My work to date has mainly focused on the comparative and urban history of the First World War. I have published articles and book chapters on the urban experience of the conflict, on refugeedom, and on humour in wartime. My most recent publications have investigated the historiography and global history of the First World War and the transformations of the belligerent state during the conflict.
From the local to the transnational, my work combines different scales of analysis and engages with a range of disciplinary perspectives. Here are some of the themes I have explored and links to a few relevant publications.
Social mobilizations in Britain and France
My first book, Mobilisation, Sacrifice, Citoyenneté. Angleterre – France, 1900-1918 (Paris: 2013), offers a comparative history of social mobilization in France and England during the First World War. It has been received as a major contribution to the historiography of WWI Europe. Its rethinking of belligerence as a critical category of analysis, informed by a critical engagement with social sciences, productively breaks down conventional boundaries between the military, social and cultural histories of war.
Click on the image to read more about it - and indeed some of it.
European and global history of the First World War
The historiography of the First World War still betrays the continuing dominance of national and Eurocentric perspectives. The conventional chronology of the war (1914-1918) is another heritage of conventional diplomatic and military history. Recent works have, however, stressed the necessity to place the First World War in a larger chronological framework (1911-1923); in a continuum of colonial conflicts, European wars, civil wars, revolutions, political violence and genocide.
Likewise concerned with the transformations of warfare, I have recently been working to develop a historical geography of the war to further our understanding of the totalizing and globalizing logic of the First World War. The conventional geography of the war, inherited from operational history, reduces the war to belligerency and military operations. Shifting the emphasis to belligerence and the mobilization of resources in response to the war will allow us to redefine both the spaces and temporalities of war. We can then locate the conflict and trace its gradual penetration within and beyond the belligerent empires, to include the experience of neutrals and colonial societies.
Attentive to the varying intensity and spread of the conflict, to the global flows of manpower and material resources, as well as to the environmental and cultural impacts of the conflict, this project seeks to rethink the experience of combat, mobilization, and reconstructions and to remap the Great War. Such a agenda calls for a collaborative effort that would produce a global history of the First World War. This project will explore all relevant spaces of the war experience; from local to global through nations and empires.
For an initial exploration of these issues, see the article I co-wrote with Olivier Compagnon: "Geographies of Mobilization and Territories of Belligerence during the First World War", Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2016/1 (71st Year), p. 37-64. Click on the image to access the article.
The transformations of the wartime state
Scholars of the First World War have long recognized the critical role played by the state in leading, organizing and managing the mobilization of belligerent societies and its transformations testified to the impact of industrialized warfare. Since the late 1980s however, the cultural turn that largely accounts for the renewal and dynamism of First World War studies has shifted the emphasis away from the wartime state and its operations. Its study relatively suffered as a result. Along with other colleagues, I have been thinking of ways to bring the state back into the center of the historiographical discussion.
I have so far focussed on three critical aspects of the relationship between state and society: the deployment of coercion, the expression of national solidarity, and the redefinition of sovereignty. The goal is to demonstrate how the logic of mass participation in modern warfare transformed both the contours and the foundations of the state. To do so, historians ought to commit to a renewed engagement with social scientific literature and the sociology of the state in particular.
For a first attempt, click on the image to access “The First World War and the Transformations of the State”, International Affairs, 90: 2 (March 2014), 249-264.
For a Spanish version, see Revista Universitaria de Histora Militar, June 2014, 165-185.
Lecture delivered at the Fritt Ord Foundation, Oslo, 2014
Exile and refugeedom in the First World War
In the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in Western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike long concurred in marginalising the experience of WWI refugees. This is no longer the case. In the last few years, historians have done a lot to uncover the stories of refugees across Europe.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece focussing on the unprecedented encounter of refugees with host communities in France and Great Britain. The article demonstrates that the refugees’ plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War. Click on the image to access it.
More recently, I considered how the specific experience of Belgian refugees in Britain highlighted the emergence of transnational home fronts in 1914-1918. See my forthcoming piece, in H. Strachan, ed., The British Home Front, 1914-1918, , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021 (forthcoming).
For a full list of publications, click here.
