This dissertation analyzes the relationship that developed between the British Army and the United States Army between 1917 and 1941. Although those two forces operated as allies during World War I, both nations’ leaders grew frustrated with each other following the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. Officers in both armies built on their positive wartime experiences, however, to ensure their armies viewed each other as prospective allies should a future global conflict arise. In the two decades after World War I, personal exchanges initiated by individual officers and information sharing between these two armies improved relations and encouraged cooperation in a number of areas. The resulting cordiality that spread to a majority of the officers in both armies manifested itself in their socializing, reports, war plans, professional journals, and personal papers. Long before President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill took steps toward forming the Anglo-American alliance during World War II, their nations’ armies laid the military foundation for the special relationship. / History

After the First World War, there was widespread support for U.S. intervention in the Near East to assist Christian minorities in the region, but the Wilson administration and the U.S. Senate took little action. The Armenian cause in particular was foremost in the minds of Americans. Many Americans felt the United States had a moral responsibility to help Near Eastern Christians. For many observers, American interest coupled with the opportunity for increased participation in Near Eastern affairs made it seem likely that the United States would emerge from the peace process as a major influence in the Area. However, this was not the case, and proposed initiatives that would increase American participation in the area were either ignored or rejected. There was broad interest in getting more involved in the Near East, but no consensus on how to do so. Some favored an American mandate over Armenia, while others wanted a larger American mandate over Armenia, Constantinople, and Anatolia, and others sought to avoid mandates altogether and instead preferred sending direct aid to Armenia and the Near East. By the time it seemed clear that American intervention in the Near East would only happen along the terms favored by those seeking to limit American costs and responsibility, the solidification of isolationist sentiment in the United States, antagonized by the long League of Nations debate, and changing circumstances in the Near East made a dramatic increase in U.S. influence in the region unlikely. The debate over American intervention in the Near East provides insight into larger discussions about American imperialism and its relationship to humanitarianism, American isolationism in the interwar years, and the partisan atmosphere of American postwar politics. / History

This dissertation investigates the reasons behind combined military and naval offensive expeditions that Great Britain conducted outside of Europe during the Great War. It argues that they were not unnecessary adjuncts to the war in Europe, but they fulfilled an important strategic purpose by protecting British trade where it was most vulnerable. Trade was not a luxury for the British; it was essential for maintaining the island nation's way of life, a vital interest and a matter of national survival. Great Britain required freedom of the seas in order to maintain its global trade. A general war in Europe threatened Great Britain's economic independence with the potential of losing its continental trading partners. The German High Seas Fleet constituted a serious threat that also placed the British coast at grave risk forcing the Royal Navy to concentrate in home waters. This dissertation argues that the several combined military and naval operations against overseas territories constituted parts of an overarching strategy designed to facilitate the Royal Navy's gaining command of the seas. Using documents from the Cabinet, the Foreign and Colonial Offices, the War Office, and the Admiralty, plus personal correspondence and papers of high-ranking government officials, this dissertation demonstrates that the Offensive Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defense drafted the campaign plan. Subsequently, the plan received Cabinet approval, and then the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, and the Colonial Office coordinated with allies and colonies to execute the operations necessary to prosecute the campaign. In Mesopotamia, overseas expeditions directed against the Ottoman Empire protected communications with India and British oil concessions in Persia. The combined operations against German territories exterminated the logistics and intelligence hubs that supported Germany's commerce raiders thereby protecting Britain's world-wide trade and its overseas possessions. / History

This thesis analyzes how the Habsburg state tried to preserve itself late in the First World War by cooperating with German plans to create a powerful Central European economic block. While Habsburg leaders initially aimed to preserve a conservative monarchical order in the Austro-Hungarian sphere of influence, this paper argues that the Dual Monarchy's response to the increasingly serious shortage of food and its economic negotiations with Germany, which culminated at the peace conference in Brest-Litovsk, show how by late 1917 the Habsburg state was willing to participate in a fundamental reordering of Europe in a final attempt to save itself. / History

