Speaker: Dr Alex Kay

Senior Lecturer, University of Potsdam

When forces from Britain and the Empire fought the regular armies of ‘civilized nations’ during the First World War, it was the first time they had done so since the Crimean War (1853–1856) against the Russian Empire, more than half a century earlier. This means, tellingly, that colonial warfare constituted the only practical and recent experience of conflict for British soldiers at the outset of the Great War. The military experiences, knowledge, practices and traditions British troops could draw on in 1914 were exclusively taken from dozens of wars and conflicts in the colonial sphere, in China, Persia, India, Sudan, South Africa, and so on. How could this not shape the British approach when faced, after an interval of almost sixty years, with a white, European enemy? How does a state wage a war against a European enemy when it’s forgotten how? The answer, I argue, was by merging practices of colonial warfare and European warfare.

Bio:

Dr Alex Kay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Potsdam, and a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He specialises in the history of Germany from 1918 to 1945, National Socialist policies of extermination, and comparative research on genocide and violence. He has published five acclaimed books on Nazi Germany, including his most recent book, Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing.

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