World War I was not just a conflict between nations, it was a war between empires. Western European empires like Britain and France had overseas colonies around the world, while Eastern empires like Austria-Hungary and Russia ruled European territories and North Asian countries connected by land. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on July 28, 1914 was itself an anti-imperialist murder, planned by members of Young Bosnia angry at the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary.
European competition for imperial territories helped set the stage for the rivalries that unfolded during World War I, and the war in turn had a major effect on the balance of imperial power. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires all collapsed during or shortly after the war, which ended with a treaty that ceded Germany’s overseas colonies to the victors.
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The Scramble for Africa
French soldiers in the streets of Senegal, around 1900. Senegal became a colony of France in 1895.
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At the start of World War I, almost the entire African continent was under one form or another of colonial rule by Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain or Portugal. Most of this colonization occurred after 1880, during a period known as the Scramble for Africa or the Partition of Africa, in which European empires battled for control African territories.
In the centuries preceding the Scramble for Africa, European empires had invaded African coastal nations to capture and enslave people, but had generally failed to invade inland due to difficulties in navigation and the threat of diseases such as malaria. After the legal abolition of slavery, new technologies like steamships and quinine enabled Europeans to invade more of the continent.
The European empires that invaded Africa saw colonization as a way to exploit forced labor, extract resources, and become more powerful compared to other European empires. Although colonialism in Africa was not a direct cause of World War I, it did help create an environment in which European empires viewed each other as rivals who could only succeed at the expense of other empires. For example, France and Germany, two main rivals during World War I, battled for control of Morocco in the decade before the war.
“France and Germany did not go to war over Morocco,” says Richard Fogarty, a history professor at the University of Albany and co-editor of Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict.
“What happened, however, was that they were conditioned to think of themselves as competitors,” he says, “and to think of the world as this zero-sum game in which the pursuit of French empire could only come at the expense of the German pursuit of empire.
Britain was also concerned about Germany’s attempt to build a navy that could challenge its own. Although Germany was far from achieving this, says Fogarty, “the British could not even tolerate the idea of a threat to their naval supremacy, because they had an empire to secure. And so it made them hypersensitive to any competition.
French and British fears over German empire building are part of what drove European nations to form alliances and informal agreements in the decades leading up to World War I, dividing Europe into two opposing camps. .
Imperialism in Europe
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie riding in an open carriage in Sarajevo shortly before their assassination. (Credit: Henry Guttmann/Getty Images)
Unlike most Western European empires, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires were contiguous, with territories connected to each other by land. On the eve of World War I, the borders of the three empires converged on the Balkans, a region of southeastern Europe that the empires considered strategically valuable and which played a major role in the start of the Great War.
The Ottoman Empire previously controlled much of the Balkans, but lost most of its territory there in the 19th century. Austria-Hungary took advantage of the decline of the Ottoman Empire to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, a region of the Balkans that the Empire annexed in 1908.
It was against this occupation and annexation that the revolutionary group Young Bosnia protested when it assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne. After the assassination, Austria-Hungary accused neighboring Serbia, another Balkan nation, of helping Young Bosnia and declared war on Serbia.
Russia ostensibly agreed to support Serbia against Austria-Hungary because it was another Slavic state; but Andrew Jarboe, history professor at Berklee College of Music who co-edited Empires in World War I with Fogarty, suggests that Russia was also motivated by imperial interests in the Balkans.
“I really think Russia’s calculation is this: if they don’t respond militarily, they make themselves obsolete in this region,” he said.
Empires dismantled after World War I
Russia fought World War I alongside the Allies, which included Britain, France, Italy and Japan, but left the Great War in 1917 when revolution and civil war broke out in its own empire. This led to the collapse of the Russian Empire and the creation of the Soviet Union.
The opposite side, the Central Powers, is where most other imperial collapses have occurred. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe and the German Empire in Europe and abroad. Britain, France and Belgium shared most of Germany’s African colonies, while Japan took over German colonies in China and the North Pacific. Additionally, the treaty imposed measures on the Ottoman Empire that led to its dissolution in 1922.
When Adolf Hitler came to power, he deliberately used the existence of a former German Empire to justify his “Third Reich”, or “Third Empire”, which he imagined would take control of Europe (in his mind, the Holy Roman Empire was the “First Reich”). When he invaded Poland in 1939, starting World War II, part of his logic that he was conquering territory that rightfully belonged to Germany – an excuse that many imperialists had used before and would use again .
