Determining People, Reordering Places. Visions for the Transformations of the Postwar World, 1916–1920

This dissertation aims to broaden understanding of the intellectual and cultural settings of the British intellectual circles in which anti-imperial arguments were conceived and received during the First World War and afterwards. The dissertation explores the ways in which the language of ethnic and national emancipation, which resurfaced during the last years of the war, was used during the military conflict and how the related concepts were understood by the British intellectuals, both as engaged citizens and subject experts mobilized into the British government structures to support the British war effort. Some of them worked towards policies that in the end of the war resulted in the transformation of the prewar world into the one in which we still live. The dissertation explores the semantic vocabulary and intellectual imagery of those who were preparing documents for the diplomats and the politicians who at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were making decisions regarding areas beyond the familiar reaches of western and southern Europe, i.e.,~in central, eastern and southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and in the Middle East, and those who inhabited these spaces. To explore the vocabulary and imagery the British intellectuals used for the postwar remaking of Europe, two text corpora were analyzed. One of them, \tnee, was a foreign policy weekly with an international network of contributors, published between 1916 and 1920, who believed that international relations needed to be established on new more democratic and equitable foundations. The other analyzed corpus consisted of a series of handbooks prepared by the Historical Section of the British Foreign Office as reference material for the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, called ``Peace Books''. This latter corpus served as a proxy for the ``official'' understanding of what shape the world could take once the First World War ended.

This dissertation lies at the intersection of intellectual history and modern European history. It uses theoretical approaches recently employed in the studies of empires, nationalities, non-state actors, post-conflict stabilization, reconstruction, and state-building. Historical actors, events, and forces cannot be studied in isolation, but need to be understood in their context as being part of an interdependent, interconnected world. To that end, this research utilizes tools and procedures of the new historical subdiscipline of computational history.