs. Watson details the riots in Cracow, the replacement of the Hapsburg eagle with Polish symbols, while Hapsburg insignia and even medals were publicly ridiculed, hanged and spat on. The corollary of this upsurge in nationalism was the end of the empire’s easy-going multinationalism, with a rise in attacks on non-Poles and especially Jews.

The Hapsburg military

In summer 1918 Austria-Hungary could have sued for a separate peace with the Allies, but failed to do so. After the peace with Russia about a million prisoners of war began returning, many bringing with them the virus of Bolshevism, but even more disillusioned by the futility of war. The army handled them badly, sending them to quarantine camps to be debriefed, where conditions were bad, then deploying them to areas where nationalism was rising and threatening the empire. Too late. Nationalist leaders in Poland and Czechoslovakia were finished with the Hapsburgs. Yet instead of negotiating a separate peace and possibly hanging onto their empire, the Austro-Hungarian ruling class tied its wagon to Germany’s fortunes. In May the emperor Karl made a humble trip to OHL headquarters in Spa, to apologise to Hindenburg and pledge his nation’s army to the neverending war.

Collapse

The last chance

The Germans made a final, enormous and well-organised push on the Western Front in spring 1918. Watson shows how the preparations were immaculate but the offensive lacked clear targets. If the advancing spearheads had taken the major supply depots of Amiens or Haezebrouck, the Germans might have forced the Allies to the negotiating table. But Ludendorff made the fateful decision to support the army which made the quickest breakthrough of Allied lines, the Eighteenth Army attacking south of the Somme. It certainly shattered the British Fifth Army, took some 90,000 prisoners, and advanced 60 kilometres. But it was 60 kilometres of wasteland, still devastated after the terrible Battle of the Somme of 1916. It had no strategic importance. He followed this up with ‘Operation Georgette’ which broke through French lines on the Chemin des Dames and advanced 20 kilometres in a day, the biggest advance in one day achieved by either side at any point of the war. But this and the final attack in Champagne merely highlighted a fatal truth. No matter how far they advanced, the British and French always had more men and munitions, and the Americans were coming. German supply lines became stretched. Ammunition was running low. And the men, who had suffered huge losses, kept being recycled back to the Front and expected to fight again and again. But they were exhausted.

Defeat

Which explains why, when the French and British counter-attacked in mid-July, the Germans collapsed. Soon the Allies couldn’t cope with the number of Germans who were surrendering. The failure of the German spring offensive had brought it home to them, one and all, that they could never win. In which case, they just wanted the war to end. Between March and July the German army suffered 980,000 casualties, and the Allies captured 385,000. There were mutinies but also plenty of cases where officers led their men in surrendering. All ranks up to and including the High Command realised they had lost. Ludendorff had a nervous breakdown and a nerve specialist was called in to keep him going. On 28 September he gave in to reality and told Hindenburg that Germany must ask for an immediate armistice.

Revolution

It all ended very quickly. By October the German and Austrian rulers had agreed to approach Woodrow Wilson asking for an armistice. Watson details the complicated sequence of events. American demands hardened after a U-boat sank a ship in the Atlantic, killing women and children and some American civilians. Negotiations between the German leaders were tortuous. I knew the Generals suddenly became impatient for the war to end, but had no idea that they then changed their minds and tried to get the Kaiser to fight on. But by then power had shifted to the Reichstag and the bulk of the population. Demoralised by the publication of Germany’s initial peace overture of 3 October, the sailors of the German fleet simply refused to put to sea for a last-ditch Götterdämmerung battle with the British. Instead, they instigated mutinies which swept across barracks in Germany, leading to the declaration of a Munich soviet and a communist revolution in Berlin. A hurriedly convened committee of left and centre politicians announced that the Kaiser had abdicated (although he hadn’t). The long awaited armistice came into force on 11 November 1918. By then Austria-Hungary had collapsed. The Hungarian Revolution started on 27 October with thousands streaming onto the streets in defiance of the Hapsburg army, with soldiers mutinying and the Hapsburg insignia everywhere torn down and replaced by the red, white and green flag. On 31 October crowds took to the streets of Prague declaring Czech independence. More violent was the declaration of independence in Poland, accompanied by violence against rival Ruthenes and, as usual, pogroms against Jews. If the peace of November 1918 signalled a genuine return to the status quo ante in France and Britain, it brought just the opposite in central and eastern Europe, it led to entirely new and unprecedented political and nationalist forces being unleashed, forces which destabilised the new fledgling nations for years, until they were all caught up in the conflagration started by the Nazis, which itself only ended in 45 years of subjection to the Soviet Union.

Epilogue

It took a long time to sign the peace treaties. Peace with Germany was only signed on 28 June 1919, with Austria in September 1919, with Hungary in June 1920. Most of the Central Power leaders escaped scot free, the Kaiser enjoying retirement in his Dutch villa, General Hindenburg never ceasing to blame ‘the politicians’ for Germany’s defeat and, amazingly, getting elected President of the Weimar Republic in 1925. The enormous reparations imposed on Germany are usually named as the cause for post-war Germany’s financial and political instability.

But Watson singles out Woodrow Wilson’s claim that the key to the peace would be the principle of ‘self determination‘. This led many people to hope for a nation and government of their own in a region which was just too racially intermixed. With the result that racial conflict was to plague all the post-war nations of central and eastern Europe for decades to come.

Above all, tens of millions of people were left wondering what all their suffering and loss had been for, and with a deep, abiding, smouldering sense of resentment and anger. Bitter and violent anger combined with ethnic and racial tensions were to lead Europe into an even worse disaster just 20 years later.

For the seeds of this in the immediate post-war years, read The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917 to 1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Verdun

Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001)

Ronald Segal

The link with McLynn and Jeal

Islam’s Black Slaves

The Atlantic slave trade

Islam’s treatment of slaves

Two routes to slavery

Islam’s anti-racism

Islam’s slaves in the service sector

Slaves in Islamic armies

Islam’s releasing of slaves

Eunuchs

Numbers and routes

Non-black slaves

Chapters

Chapter 5. The Farther Reaches

China

India

Spain

Chapter 6. Into Black Africa

Chapter 7. The Ottoman Empire

Chapter 8. The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran

Chapter 9. The Libyan Connection

Chapter 10. The Terrible Century

East Africa

Sudan and Egypt

Ethiopia and Arabia

West Africa

Chapter 11. Colonial Transactions

Northern Nigeria

French Soudan

Mauritania

Somalia

Zanzibar and the Kenyan Coast

Chapter 12. Survivals of Slavery

Mauritania

Sudan

Epilogue. America’s black Muslim backlash

Thoughts

Credit

Related links

More Africa reviews

Share this:

Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) and multi-ethnic societies

More social than military history

Absence of smaller campaigns

Ethnic tension

Germany

Austria-Hungary

The perils of multi-ethnic societies

Conclusion

First World War reviews

Share this:

Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) A synopsis

1. Decisions for war

The conspirators

War of existence

The miscalculated risk

World war

Mobilising the people

Assassination

The July crisis

Mobilisation

War of illusions

War plans

The Western Front

The Hapsburg war

The war of defence

Invasion

Allenstein

Russian atrocities

Race war

Life in Great Russia

‘Unwelcome co-eaters’

Encirclement

The long war

A war of love

Germany versus Britain