People left poppies on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa on Nov. 11, 2018. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

World War I: new perspectives to come, says historian

Many Canadians have a holiday from work today to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I and, in the years to come, one historian thinks their perspectives on the war may broaden.

“A century ago, people were really interested in the fact that this was a world war,” says Jonathan Vance a history professor at Western University and author.

“The big ticket battles were in western Europe. But it was a war that was fought in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, South America. And I think that element, the international reach of the war, is something that people are going to get interested in in the coming years because there’s such a rich story there that we really haven’t been told yet.”

‘The seeds of decolonization’ sown

As an example, Vance notes that when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson went to the Paris peace conference in 1919, he talked about the national self-determination of peoples and may have inspired people like Ho Che Minh to seek independence from their colonial masters, as he did for Vietnam. “So, I think we find in the first world war the seeds of decolonization around the world,” says Vance.

“It (the war) had great geopolitical impact obviously, say, in the Middle East where European leaders got together and decided to redraw borders and move people around and created decades of discord and damage.”

Other, more practical aspects of World War I included the first levy of personal income tax in Canada, the U.S. and Britain to pay for the war effort, and the practice of moving clocks forward one hour to save money for the war.

There is always a large ceremony at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Remembrance Day, but communities across Canada have their own memorial sites and ceremonies. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

‘Much of our lives shaped by this…war’

There has been a great deal of interest in the 100th anniversary of World War I in Canada partly because there were many local community-based commemorations. Canadians can also benefit from searching all the service records of those who were in the war which have been posted online by Library and Archives Canada.

“What we have to understand and appreciate is how much of our world in 2018, how much of our country…how much of our lives was actually shaped by this experience of war a hundred years ago,” says Vance.

“And once we get a sense of that, it puts us in touch with the past in a much more real and immediate way.”

Prof. Jonathan Vance says now that the 100th anniversary of World War I has passed there will be opportunity for Canadians to get new perspectives on the war and how it has shaped the world.

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