The Great War was a global conflict, but some peoples were affected more significantly than others. The Japanese and Ottoman Turks were directly involved, fighting with the Allies and Central Powers, respectively. The Chinese, who overthrew their emperor in 1911, were more concerned with internal events and the threat from Japan than they were with war in Europe. In British India and French Indochina the war’s impact was unavoidably greater. Total war required the British and the French to draft their colonial subjects into the conflict, uprooting hundreds of thousands of Asians to fight the Germans and the Ottoman Turks.

An Indian or Vietnamese soldier who fought in France and came in contact there with democratic and republican ideas, however, was less likely to accept foreign rule when he returned home. The British and the French therefore had to make rash promises to gain the support of these colonial peoples and other allies during the war. In India the British were forced in 1917 to announce a new policy of self-governing institutions in order to counteract Indian popular unrest fanned by wartime inflation and heavy taxation. French representatives suggested to Syrian nationalists in 1917 that Syria would have self-government after the war. British leaders promised Europe’s Jewish nationalists a homeland in Palestine, while promising Arab nationalists independence from the Ottoman Empire. After the war the nationalist genie the colonial powers had called on refused to slip meekly back into the bottle.

U.S. President Wilson’s war aims also raised the hopes of peoples under imperial rule. In January 1918 Wilson proposed his Fourteen Points (see “The Paris Peace Treaties” in Chapter 28), whose key idea was national self-determination for the peoples of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Wilson recommended in Point 5 that in all colonial questions “the interests of native populations be given equal weight with the desires of European governments,” and he seemed to call for national self-rule. This subversive message had enormous appeal for educated Asians, fueling their hopes of freedom.