University of British Columbia Press
For Home and Empire
Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War
9780774861212
9780774861205
Distributed for University of British Columbia Press
For Home and Empire
Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War
For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization on the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. Steve Marti shows that collective acts of patriotism strengthened communal bonds, while reinforcing 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 hometown soldiers or Welsh ones? Should Maori enlist with a local or an Indigenous battalion? Such questions highlighted the diverging interests of local communities, the dominion governments, and the Empire. Marti applies a settler colonial framework to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.
Table of Contents
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