Book launch and public lecture

With the outbreak of war in 1914, British, French and Japanese forces uprooted and interned German civilians and soldiers in Germany’s African and Asian colonies. The Allied overthrow of Germany’s overseas colonies during the First World War challenged the structures that underpinned nineteenth century imperialism. Through his analysis of this internment and deportation Dr Murphy's new book Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) highlights the impact the First World War had on the notion of a common European "civilising mission" and the image of empire in the early twentieth century. Internment of Europeans in the colonial spheres of the war altered collective European identities, fed into propaganda, connected the extra-European front to the European front, and forced a reassessment of the administration of empire.

Comments by Dr William Mulligan.

Mahon Murphy is a JSPS Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University. His PhD thesis, received from the London School of Economics, focused on the British takeover of Germany’s colonies during the First World War and the internment of German civilians and combatants in the extra-European theatres of the conflict. His thesis was awarded the Annual Thesis Prize of the German Historical Institute, London 2015. He is currently working on Japanese attitudes towards peace and internationalism in the Taisho period (1912-1926). Mahon was previously a HERA research fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the collaborative project ‘Making War Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920’ where he analysed the British military occupation of Jerusalem during the First World War.

William Mulligan is an Associate Professor on modern international history at University College Dulin.

David Stevenson is Professor of International History at LSE.

The Department of International History (@lsehistory) teaches and conducts research on the international history of Britain, Europe and the world from the early modern era up to the present day.