This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

War formed a backdrop to much of Vaughan Williams’s life, and his understanding of its effects – whether from his service in the First World War or as a civilian on the home front during the Second World War – evoked some of the most powerful and poignant musical responses of his career, including The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Pastoral, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies. These and other compositions incubated and emerged during tumultuous periods in the realms of musical performance, broadcasting, publishing, and patronage. Vaughan Williams’s navigation of these fields reveals a cross-section of major issues of concern to myriad composers, performers, and institutions, including the limits of political and ideological tolerance, the role of the state in artistic sponsorship, the responsibility of the artist to society, and the nature of musical memorialization.

C. E. Callwell’s (1896; 1899; 1906) Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice was perhaps the most influential British Imperial irregular warfare manual of its time. Many existing accounts treat Callwell and other European colonial militarists as primitive—originals from which to explain later theorists’ descent and deviation. I show how he arrived at his account. Previous theorists, like Ewald, drew military lessons from early modern European irregular war, including targeted use of force by stealthy and mobile “light troops.” In contrast, Callwell advocated arbitrary and overwhelming violence, against combatants and civilians alike. I locate Callwell’s thinking at the end of the intellectual and political long nineteenth century. He exemplified a distinctively reactionary strand of British imperial thinking, imagining empire as permanent. His historical knowledge and field experience were encyclopedic. He linked a reactionary-utopian colonial nostalgia with systemic and racist high modernist violence. In the South African War (1899-1902), he helped deploy these practices against white Afrikaner colonists. His manual remained influential into the early twentieth century.

This chapter describes the processes by which the foundations were laid for Canada to become one of the world’s great industrial nations. In this period, Canadians build more railways, encouraged massive immigration, and experienced growing class, ethnic, gender, religious, and regional tensions. Immigrants flocked to jobs in urban centres, developed Canada’s resource frontiers, and swamped the Indigenous populations of British Columbia, the Prairies (from which the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and an enlarged Manitoba were carved), and Yukon Territory (where gold was discovered in 1896). Meanwhile, Montreal and Toronto emerged as nation-dominating metropolises, and progressive civil society organizations agitated for social reforms that would smooth the rough edges of industrial capitalism. Although national unity was a fragile flower and the national policy based on immigration, railroad building, and industrial development was called into question from a variety of critics, both the nation and the national policy survived all challenges, including demands for annexation to the United States and Imperial Federation.

As the Golden Jubilee of 1857 approached, memories of the rebellion which circulated around this anniversary combined with news of ongoing protests against the 1905 Partition of Bengal and unrest in other parts of the country, including the Punjab, to result in widespread fear that 1907 would witness a ‘Second Mutiny’. Though these issues would have been of great concern at any time, imperialist commentators in Britain thought them all the more serious given domestic political changes that had resulted in the defeat of the Conservative-Liberal Unionist coalition at the ballot box in 1906, and the apparent decline of the British martial character which had been blamed for many of the failings during the Boer War. As this chapter will show, these anxieties played a considerable role in shaping how the mutiny was remembered in 1907, as well as how it was commemorated at the end of the year. In this respect, commemoration was an anxious response from hard-line imperialists who wished to reaffirm the values that had helped underpin colonial rule in the late Victorian era and yet were now thought both necessary to combat growing unrest in India, and yet sorely lacking within Britain.

The period between 1900 and 1920 witnessed several important developments in the production and dissemination of wartime propaganda. Most important among these developments were the rise of the popular press, the expansion of mass literacy, and the increasing centralisation of propaganda efforts as a responsibilty of central government. This chapter traces the development of propaganda methods and of literature’s complicated entanglement with propaganda from the Boer War to the aftermath of the First World War. It describes how a number of major writers – Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells – came to play important roles in the British state’s wartime communications, and how the culture of ‘suspicious reading’ encouraged by the prevalence of propaganda shaped post-war debates about the truth-telling capacities of the literary realism with which those writers were closely associated.

