British Empire Total War

The third characteristic of a total war is that a nation utilizes all of its resources towards meeting the needs of the war effort. In the case of total wars a nation’s resources is made up of all of its material resources, industrial resources and importantly its human resources. This characteristic of a total war is the most difficult to definitively determine for the British Empire. The reason for this is that the British Empire is not made up of only one nation. Rather, it includes Britain and a number of colonial territories, each of which played a distinctive role in the British Empire’s war effort. It is incredibly difficult to analyze whether each of the pieces of the empire contributed all or most of its resources towards the war effort. For the sake of brevity this paper will break the British Empire into

This approach will inevitably generalize the contributions of the territories, but will hopefully provide a clearer picture of the British Empire’s utilization of resources during the Frist World War. The concept of a Homefront is an important element of total war. That is to say that the lines between civilian and military blur as a nation pushes its resources into the effort of war. Britain during the First World War is a good example of this mobilization of resources to the war effort. This mobilization of the nation’s economic resources to the war effort can be measured in a number of ways, but can be difficult to solidly quantify. In order to examine this mobilization this paper will examine the mobilization of the nation’s expenditures towards the war in proportion to the national income of the nation. This method provides a good indicator of a nation’s investment into the war effort. According to the work of Martin Horn the British Empire spent massive proportion of its national income on war expenditures. This