The Trans-Saharan Railway and the Politics of Imperial Expansion, 1890–1900

The trans-Saharan railway scheme was the dominant, if intermittent, theme of French African expansion in the last 20?years of the nineteenth century. Behind political and economic arguments for the scheme lay a hidden agenda—the promotion of Algerian railway interests. Its revival in 1890, after a ten-year interval, was driven by a need to safeguard returns on railway investments, threatened by the growing political influence of the Radicals. Success in a campaign on its behalf was dependent on reinvigorating empire-building in tropical Africa, a function performed by the Chad plan, which also provided the required territorial configuration for a trans-Saharan railway. Subsequently, interest shifted from West Africa to the Sahara where efforts to promote railway construction through exploitation of the Tuat question stood greater chances of success. Saharan expansion was delayed for almost a decade by the obstinacy of the Algerian generals and the timidity of governments in France, before finally being resolved by a fait accompli. However, political circumstances at home, and the emergence of new railway competition in the Sahara, prevented the railway companies from reaping the full reward for their efforts. On the map, if not in any practical sense, a territorially unified French African empire had been completed by 1900, whose origins can be traced directly to the activities of the railway lobby.     

The Field Artillery Revolution and the European Military Balance, 1890–1914

ABSTRACT

This article centres on the introduction of the French 75mm light field gun, and its impact on the European military balance in the two decades before the First World War. It argues that the 75mm (and particularly its new recoil-absorption mechanism) dramatically accelerated the rate of fire and gave France a major military advantage over Germany between c. 1899 and 1906. Subsequently the application of the new technology to howitzers and heavy artillery enabled Germany to redress the balance. On the eve of war, however, Germany's leaders feared a new round of French and Russian emulation, and this fear influenced their policy in the July 1914 crisis. The article also examines the failure to forestall the quick-firing revolution at the First Hague Peace Conference; the new technology's role in the First Moroccan Crisis; its dissemination across Europe and the Franco-German competition to amass reserves of shells.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

The Russian Quality of Life, 1914–1917

Contrary to the views of some historians, prices during the First World War rose faster than wage increases, leading to declining living standards and fueling popular unrest, thus contributing to the 1917 revolutions.