UBC Press For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War (Studies in Canadian Military History)

Product Description 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 Māori 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. Review 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 About the Author 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.