To navigate around the map, simply click on the place tags to see what was happening there or use the categories on the right-hand side to filter information according to your topic of interest. Click again on the pop-up boxes on the map to find out more information.
World War I: Sowing the Seeds of Global Citizenship
Global Link received funding in 2017 from the Heritage Lottery to work with adult volunteers in creating a digital map charting movements for peace, internationalism and global citizenship in the years following the First World War. In 2019 we received further Heritage Lottery funding for a follow-on project. Growing the Seeds of Global Citizenship involved students from Lancaster Royal Grammar School and members of 3rd Parbold and Dalton Girl Guide Unit who used school and Girlguiding archives to research how young people during this period were engaging with concepts of world citizenship, peace and internationalism. The young people added entries to the map and created work to be displayed as part of an exhibition called Learning from the Past at Lancaster City Museum in early summer 2020.
We are extremely grateful to all the volunteers and also the historians, libraries, schools, archive offices and other organisations that supported us with this project. Our map provides just a snapshot of the huge amount of activity in the 1920s and 30s here in the North West of England and beyond but we hope it will help stimulate further questions and research.
Rethinking the History of Global Citizenship
The timelines of events between the First and the Second World Wars commonly offer a depressing aggregation of international tensions, broken promises and overt lies. After the war to end all wars, we lurch through the escalation of tensions to outright hostilities and a second global conflict within twenty years. The League of Nations, the organisation which emerged out of the peace negotiations with the express aim of resolving conflict between nations without recourse to war, appears in such timelines largely as a testament to its failure.
In populating such timelines, we run the eternal hazard of being led by hindsight to trace a linear series of events to the known outcome. When the main period under investigation in World War I: Sowing the Seeds of Global Citizenship is commonly referred to as the interwar period, what else but war could possibly define or conclude those decades?
As this project shows, however, such selective timelines and labels marginalise the number of options created and negotiated by contemporary actors, for whom the outcome we know was only one of many possibilities. The events and activities unearthed by the researchers on this project tell of some of these; the map suggesting how the commitment to peaceful cooperation reached across international, national and local boundaries, and into individual homes and schools. In his treatise on war first published in 1832, Carl von Clausewitz famously suggested that war was merely the continuation of politics with other means (often mistranslated as ‘war is diplomacy by other means’). This project reveals the depth and breadth of feeling that ‘law not war’ was the way forward and suggests we may need to take a much longer and deeper view of the history of global citizenship.
As you browse through the entries, notice how many activists’ names appear and reappear, how many grassroots movements there were in the smallest of localities, let alone the impressive scale of national and international parades, pilgrimages, committees and conferences. Explore the props of peace which encompass plays and pageants, pennants and tabards, tea parties and garden fetes… And perhaps you will find inspiration in the impressive level of commitment and energy exhibited by individuals ranging from primary school pupils to experienced political activists. We need that inspiration and creativity more than ever if we wish to water those seeds.
Corinna Peniston-Bird, Department of History, Lancaster University