Adrian Gregory

Peculiarities of the English? War, Violence and Politics: 1900–1939

Englische Besonderheiten? Krieg, Gewalt und Politik: 1900–1933Vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg war Gewalt am Rande von Streiks und bei Wahlkampfen in Grosbritannien eine haufige Erscheinung, auch wenn sie sich zumeist auf glimpflich verlaufende Prugeleien beschrankte. Nach 1918 sties auch diese Gewalt auf wachsende Ablehnung. Aus ehemaligen Frontsoldaten setzten sich dagegen die «Black and Tans» zusammen, die mit brutaler Gewalt der irischen Unabhangigkeitsbewegung Herr zu werden versuchten. Sie reprasentierten jedoch nur eine kleine Minderheit der ehemaligen britischen Frontkampfer und wurden in der britischen Offentlichkeit wegen ihrer Methoden unzweideutig verurteilt. Die weitgehende Eindammung politischer Gewalt in Grosbritannien hatte ihre Ursachen in der Demokratisierung und «Feminisierung» der Politik durch die Wahlrechtsreform bei Kriegsende und in der englischen Selbstwahrnehmung nach 1918, die den friedlichen eigenen Nationalcharakter gegen den gewalttatigen irischen und den der kolonialen Untertanen ab...

Imperial Capitals at War: A Comparative Perspective

London was one of six large imperial capitals in Europe (Berlin, Constantinople, Paris, St Petersburg, Vienna) which became focal points of total war during the First World War. In some respects, each of these capitals can be understood as undergoing a form of siege in which the endurance of the population at the heart of the combatant Empires was severely tested. London proved to have important resources which helped it to endure better than some of the others.

GLOBALISING AND LOCALISING THE GREAT WAR

This article is intended to suggest an approach to the global history of the First World War that can provide a method of managing the potentially unwieldy concept of global conflict by understanding it through the wars impact on localities. By concentrating on four relatively small but significant cities; Oxford in England, Halifax in Nova Scotia, Jerusalem in Palestine and Verdun in eastern France, which experienced the war in very different ways, it looks at both the movement of people and things and the symbolic interconnectivities that made the war a ‘world war’. This local focus helps challenge both the primacy of self-contained national history and the focus on the violent interaction of the opposing sides which are the more normal ways of narrating the war. It does not deny the usefulness of these traditional structures of narration and explanation but suggests that there are different and complementary ways the war can be viewed, which create different emphasis and chronologies.

Civilians in a world at war, 1914–1918

turns to the government-sponsored Gold Star Mothers’ pilgrimages that commenced in 1930, following a decade of agitation. Women’s accounts of these pilgrimages are among the more powerful documents in the book. Still, the limits of government archives have also set the limits of Budreau’s investigation, and there is work here for future scholars in addressing the questions on which these particular archives remain silent: what were the experiences of those Americans who did undertake pilgrimages in the decade after the war? And where bodies were returned, how were they received back into their families and local communities? To be fair, Budreau cites the effect of repatriating bodies as ‘a massive diffusion of memory’, as these loci of commemoration were dispersed across the country (p. 242). Budreau remains confident, however, that we can discern a peculiarly American way of commemorating the dead, which she ascribes to the exceptional nature of American mass democracy. Democratic process, she argues, exposed difference and dissent, rather than welding in society a common myth of the war. Her argument that the USA had developed ‘a distinctly different approach to remembrance, one that reflected a nation on a modern and divergent commemorative path’ is, however, over-extended and difficult to sustain (p. 171). The European societies that struggled with repatriation were not monolithic by comparison with US democracy. The same processes and debates were occurring outside the USA. Budreau is right in attempting to account for difference, yet her insistence on American exceptionalism leads her to assert that ‘although European memory theorists may offer their hypotheses for reflection, their abstract and theoretical cultural approaches are insufficient for the messy nature of American democracy’ (p. 241). In so dispensing with potential analytical tools, the study misses an opportunity to engage more closely and comparatively with other societies grappling with the politics of memory after the First World War, and to suggest how the American experience might shed light on other experiences. The book’s potential contribution to comparative work lies in its assessment of the implications of repatriation, and in highlighting the struggle between national representation and private mourning that persisted beyond acceptance of the policy. Budreau’s achievement has been to expose those points of contact and contest between agents of memory; in this, however, we may yet find that what mourners in their differing national and cultural contexts had in common is more compelling than what set them apart.