MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · November 5 · 1914
ON THIS DAY · 5 NOVEMBER 1914
Tanga
2-5 Nov 1914 — Lettow-Vorbeck’s askari, outnumbered 8-to-1, rout a British-Indian landing (helped, the story goes, by swarming bees). His East African force will keep 130,000 imperial troops chasing it until after the armistice.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Call it the First World War and mean it: look at how little of this map is parchment. Around four million men from Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas served the European empires — 1.4 million from British India alone, fighting from Flanders to the Tigris; some 450,000 tirailleurs and other troops from French Africa; 140,000 laborers of the Chinese Labour Corps digging the Western Front (marked at Weihaiwei, where they embarked); porters in Africa by the million, conscripted at gunpoint, who died of disease and overwork in numbers — perhaps 100,000 in East Africa alone — that no one troubled to count precisely. The Dominions sent armies that came home nations: Canada took Vimy, Australia and New Zealand counted Gallipoli as a founding, South Africa took German South-West Africa while suppressing a Boer revolt at home. None of these peoples chose the quarrel in Sarajevo. All of them paid for it — and many concluded, watching their rulers bleed, that the empires were neither invincible nor grateful.
From Chapter 7 — The World’s War of The Great War, 1914–1918 (MAY 1917).
OPEN THE INTERACTIVE MAP →New here? Chapters 1–2 of every atlas are free to sample, and the WW2 atlas is free in full. One membership opens all ten — the Cartographer’s Circle.
TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — Empires wage war with empires. Why was a European war global on day one? Because its belligerents were not countries but systems: shipping lanes, coaling stations, colonial…
- The turn — The double promise, 1916. Between January and May 1916, Britain committed itself to Arab independence and to partition with France over the same territory. It is this atlas’s…
- What it changed — The empires lose their aura. A generation of colonial soldiers saw Europeans die badly, take orders, and depend on colonial labor and loyalty. Wilson’s “self-determination” and…
Then ask the room: “A European civil war with global casualties” — is that a fair description of 1914–18? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT
THE DISPATCH
One short letter when a new atlas opens — and the printable study guide for WWI is yours now, free.
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME