The central argument of this book is that the First World War catalysed the transformation of an integrated art milieu, previously shaped by upper-class art patrons, into divided and highly nationalised art markets driven by capitalist incentives of investment and speculation. Discourses on ‘art profiteers’, art looting in war zones, large-scale confiscations, and attempts to use expropriated art to alleviate national exchange rate crises are all phenomena that can be traced back to 1914. This year also marked the start of a nationalisation process that would lead to the decline of the international ‘collecting class’ that had shaped the trade in art in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The seeds of the contemporary dominance of Anglophone auction markets were sown during the First World War, laying the foundation for the ‘modern market’ to emerge as a financial entity.

This chapter analyses the auction milieu’s cultural responses to war-induced developments. Within societies deeply entrenched in the mentality of mobilisation and sacrifice, the commercialisation of art stirred moral apprehensions, feelings of possession, and envy, both among the general public and within the art industry. Debates on nouveaux riches and profiteers underscored the construction of antagonist figures during the war, highlighting threats to the market from both external and internal forces. The widespread destruction of heritage also catalysed nationalist feelings, deepening the cultural fragmentation of a formerly integrated trade sphere. By scrutinising the biographies of dealers, examining art’s vulnerability in wartime upheaval, and exploring the interplay between art and finance, this chapter also outlines how the war acted on the tensions characteristic of each market and brought them to a conflagration.

How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

With the foundation of Imperial Germany in 1871, Berlin became capital of an enlarged and increasingly significant Empire, or Reich. Unification precipitated an economic boom, soon followed by a crash; but industry continued to expand rapidly, with an exponential growth of the population through immigrants seeking work in the city. In the half century following unification the population quadrupled, from around one million in 1871 to nearly four million in the expanded metropolis of Greater Berlin in 1920. New forms of transportation altered the dynamics of the city, while adequate housing and public health became matters of growing concern. In an era of competing nation states, Imperial Germany too began to acquire overseas colonies, including in southwest Africa and eastern Africa (today’s Namibia and Tanzania) as well as elsewhere in Africa and the Pacific. But defeat in the First World War shattered the dreams of the newly rich, the imperialists and colonisers, those who trumpeted racial superiority and dreamed of world mastery.

Capital/assets ratios in banking declined substantially during the two world wars. Three drivers severely impacted the capitalisation of banks. Banks invested heavily in government debt, which led to an expansion of balance sheets. High inflation ratios devalued the paid-up capital of banks. Moreover, formal and informal constraints restricted banks from issuing capital in wartime. The Second World War, in particular, had long-lasting effects on the evolution bank capital. The United Kingdom controlled capital issuances after 1939 and reinforced the financial repression of banks. The Swiss Banks operated in a regulated but much more liberal framework. In the United States, the belief in informal capital requirement guidelines was very pronounced. By the mid-1930s, the United States had already three federal bank supervisory agencies, which all had developed opinions on how capital adequacy was assessed. However, the rapidly growing government debt in banks’ balance sheets overturned these conventions, leading to the first risk-adjusted measurements for capital and triggering the development of new measurement approaches that became the forerunner of the Basel I guidelines.

This chapter begins with the First World War, when camels were used in unprecedented numbers by fighting armies. The First World War was the first step in the gradual transformation of the economic and political geography of the Middle East. It had deep influence on caravan trade and, following the caravans during the war and in the midst of borders negotiations, one can see how transnational and national form in parallel through overland mobility. With the following one, this chapter benefits from a dense and heterogeneous source base, which allows for the inclusion of lively narratives in order to give a full extent to Middle Eastern experiences of these transformations.