Between 1914 and 1919, elite white people erected monuments across Virginia, permanently transforming the landscape of their communities with memorials to the Confederacy. Why did these Confederate memorialists continue to build monuments to a conflict their side had lost half a century earlier? This thesis examines this question to extend the study of the Lost Cause past the traditional stopping date of the Civil War semicentennial in 1915 and to add to the study of memorialization as a historical process. Studying the design and language of monuments as well as dedication orations and newspaper coverage of unveiling ceremonies, this thesis focuses on Virginia's Confederate memorials to provide a case study for the whole South. Memorialization is always an act of the present as much as an honoring of the past. Elite white Virginians built memorials to speak to their contemporaries at the same time they claimed to speak for them. Memorialists turned to the Confederacy for support in an effort to maintain their status at the top of post-Reconstruction Southern society. Confederate monuments served as permanent physical role models, continuing sectional reconciliation, encouraging women to maintain prescribed gender roles, and discouraging African Americans from standing up for their rights. American involvement in World War I exacerbated societal changes that threatened the position of the traditional white ruling class. As proponents of the Lost Cause squared off against the transformations of the Progressive era, Virginia's Confederate memorialists imbued monuments throughout the Commonwealth with messages meant to ensure their continued dominance. / Master of Arts

<p>This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty. </p><p>To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era. </p><p>This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region. </p><p>This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis examines the relationship between the private naval armaments industry, businessmen and the British Government’s supply planning framework between 1918 and 1941. More specifically, it reassesses the concept of the Military-Industrial Complex by examining the impact of disarmament upon private industry, the role of leading industrialists within supply and procurement policy, and the successes and failings of the Government’s supply organisation. This work blends together political, naval and business history in new ways, and, by situating the business activities of industrialists alongside their work as government advisors, it sheds new light on the operation of the British state. This thesis argues that there was a small coterie of influential businessmen, led by Lord Weir, who, in a time of great need for Britain, first gained access to secret information on industrial mobilisation as advisers to the Supply Board and Principal Supply Officers Committee (PSOC), and later were able to directly influence policy. This made Lord Weir and Sir James Lithgow among the most influential industrial figures in Britain. This was a relationship which cut both ways: Weir and others provided the state with honest, thoughtful advice and policies, but, as ‘insiders’ utilised their access to information to build a business empire at a fraction of the normal costs. Outsiders, by way of contrast, lacked influence and were forced together into a defensive ‘ring’ – or cartel – and effectively fixed prices for British warships in the lean 1920s. However, by the 1930s, the cartel grew into one of the most sophisticated profiteering groups of its day, before being shut down by the Admiralty in 1941. More generally, this work argues that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was a turning point for supply organisation, and that between 1931 and 1935, the PSOC and its component bodies were governed by necessity. Powerful constraints on finance and political manoeuvre explain the nature of industrial involvement. Thus, it is argued that the PSOC did a broadly effective job at organising industry with the tools it was given, and the failings were down to the top levels of policymaking – the Cabinet – not acting upon advice to ease procurement bottlenecks early enough, to the extent that British warship construction was more expensive and slower than it could have been. In sum, this group of industrialists, the Admiralty and a few key figures in the PSOC such as Sir Harold Brown, effectively saved MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain’s National Government from itself.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / David Stone / This manuscript reveals the primary causes of Habsburg defeat both in 1866 and in 1914-1918. The choice of offensive strategy and tactics against an enemy possessing superior weaponry in the Austro-Prussian War and opponents with superior numbers and weapons in the First World War resulted in catastrophe. The inferiority of the Habsburg forces in both wars stemmed from imprudent spending decisions during peacetime rather than conservatism or parliamentary stinginess. The desire to restore the sunken prestige of Austria-Hungary and prove Habsburg great power status drove the military to waste money on an expensive fleet and choose offensive tactics to win great victories. This study shows the civil-military interaction in regard to funding and procurement decisions as well as the deep intellectual debates within the army, which refute the idea that the Habsburg military remained opposed to technology or progress.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / This study argues that after World War I, corporate executives continued a strategy of perception management (PM) to control Americans’ choices in the commercial sphere and to shape the economic and cultural landscape of the 1920s. The state used PM on an unprecedented scale in 1917 and 1918 to promote a model of loyal American behavior (as part its effort to manage the mobilized U.S. society), but the use of PM did not end after the Armistice. While many historians have seen wartime propaganda measures as the result of special fears and circumstances tied to a sense of pervasive national emergency, they fail to explain the continuation of comparable methods into the period of peace supposedly characterized by a return to "normalcy." Whereas most historical studies sharply delineate between political propaganda and commercial advertising, this study stresses leaders' continuous use of PM to promote their notions of what constituted typical, normal, even loyal American behavior in times of both war and peace. While not a contemporary term in the early twentieth century, PM offers an appropriate conceptual framework to analyze a deliberate strategy at that time. This study defines it as actions used to convey or deny selected information to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, resulting in behaviors and actions favorable to the originators’ objectives. During WWI, policymakers and bureaucrats concealed the state's effort to control people's behavior with claims of defending liberty and democracy. After the war, corporate executives used PM to manufacture consumer demand and encourage Americans to think of themselves foremost as consumers. A cross section of political, economic, and cultural history, Perception Management in the United States from the Great War to the Great Crash offers an original perspective that emphasizes the consistency between the wartime and postwar eras by highlighting leaders' ongoing use of perception management to control Americans' behavior.

