For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War

by Steve Marti

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 Māoris 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.

Genres: Canada

208 pages, Hardcover

Published September 27, 2019

About the author

Steve Martii is a doctoral candidate at Western University. His dissertation examines the relationship between identity and voluntary contributions to the war effort in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.