This study examines the role of art as a crucible of capital and property during the First World War and constructs a large-scale historical narrative of European auctions held between 1910 and 1925. By combining sources such as auction reports, newspaper articles, caricatures, individual memoirs, and financial and legal documents with an analysis of art prices, this study allows for making new observations about the evolution of European art markets, their disruption by the events of the First World War, and their transnational entanglements. Far from focusing solely on reconstructing the collecting patterns of prominent individuals or shedding light on specific histories of appropriation and looting, this book explores broader cultural and social developments across the British, French, and German art markets and their milieus and also touches upon trade spheres such as Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia. While the First World War has often been neglected in scholarly studies as a phase of stagnation and stasis, this study shows that it had a disruptive impact on the art trade in the twentieth century and introduces a new transnational methodology for historical inquiries into cultural and artistic markets.

The First World War marked a shift from liberalism and internationalism to a period characterised by nationalisation, ethnicisation of citizenship, and economic protectionism. The art market’s history aligns with these narratives, highlighting the fragmentation of a European trade zone and the disruption of a transnational trade equilibrium. The war prompted significant structural transformations in these markets, with Germany seeing a surge in art investment as a hedge against inflation. In Britain, art sales were driven by tax obligations and national service investments. Conversely, the French market struggled, facing stagnation and a focus on preserving existing collections due to the threat of destruction. Neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland maintained stable art markets, fostering avant-garde movements and serving as hubs for buyers and sellers. The year 1914 catalysed structural transformations in these markets, highlighting how modern warfare altered art’s perception, value, and trade.

Violent conflict was a feature of the early papacy as theological factions or Roman families contested the Throne of Saint Peter and as popes responded to the collapse of Roman authority by assuming responsibility for the defense of Rome. By 1000 CE, popes were temporal rulers, and like their secular counterparts they considered military force a legitimate instrument. The papacy participated in the Crusades, principally as propagandist and financier, and engaged militarily in the “Italian Wars” (1494–1559). Subsequently, papal military capabilities declined and during the Napoleonic Wars the papacy offered little resistance against French armies that twice seized Rome. Under Pius IX, serious efforts to improve the papal military were insufficient to prevent the absorption of Rome and the Papal States into the kingdom of Italy. Reduced to a handful of palace guards, subsequent pontiffs abandoned any martial posture, although these household guards protected the Vatican during World Wars I and II.

Chapter 1 focuses on relations between soldiers and the Bahian people during the War for the Debatable Lands from 1776 to 1777. This war between Spain and the Portugal drew Bahia into an inter-imperial conflict that had a significant impact on local politics. The governor of Bahia tried to conscript young men into military service as well as step up efforts to catch deserters. People used a range of tactics to protect themselves and others from conscription as well as from slave catchers and brutal work conditions. Such protection could take the form of runaway enslaved people who hid deserters, to officers who refused to force young men into the army, to enslaved people and deserters fighting together against conscription officers. In short, many Bahians worked to avoid the wartime dictates of the empire at all costs. Colonial officials cited these relations as proof that the people of Bahia were disorderly. Yet the people castigated the military and the government as disorderly, and they acted accordingly when they felt threatened.

A global lens on European military history exposes the racist foundations upon which European empires have gone to war around the world over centuries. The racisms and nationalisms embedded in the narration of Europe’s military past prevent it from fully making the global turn. The study of war and militarization without the global turn enables the continued avoidance of questions that inherently challenge the nationalist, patriotic, and frequently racist and misogynist foundations that have long shaped the field. Moreover, European military historiography tends to ignore the many wars of anti-colonial resistance fought against colonizing powers in the long nineteenth century. Yet they were as much a part of European military history as any other wars. To globalize European military history, scholars must include analysis of anti-colonial resistance within the standard approaches to “military history.” Situating European military history more firmly in the global unsettles assumed knowledge about European military dominance, opening new possibilities for historians to consider armed struggles against empire within the same field of study as the recognized staples of European military history.

In Chapter 10, we advance concrete ideas that peace and social activists are invited to adopt when interested in using personal narratives of genocide and/or intractable war in intergroup processes of sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation. Our suggestions draw on conceptualizations discussed in the book, as well as recommendations derived from previous on-the-ground experiences in such contexts. Our proposals focus on the following four arenas: (1) intergroup methods for moving from narratives of distancing to narratives that encourage peacebuilding; (2) ways to deal with social forgetting and “dangerous memories” of genocide and intractable war in peacebuilding efforts; (3) how to deal with fake news, denial of atrocities, and distancing narratives in reconciliation endeavors; and (4) concrete suggestions for pursuing peace with personal narratives of genocide and war when the macro-social level is sabotaging peace efforts.

The chapter is concerned with metaphor and focusses specifically on war metaphors in political discourses. The cognitive mechanisms at work in metaphor are described with an emphasis on frames as the unit of conceptual organisation that gets mapped in political metaphors. Recent experimental studies demonstrating the framing effects of metaphor are discussed. The war frame is described to include discussion of intertextuality as a means of accessing it. Three case studies are then presented exploring war metaphors in discourses of Covid-19, Brexit and immigration. Analogies with the first and second world wars in particular are highlighted and critiqued. The chapter defines and discusses extreme metaphors illustrated through examples in which immigrants are compared to animals and closes with a discussion of how readers may resist extreme metaphors.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.

In Chapter 5, we propose our categorization of the four main kinds of personal narratives of genocide and intractable war – Distancing, Victimhood, Ambivalence/Paradoxes, and Embracing the Other while Remaining in One’s Pain – that joins conceptualizations and understandings connected to the development and dynamics of group identity, intergenerational trauma and types of coping, and genuine dialogue between former and present-day “enemies.” We combine these conceptualizations into a theoretical model that proposes the conditions that can either encourage sustainable reconciliation and positive peacebuilding or, unfortunately, obstruct peace endeavors, in contexts of genocide and/or intractable war. The theoretical model focuses on conditions that exist on two main levels: the personal and intergroup level, and the macro-social level.

Many people fleeing the massacres, village burnings, slave raids, and famines across southern Sudan from the early 1980s followed paths north to the capital. This chapter starts at the height of this wartime displacement in the mid-1980s, detailing the emergency mutual support and organisation that people undertook, based on older associational cultures and systems rooted in long histories of migration and displacement north. The chapter locates the people whose lives and work are followed through the book, as they build new neighbourhoods and negotiate access, safety, and work within the hostile capital.

Chapter 9 proposes topics and issues that connect to further research of personal narratives of genocide and war, and their connections to sustainable peace and reconciliation. This chapter proposes four different areas that have relevance for further exploration of this topic that can be explored qualitatively, quantitatively, or via mixed methods. The four research arenas are: (1) exploration of the categories of personal narratives of genocide and war; (2) personal narratives of genocide and war and their ties to societal transformation; (3) personal narratives and coping with the effects of genocide and war; and (4) further exploration of our conceptual model concerning kinds of personal narratives and the conditions that can either encourage peacebuilding processes or peace obstruction.

The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.