At the British National Archives, they hold records on the First World War from across the globe. They wanted to represent the global nature of the conflict, and feature these records. and came the idea of a map to explore the records in a visually engaging and intuitive way.
The First World War. What images spring to mind when you read those four words? Trenches? Mud? Young men, armed with bayonets, charging into machine gun fire? Poppies? These images of the horror of the Western Front have come to define what many of us think about this conflict. They tell a powerful and tragic story of death and waste across the heart of Europe.
But this is only one story, of a war that enveloped the whole world. What happened in countries and territories as far from Flanders’ fields as it is possible to go: from Ascension Island to Burma, Zanzibar to Newfoundland, Cyprus to Hong Kong? How did experiences and perceptions of the war differ in these far-flung corners of the world?
