1919 Crises of empire

The British empire emerged as one of the primary victors of the First World War, reaching its largest territorial following the peace settlement. But on a global scale, the war and its aftermath were a dramatic period of imperial collapse. As empires that had dominated Eurasia for centuries—Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman—disappeared, new landscapes of nation-states slowly and contentiously emerged. King’s played an important role in both of the reconfiguration of the British empire and the quest for a post-imperial models elsewhere in the world. Already during the First World War, the establishment of the School of Slavonic Studies at King’s provided a home for East-Central European scholars and activists in exile from the Habsburg empire or countries under the occupation of the Central Powers. While Slavic studies at King’s was originally strongly linked to the study of Russian language and literature, reflecting the wartime alliance with the Russian Empire, the collapse of that empire in 1917 deepened the association between Slavic studies and post-imperial self-determination in Eastern Europe. Already in the autumn of 1915, an inaugural lecture at King’s by Tomas G. Masaryk, who would later serve as the first president of Czechoslovakia, laid out a vision for ‘small nation’ emancipation that prefigured Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

This advocacy of national liberation did not, of course, extend to Britain’s own empire. But emerging anti-colonial challenges, alongside the strains of the Great War, contributed to a growing sense that the core legitimacy and structures of British imperial rule could also be breaking apart. In many territories the response was one of brutal military reprisal, but there were also moves afoot to reimagine what empire stood for and what colonial rule could achieve. In place of the jingoistic militarism that characterized late-nineteenth expansion, greater emphasis was placed upon responsible administration and colonial development schemes. Like many British universities, King’s saw its role to train a new cadre of highly educated colonial officials to take up roles across empire. With a growing number of students arriving from colonial territories, the college became a space in which the ideology and politics of empire could be debated, challenged, and reimagined. This research will examine how new assessments of imperial power by King’s fellows contributed to a reappraisal of the empire’s meanings and historical narrative, alongside exploring the experiences of the first generation of King’s students from colonial backgrounds.