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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with artists and thinkers in debates and interviews.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Rana Mitter

Kamila Shamsie

Naoko Shimazu

Sean McMeekin

Erez Manela

Free Thinking: Oh What a Lovely Savas

Oh What a Lovely Savas

03/07/2014

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Oh What a Lovely Savas

Rana Mitter discusses the roles of Turkey, India, China and Japan in World War I.

Rana Mitter is joined by writers of fiction and history to discuss the roles of Turkey, India, China and Japan in World War I and the repercussions for those territories.

'Oh what a lovely Savas' begins Rana Mitter in this edition of Free Thinking, using the Turkish word for War. Along with Sean McMeekin of the Koc University in Istanbul, the novelist Kamila Shamsie, Naoko Shimazu of Birkbeck College and Erez Manela of Harvard University Rana puts Japan, China, India, the Ottomans, Koreans and others centre stage in the years 1914 to 1918. 
If you weren't from one of the European Great Powers could you even get into the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 which was to lead to the Treaty of Versailles? And was the failure of the Racial Equality Clause to get on the statute books at this conference the beginning of the end of Empire even for those who won the war ?

Rana and guests discuss a world in which creating an empire was the accepted way of gaining a place at the top table of international diplomacy and power... until a war changed the way the world was for everyone - including the victors. 
The very legitimacy of the idea of Empire was possibly the biggest ideological casualty of the so called First World War.
That's 'Oh What a Lovely Savas' with Rana Mitter and guests - Free Thinking.

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