The First World War is often understood as a European conflict that spread globally, but this perspective obscures a fundamental reality: the war was built upon a foundation of European control of global colonial resources and labor established over the previous century. The industrial capacity that made total war possible, the raw materials that sustained it, and the human resources that fought it were drawn from this global imperial system that extended far beyond Europe’s borders. That made the Great War, into a world war.
The empires of the nineteenth century were the second wave of European expansion, after the first phase that began with the Portuguese and Spanish in the 1400s. The first wave largely targeted the Americas, but the second primarily focused on Africa and Asia. Nineteenth-century colonial expansion gave Europe access to greater raw materials, agricultural goods, markets, capital flows, and labor, which combined with new industrial economics, linked the development of the imperial metropole to the colonies. While imperialism was profitable for the elite, the increasingly literate masses were influenced by newspapers that supported imperialism to back overseas expansion as a sign of national greatness. Colonies became a status symbol, proof that a nation mattered as a Great Power.
But this imperial competition was built on more than prestige—it rested on European views of racial hierarchy that shaped how the war was fought. As Europe changed, secular arrogance mixed with scientific racism that ranked peoples with Europeans or “whites” on top. Under the facade of a decaying Christianity, racialized thinking spread; the creed that actually governed was Social Darwinism—flatly incompatible with Christian claims of human equality. The supposed duty to “civilize”—through education, health care, Christianity, and “good government”—functioned as moral cover for a system that denied the very gospel it invoked. Popular European images cast Chinese as cunning, Africans as primitive, and Pacific islanders as big children. These hierarchies determined not only who would be ruled, but who would fight Europe’s war, and where it would be fought. The spread of racism would comeback to haunt Europeans in later generations.
When the Great War came, Europe could draw on this global network—while the colonized populations lived with the upheaval, the classifications, and the contradictions of foreign rule. Finance capitalism funded the new empires. Industrialization and new scientific discoveries made it possible to expand into areas that were previously too difficult to reach, and where in the past European armies did not have the firepower to subdue large African and Asian armies. Steamships moved goods and troops faster. The underwater telegraph carried instructions swiftly from imperial capitals to the colonial administrative centers. Quinine reduced deaths in tropical zones where previously Europeans were extremely vulnerable. Just as Eurasian diseases devastated New World populations, Europeans could be hit just has hard by diseases in other parts of the world because immunity does not play favorites.1 Breech-loading rifles and machine guns delivered firepower in increasingly one-sided conflicts. And then, the power that went out would be reimported into Europe, the violence abroad would feed the violence at home.
Colonized societies were transformed through this mobilization, meaning the importation, or deployment of colonized people into Europe to fight. The first mass contact of the colonized people with the imperial heartlands came through the trenches. African and Indochinese soldiers learned French; soldiers from India learned the king’s English—European languages connected the world through the vocabulary of war. This mobilization of colonial subjects for European warfare made the contradictions at the heart of empire visible. The French and British would be less powerful without their ability to put colonial populations in uniform, but also, their German enemy could also draw away some of their power by targeting the colonies.
The war exposed the tensions that had would only grow after the peace of 1919. European powers celebrated constitutionalism and national independence at home while running unrepresentative regimes abroad. They claimed they fought for freedom and civilization while denying freedom to millions under their rule. The scale of colonial contribution to the European war effort made these contradictions difficult to justify. What would happened if some of the colonized decided that they could actually support the European empires if the Europeans would make them partners and not merely subjects? And, if the empires of capital would not share with the colonials, then perhaps Marx was right about the fundamental contradictions of the system, and maybe those who opposed European exploitation of their homelands would embrace communistic theories as a rejection of European domination. The misbehavior and contradictions of the Europeans supplied the arguments to undermine them, and would later feed into Cold War struggles.
Consequently, mobilizing colonial resources and peoples for a European conflict also revealed to those same peoples how dependent Europe had become on those it claimed were naturally inferior. This was a fraught choice by the great powers because without access to global resources and labor, the Europeans could not have built the wealth that sustained the scale and duration of industrial warfare that characterized the Great War. And without these colonies Europe would be in a much weaker position versus the rising power the United States because American power was based on domestic resources not colonial extraction. The USA could be a superpower without any colonies whereas it was colonial resources that determined the balance of power in favor of the Entente and the lack of those resources placed the Central Powers at a great disadvantage.
France, Britain and Russia, especially, needed their vast territories. Imagine France without Africa, Britain without India or Russia without Siberia. The USA with its 48 states was inherently stronger because America power was American and secured domestically, while European power was imperial and vulnerable to ruptures in those relationships.
But, increased contact with Europe itself, created negative feedback for the imperial regimes. Bringing colonial soldiers to Europe exposed them to regular Europeans—often not so different from poor African and Asian peasants—undermining claims of superiority. Additionally, the “lessons” of European imperial success would later return with devastating effect during the Second World War, when Japan adopted an accelerated version of European-style imperialism, asking: if European colonization was a sign of superiority and advanced culture, should not Japan do the same to Europeans in order to gain their respect?
But first, European powers like France would have to manage and police relations between their own people and the colonial soldiers they had deployed to fight the Germans. The methods of managing that system would also strain relations with later allies like the United States after it entered the war. But in 1914, Europe’s problems were the world’s problems.2
In the seeds of every ideology is the "genetic" flaw that in time will be exposed. The ideology that drove imperialism, shunting true theology to the side and using it as a cloak, is the same ideology that drove neo-con and neo-lib nation-building and both have been shown to be dead ends. Colonize the world or "democratize" the world is the same ideology in different words. What it ends up being is colonize the world, import the world. We can be a shining city on the hill and draw world to the light by example or we can send our young men into the world to "make" them just like us. Choose wisely, one road takes everyone toward the Kingdom, the other road takes everyone to perdition. While the First World War is one example that is still playing out, there are other earlier examples in history that suggest the same choice.