Cover: For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the FIrst World War, by Steve Marti. illustration: a man in a green military uniform extends his arms outwards.
216 pages, 6 x 9
12 b&w photos, 2 illus., 3 maps
Paperback
Release Date:01 Mar 2020
ISBN:9780774861212
Hardcover
Release Date:01 Oct 2019
ISBN:9780774861205
PDF
Release Date:01 Oct 2019
ISBN:9780774861229
EPUB
Release Date:01 Oct 2019
ISBN:9780774861236
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For Home and Empire

Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War

UBC Press

For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization across the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. It draws together case studies from the dominion home fronts to build a history of nations and empire in wartime.

In the First World War, dominion governments relied heavily on voluntary efforts to support the expansion of their skeletal peacetime armies into formidable expeditionary forces. Communities organized to raise recruits, donate funds, and provide supplies ranging from a pair of socks to an airplane. Their efforts strengthened communal bonds, but they also reinforced class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier’s wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for local soldiers or for Welsh soldiers in the British Army? Should Māori volunteers enlist with their home regiment or with a separate battalion? Voluntary efforts reflected how community members understood their relationship to one another, to their dominion, and to the Empire.

Steve Marti examines the motives and actions of those involved in the voluntary war effort, applying the framework of settler colonialism to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.

This book will appeal not only to historians of the First World War and the British Empire but also to those with an interest in settler colonialism, voluntary action, and war and society in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

Steve Marti’s lively and informative monograph For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War will be a worthwhile addition to the reading list of anyone interested in understanding the impact of the Great War on the British Empire.  Patrick H. Brennan, Canadian Journal of History
Marti weaves together multiple strands of historiography to present fresh insights into the wartime societies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada...[his] level of detail and meticulously supported arguments offer little room for critique. Jordan Beavis, University of Newcastle, Australia, Canadian Military History
Marti’s research is impressive and suggestive, and the comparative approach will add substantially to further efforts to understand the Great War in the British Dominions. J.L. Grantastein, CHOICE Connect
An impressive and invaluable work of transnational history. Peter Stanley, author of The Crying Years: Australia's Great War
For Home and Empire provides significant new vantage points on wartime mobilization and the influence of the local on the national and imperial contexts. Its illumination of the importance of local organizing opens up new areas of inquiry. Cecilia Morgan, author of Creating Colonial Pasts: History, Memory, and Commemoration in Southern Ontario, 1860–1980
Steve Marti is a historian based in Kingston, Ontario. He is a co-editor of The Great War: From Memory to History and Fighting with the Empire: Canada, Britain, and Global Conflict, 1867–1947.

Introduction

1 Dominion over War: Local Volunteers, Dominion Mobilization, and the Imperial War Effort

2 Hands across the Sea: Greater Britain, New France, and the Ties to Home and Homeland

3 Far from Home: Race and the Boundaries of Communal Mobilization

4 Aliens or Allies: Southern and Eastern European Immigrants and the Bonds of Military Service

5 As Obsolete as the Buffalo and the Tomahawk: Assimilation, Autonomy, and the Mobilization of Indigenous Communities

Conclusion

Notes; Bibliography; Index

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