Empire, Food and Weather: A Historiographical Analysis

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 food and weather played almost no role at all. As recent and a few less recent studies (Krämer et al. 2016, Offer 1989, Segesser 2016) have shown, however, food and weather were essential elements for almost all belligerent countries during the war and in Germany right wing activists even claimed that it had been the “Hungerblockade”, which had finally brought their country down. Taking the theoretical framework of histoire croisée (Werner&Zimmermann 2006) as a starting point and based on an analysis of the Carnegie Economic and Social History of the World War of the 1920s and 1930s as well as of further publications the presentation proposed here wants to examine the relevance of food and weather during the war in post-war historiography with a special focus on the British Empire and particularly its non-metropolitan areas.