Esta tese analisa a relação entre o setor externo e as mudanças ocorridas na política econômica do Brasil entre a Crise de 1913 e o fim da Primeira Guerra Mundial. O objetivo principal é estabelecer relações entre a crise financeira que teve início quando as Guerras Balcânicas envolveram interesses dos principais países da Europa Ocidental. O receio de que os confrontos nos Bálcãs provocassem mudanças na geopolítica da região levou o mercado financeiro europeu a entesourar recursos. Este entesouramento dificultou o acesso de recursos em ouro pelo Brasil. A economia brasileira era dependente do setor externo. A falta de divisas levou à redução nas exportações dos principais produtos que o Brasil comercializava no mercado internacional: café e borracha. A retração nas vendas internacionais dificultou o financiamento das importações, que foram reduzidas em percentual acima do verificado com nas exportações. A solução foi solicitar uma nova consolidação da dívida externa brasileira que entrou para a história como o segundo funding loan. A Crise de 1913 previa os eventos que se consolidariam como a Primeira Guerra Mundial. O Brasil foi forçado a modificar a sua política econômica. Novos mecanismos de atuação da economia brasileira no cenário internacional foram experimentados. A economia brasileira chegou ao fim de 1918 com novas perspectivas de atuação na economia internacional. / This thesis analyzes the relationship between the external sector and the changes in economic policy in Brazil between 1913 crisis and the end of World War I. The main objective is to establish links between the financial crisis that began when the Balkan Wars involved interests of the major Western European countries. The fear that the clashes in the Balkans provoked changes in the geopolitics of the region led the European financial market to hoard resources. This hoarding hindered the access of gold resources in Brazil. The Brazilian economy was dependent on the external sector. The lack of foreign exchange led to a reduction in exports of the main products that Brazil traded in the international market: coffee and rubber. The decline in international sales hampered the financing of imports, which were reduced by a percentage higher than that observed with exports. The solution was to request further consolidation of Brazil\'s foreign debt went down in history as the second funding loan. The Crisis 1913 predicted the events that would consolidate as the First World War. Brazil was forced to change its economic policy. New mechanisms of action of the Brazilian economy in the international arena have been tried. The Brazilian economy has ended 1918 with new perspectives of action in the international economy.