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This book talks about the mass displacement of civilians, estimated to be 14 to 15 million, in the twentieth-century Europe during the First World War. It looks at the causes and consequences of the refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the attempts to understand its significance. Key sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Serbia. The German army's occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of refugees, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Jewish, Ruthenian and Polish civilians in the Habsburg Empire fled their homes or were deported by the military to distant locations. Following Italy's attack on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Habsburg authorities ordered around 100,000 Slovenian subjects of the empire to leave. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia brought about a humanitarian catastrophe as civilians and the remnants of the Serbian army sought safety elsewhere. However, mass flight of civilian refugees did not begin in 1914 nor did it come to an end in 1918. Muslim refugees fled to the relative safety of Anatolia in order to escape violent persecution by Bulgarian and other forces during the Balkan Wars on 1912-13. There were complex movements of population between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before 1914. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances.
noting the ‘preponderant Afrikaner vote, a vote which is particularly difficult to educate’. 44 While the presence of those involved in the RAF training scheme was contested among established settlers, the presence of refugees and enemy internees provoked more straightforward denunciations. A total of over 12,000 German, Austrian and Italians were interned in Southern Rhodesia as well as 1,624 Polish refugees who were put into camps across the colony at Gatooma (Kadoma), Fort Victoria, Salisbury, Tanganyika and Umvuma (Mvuma). 45 Doris Lessing had become an alien by
higher: according to Wasilewski, the number of refugees from Polish lands may have reached 1.5 million people.30 It is clear that Polish refugees made up a significant proportion of the total number of refugees who ended up in Russia. The Tatiana committee for the relief of refugees concluded that there were 3,113,400 refugees of different nationalities in Russia at the beginning of 1917, of whom more than 606,000 hailed from the Kingdom of Poland. In fact the number of refugees from the Polish lands was probably much higher. According to official Polish sources, 1
Fifty years ago Enoch Powell made national headlines with his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, warning of an immigrant invasion in the once respectable streets of Wolverhampton. This local fixation brought the Black Country town into the national spotlight, yet Powell's unstable relationship with Wolverhampton has since been overlooked. Drawing from oral history and archival material, this book offers a rich local history through which to investigate the speech, bringing to life the racialised dynamics of space during a critical moment in British history. What was going on beneath the surface in Wolverhampton and how did Powell's constituents respond to this dramatic moment? The research traces the ways in which Powell's words reinvented the town and uncovers highly contested local responses. While Powell left Wolverhampton in 1974, the book returns to the city to explore the collective memories of the speech that continue to reverberate. In a contemporary period of new crisis and division, examining the shadow of Powell allows us to reflect on racism and resistance from 1968 to the present day.
The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. A communal, public, and embodied art form, drama was linked for the Chartists with other kinds of political performance: the oratory of the mass platform, festival-like outdoor meetings, and the elaborate street theatre of protest marches. Plays that Chartists wrote or staged advanced new interpretations of British history and criticised aspects of the contemporary world. And Chartist drama intervened in fierce strategic arguments within the movement. Most notably, poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising of 1839, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives, defends the rebellion and the Chartist recourse to violence as a means for the movement to achieve its aims. The volume’s appendices document over one hundred Chartist dramatic performances, staged by activists in local Chartist associations or at professional benefits at some of London’s largest working-class theatres. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.
1915. He recorded refugees’ stories along with his personal impressions of the evacuation of Belarusian and Polish refugees, as well as German colonists. These were published in his book Liudskie volny: bezhentsy (‘Human waves: refugees’), which first appeared in Petrograd in 1917. Eighty years later, his memoir was republished in the Belarusian magazine Nyoman.8 This chapter begins by describing the ‘spontaneous’ migration of the population of the Western Front areas of the Russian Empire at the outbreak of war in 1914 along with deportation of others, including
Ukraine The precise ethnic composition of refugees is difficult to establish. Officials normally referred to Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian refugees v 111 v Liubov Zhvanko and Oleksiy Nestulya as ‘Russian refugees’. Only after the February Revolution did they begin to express their national identity. Polish refugees outnumbered them all.9 In total, refugees on Ukrainian soil belonged to 20 different national groups, including Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Moldavians, Rumanians and Serbs. From
Around 100,000 Belgian and other refugees moved in and out of a large refugee v7v Introduction camp organised by the Metropolitan Asylum Board in Earl’s Court, London.26 Impoverished Jewish, Ukrainian and Polish refugees who fled from Russian-occupied Galicia found it difficult to reach Austria but, as Klein-Pejšová and Hermann point out, those with means (bemittelt) were able to move more freely. Relatively impoverished states, such as Russia and Turkey, already overwhelmed by the scale of the refugee crisis, shifted much of the responsibility for maintaining
number of members of the RAF and their dependants arrived as well, as wartime training schemes continued up to 1953: 637 in 1947, 2,444 in 1948. Official Southern Rhodesian statistics usually included members of the RAF and their dependants in their accounting of arriving immigrants, perhaps because many did remain in Southern Rhodesia. See Ian Smith Papers, 1/78/002, Memorandum on Immigration, 23 July 1954. 62 Using the case of Polish refugees sent to Southern Rhodesia during the Second
, misses the thrills of war, but Somers seeks tranquillity and a reaffirmation of his humanity. He finds salvation not with the deceptively placid English gentleman whose butterfly collection he catalogues, but with a supposedly mad girl (Jean Simmons) suspected of murder. Similarly, Philip Davidson (John Mills) in The Long Memory is restored to humanity by a Polish refugee whose awful wartime experiences more than match the