This chapter turns its attention to the first years of the Great War. Commencing with a reading of James’s wartime correspondence, its first half charts how the aging author was tormented, in the latter stages of 1914, by the possibility that his life and works might be subjected to retroactive disavowal in light of the conflict he never saw coming. It then discusses two of James’s wartime works, The Middle Years (1917) and The Sense of the Past (1917), focusing on how these texts engage with and reflect upon the prospect of undoing and recasting formative experiences. In its second half, the chapter zooms out slightly and offers a broader investigation of the wartime critical climate within which James’s acts of creative self-interrogation took place. Noting that as the conflict raged on, authors and critics alike became caught up in debates about the purpose of reading in wartime, the chapter draws on Rebecca West’s reviews of James from 1915 and 1916 and analyses her Jamesian novel, The Return of the Solider (1918), to explore the psychological and ethical pressures that were placed on another form of counterfactual consolation: the world into which we can escape through fiction.

On the cusp of the First World War, the global transition from coal to oil as the predominant energy source for technological, military, and industrial purposes markedly augmented the strategic value of oil, a prominence it retained for subsequent decades. In reaction, the British government, which possessed a 51 per cent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, sanctioned a significant expansion of the industry within its sphere of indirect influence. As petroleum demand escalated during the conflict, this enlargement necessitated the prioritisation of workforce allocation and maintenance, essential for producing petroleum in its varied forms. In response, a novel labour recruitment policy was instituted in collaboration with the British Indian Raj, extending the scope of recruitment beyond the borders of Iran through the Persian Gulf. As the war intensified, the strategic significance of Iran – highlighted by its extensive oil reserves and the proximity of its oil fields and refinery to the Mesopotamian front – transformed it from a marginal theatre of war into a pivotal military operations centre, thereby rendering it a sustained zone of conflict. This shift profoundly affected the operations and security of the Iranian oil industry and markedly influenced the working and living conditions of the labour force throughout the duration of the war.

This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.

The war seemed to have destroyed all false hopes. From the very beginning, Jews felt joined with other Germans in the war efforts and uplifted by the promise of total brotherhood, as announced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the streets of Berlin. But later on, as the war became a rather hopeless trench war, little remained of this sense of togetherness. The Jews felt the atmospheric change in the return of antisemitism. Individuals experienced it directly in their various army units and the community as a whole was finally shocked and irritated by the decision to collect “Jewish Statistics,” measuring their presumably real part in defending the Fatherland, , in October 1916. Later on, Jews were overwhelmed, together with others, by more threatening dangers. After briefly telling the life-story of Albert Ballin, the great ship-owner from Hamburg, a “Kaiser-Jew,” and the way he experienced the lost war, the end of the empire, and the approaching revolution, the chapter moves on to tell of the great hopes entertained by other, less prosperous Jews, who experienced the end of the old order and the imminent establishment of a new republic in a far more positive light.

The concluding Chapter 8 examines the commemorative afterlives of the West India Regiments in Britain and the Caribbean. Placing this within the wider context of the centenary of the First World War, including the ’culture wars’ that have occurred around how the British Empire is remembered, the chapter considers the acquisition, creation and display of the regiments’ material culture.

Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

In 1918, Prague became one of the new capital cities that appeared on the map of postimperial Europe. This Introduction suggests that examining urban streetscapes can fruitfully reveal the transformations in daily life caused by war and the transition from Empire to nation-state. It situates the book within a renewed historiography of the First World War and engages with recent approaches to the history of the Habsburg Empire. It also provides the theoretical framework that underpins the work, the rationale for the chosen focus on space, and the people who inhabit that space rather than separate national communities, and a brief discussion of the body of sources used.

War formed a backdrop to much of Vaughan Williams’s life, and his understanding of its effects – whether from his service in the First World War or as a civilian on the home front during the Second World War – evoked some of the most powerful and poignant musical responses of his career, including The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Pastoral, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies. These and other compositions incubated and emerged during tumultuous periods in the realms of musical performance, broadcasting, publishing, and patronage. Vaughan Williams’s navigation of these fields reveals a cross-section of major issues of concern to myriad composers, performers, and institutions, including the limits of political and ideological tolerance, the role of the state in artistic sponsorship, the responsibility of the artist to society, and the nature of musical memorialization.