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The following considers Richard Marsh’s 1897 gothic novel The Beetle in relation to fin-de-siècle anxieties, specifically sexual deviancy, empire, and venereal disease. While the domestic Contagious Diseases Acts had been revealed in the 1880s, continued high rates of VD amongst British soldiers in particular continued the debate as to who was responsible for spreading diseases such as syphilis both at home and abroad. At a time of ‘colonial syphiliphobia’, to extend Showalter’s term, The Beetle suggests the necessity of regulating venereal disease in the Empire to protect Britain’s ‘racial superiority’ and conservatively warns against the potential consequences of dabbling with the sexually ‘deviant’ and dangerous Orient.
This book re-examines the campaign experience of British soldiers in Africa during the period 1874–1902—the zenith of the Victorian imperial expansion—and does so from the perspective of the regimental soldier. The book utilises a number of letters and diaries, written by regimental officers and other ranks, to allow soldiers to speak for themselves about their experience of colonial warfare. The sources demonstrate the adaptability of the British army in fighting in different climates, over demanding terrain and against a diverse array of enemies. They also uncover soldiers' responses to army reforms of the era as well as the response to the introduction of new technologies of war.
The history of relief work is in its infancy. This book draws on new archival research to reveal the priorities of nineteenth-century relief workers, and the legacies of their preoccupations for relief work today. It first explores the inauguration of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (NAS) at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 under the figurehead of Loyd Lindsay. Then, the book sees the revival of the NAS for work in the Balkans during a period of nationalist violence and Ottoman counter-insurgency which culminated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. It also follows the staff of relief committees as they dispensed aid in British colonial wars. The book examines the critiques of British policy in the Boer War (1899-1902) emanating from intersecting circles of Quakers, New Liberals and ethicists, and considers these groups' offer of aid to Boer civilians. Further, the book concentrates on the methodologies of relief for Boer inmates of British concentration camps in South Africa and on the implications of this relief for its intended recipients during and after the war. It concentrates on aid to British soldiers. The book closes by tracing continuities in vocational practices and dispositions to emerging areas of concern in the post-war period, in particular child welfare, and briefly considers their implication for relief work today.
Personal testimony of a British soldier injured during the Troubles.
. The purpose of this book is to explore in greater detail the issue of soldier settlement. Using a comparative framework, the book examines two parallel but complementary themes: the settlement of British soldiers in the overseas or ‘white’ dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) between 1915 and 1930; and the resettlement of dominion soldiers in their countries of origin and the
experiences in each of these colonial sites at the backdrop of the war gave rise to a variety of responses in their personal writings. Their writings towards the end of the war, during the 1918–20 moment in particular, give an insight into how they imagined late-wartime and post-war British colonies, and how they performed colonial agency and perpetuated colonial power both in the battlefields and beyond. However, first it is necessary to unpack what this ‘1918−20 moment’ signified for British soldiers posted (and living) in the colonies, and how their forms of sortie de
numbers of British soldiers at the front was declining rapidly. Not enough men were volunteering for service and those killed or maimed were simply not being replaced. One week after the pacifist conference was held at Caxton Hall, Prime Minister Asquith proposed a national registry to record the details of everyone living in England between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five.10 The compulsory registry was quickly authorised and on 15 August the results revealed that two million eligible men had not yet volunteered for war service. The results compounded the argument
exceptions, British soldiers lie in British cemeteries, Germans in German and French in French. More specifically, it may define regimental, and sometimes regional, allegiance (for example, the Devonshires’ regimental cemetery at Mametz, where the actual trench which soldiers defended became their permanent burial site; the entrance bears this inscription: ‘The Devonshires held this trench. They hold it still.’) On a practical level, a war cemetery is designed and organised in such a way as to enable relatives and other visitors readily to locate the exact burial place of
these deployments took place. It has been stated that much of the media coverage in the UK can be best described as pro-UK ‘propaganda’,4 heavily biased towards the Army, yet by definition such accounts failed to represent the reality of the individual British soldier’s experience of the Troubles. What are needed are accounts that do not prioritise a reading of that third community as a depersonalised and undifferentiated mass, representing the soldier as an unnamed and anonymous individual, available as the repository of a heroising or demonising metanarrative.5
1899–1902 was one of a cluster of colonial campaigns at the end of the nineteenth century in which the Red Cross movement provided aid to British soldiers for the first time. This is not to say that aid in foreign war ceased, as the rather more freelance assistance of the British Red Cross to all sides in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 testified, but there was now a distinct