Representations of conflict in the early twentieth century respond both to the impact of mass industrial warfare, particularly in the First World War, and the development of mass culture following the Education Acts of the late nineteenth century. Concomitant with the development of literary modernism, the need to represent radically new forms of physical and mental experience reshaped war writing; a hundred years later, that influence persists. This chapter argues that war writing must be understood not simply as a response to individual conflicts; rather, the memory, expectation, and fear of war was a pervasive presence that continually shaped much of the period’s writing even in times of apparent peace, and supported a lucrative literary market in jingoistic literature, popular invasion fiction, and memoirs of wartime trauma. This chapter traces the lasting influence of the period’s major conflicts on its literary writing – particularly its prose – and concludes with a discussion of several post-war texts, published in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, which point towards the disenchanted and often angry tone of the 1928–30 War Books Boom.

For more than half a century I have been researching and writing about Australian military history, defence policy and intelligence. My first major article, written while I was a cadet at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1969, was on General William Sherman’s command during the Atlanta campaign in the United States Civil War. Since then I have written or edited thirty-five books and almost a hundred journal articles or book chapters. In these, my primary focus has been on two inter-related issues: strategy and command.

Thirty galloping horses at Astley’s Circus in 1824 underpinned the presentation of the Battle of Waterloo, which subsequently became a staple circus act during the first half of the nineteenth century. Military action was imbedded in the early circus, indicative of both an increased number of soldiers in nineteenth-century society and its ensuing militarisation. This chapter explores the use of horses and other animals in the re-enactment of war in the nineteenth-century circus. War re-enactments expanded to encompass colonial conflicts, so circus became complicit in colonising practices and attitudes to colonised peoples in the British colonies and towards exotic animals that were shipped in increasing numbers. In the 1880s a distinctive war-re-enactment genre emerged, exemplified by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which toured internationally and was integrated back into circus. This chapter argues that it was the action of horses and other nonhuman animals that instigated and made battle re-enactment seem authentic but that circus war action replicated the pattern of actual war in which animals went unnoticed. This pattern was reversed with the Boer War re-enactment. Directed by circus entrepreneur Frank Fillis for the 1904 St Louis Exposition, it sought authenticity by featuring the death of fifty horses on the battlefield.

Chapter 1 discusses attempts to coordinate colonial military resources for the South African War, and how the war led many to doubt whether the British Empire could be effectively defended, or its people and resources effectively coordinated in moments of crisis. It then shows how these doubts structured ongoing state-building projects in British colonies, specifically the federation of Australian colonies into one Commonwealth in 1901 and the abortive attempt to federate New Zealand with Fiji. The chapter ends by demonstrating that this fashion for large federal projects was an attempt to solve imperial dilemmas of security and population control, and was freighted by racial politics.

With Bülow becoming chancellor in 1900, Schmoller and his students became advisors to the government in many capacities. The southward shift of German interest into the Yangtze valley advocated by Hermann Schumacher took concrete form during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, itself an outgrowth of Germany’s seizure of Kiaochow in 1897 and German railway construction in Shantung. The Boxer intervention led to strained relations with Britain and encouraged an Anglo-Japanese alliance around a common fear of Russia. These developments were also tied up with British anxieties about decline during and after the Boer War in which Germany began to play the role both as model and menace. The writings and activities of Schmoller and his students played an important role in these perceptions. The Bülow tariff of December 1902 likewise contributed to growing trade frictions with Britain that encouraged Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform and imperial federation and the coalescence of a German menace in the minds of many other British observers, misperceptions fed to an unusual degree by German naval propaganda and the rancorous debates over German tariffs.

Germany's naval leap in 1898 concided with the start of the Spanish-American War, revealing the limits of Germany’s diplomatic pull with its still tiny navy. Likewise, tensions with the Americans and British over Samoa demonstrated German weakness in the face of an increasingly aggressive United States aided and appeased by Great Britain. This chapter analyzes these developments, as well as the outbreak of the Boer War, during which the Royal Navy violated German neutral rights by abusing its command of the sea. These developments were important catalysts for naval enthusiasm in Germany, which Schmoller, von Halle, Schumacher, Sering and the other so-called fleet professors helped mobilize during the campaign for the second navy bill in 1899 and 1900. This activity centered on the Free Union for Naval Lectures which organized pro-naval speeches throughout Germany. Likewise, the Germany Navy League, which these men helped transform into a more populist mass organization, grew in size dramatically. This culminated in passage of the second navy bill in June 1900 and in Bernhard Bülow’s appointment as chancellor.