1
Introduction
The aftermath of the Great War saw internal violence in both defeated and
victorious countries. Most are familiar with the Spartacist revolt in Germany and its
effects on the Weimar republic at its founding, and the class riots of the biennio rosso in
Italy that helped lead to the rise of fascism,
1
but scant comparative attention is paid to the
violence in major industrial centers of victorious countries including: Chicago, USA;
Johannesburg, South Africa; and Belfast, Northern Ireland. In July 1919, Chicago saw
the most serious race riot of twenty-five that year when 38 people were killed. In 1917,
40 had been killed in rioting in East St. Louis. In South Africa in 1922, a strike by
miners escalated into a revolt by Afrikaner and communist miners, which was only
stopped by the imposition of martial law on the Rand, including the aerial bombardment
of Johannesburg. In July 1920 in Belfast, Protestant workers with the participation of
unemployed demobilized soldiers expelled several thousand Catholics from their jobs.
That event led to the violent polarization of the city and to the creation of Loyalist
vigilance committees in the shipyards. The timing of these episodes of ethnic and racial
violence across the post-Great War world suggests the need for comparison.
This paper addresses two sets of linked questions. The first is empirical. Why
did these incidents occur at roughly the same time in the aftermath of the Great War?
Were the political economic dynamics that led to the violence similarly patterned in each
case? If not what was the pattern of the differences among the cases? Which factors
were the most significant in each case and why? I will argue that the violence in all three
cases was produced by the intensification of workplace class and status group conflicts
during and after the war, and heightened contestation over citizenship and nationality.
1
Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1919-1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 21-34.
Convention