Volker Schult Das Deutsche Reich und die Revolutionierung Britisch-Indiens während des Ersten Weltkriegs

About this book

The sequence of events in the Asian region since the outbreak of World War I in Europe caused the British great concern. First, the light cruiser Emden virtually single-handedly disrupted shipping traffic between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean; then a mutiny by the 130th Baluchi Regiment in Rangoon in January 1915 was only narrowly averted, and finally, the 5th Light Infantry rebelled in Singapore in February 1915, one week before a planned major revolt in India. By then, it was dawning on the British that these events could not have been mere coincidences. However, if the British believed they had left the worst behind them, they were mistaken. Even after the mutiny in Singapore was quelled, the bad news for the British showed no sign of ending. The focus, however, had now shifted to India itself, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.

The idea of revolutionizing British India with the help of the Emir of Afghanistan is a frequent focus of historical studies. However, there is another aspect to this context that has received relatively little attention in the relevant literature. Berlin, in fact, was playing a second card. With German support, Indian revolutionaries were to be enabled to initiate the end of British rule in India from Southeast Asia. It was, in other words, a kind of pincer movement aimed at undermining the British Raj.

Only by including the Southeast Asian theater does the actual danger to the British Empire become clear. A global network stretching from Berlin through the Middle East, from North America through China to Southeast Asia, threatened British India as well as French Indochina and, had it succeeded, would likely have had a very significant, possibly even decisive, influence on the course of the war in Europe.