For Home and Empire

For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization across the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. It draws together case studies from the dominion home fronts to build a history of nations and empire in wartime. In the First World War, dominion governments relied heavily on voluntary efforts to support the expansion of their skeletal peacetime armies into formidable expeditionary forces. Communities organized to raise recruits, donate funds, and provide supplies ranging from a pair of socks to an airplane. Their efforts strengthened communal bonds, but they also reinforced 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 local soldiers or for Welsh soldiers in the British Army? Should Māori volunteers enlist with their home regiment or with a separate battalion? Voluntary efforts reflected how community members understood their relationship to one another, to their dominion, and to the Empire. Steve Marti examines the motives and actions of those involved in the voluntary war effort, applying the framework of settler colonialism to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.