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"Draft Great Britain History."
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British Military Service Tribunals, 1916-18
Military Service Tribunals were formed following the introduction of conscription in January 1916, to consider applications for exemption from men deemed by the new legislation to have enlisted. Swiftly, they gained two opposing yet equally unflattering reputations. In the eyes of the military, they were soft, obstructionist ‘old duffers’. To most of the men who came before them, they were the unfeeling civilian arm of a remorseless grinding machine. This work, utilizing a rare surviving set of Tribunal records, challenges both perspectives. The Tribunals were charged with balancing the needs of the army with those of the localities from which their members were drawn; they received instructions, recommendations and polite guidance from their masters at Whitehall, yet each was in effect a sovereign body whose decisions could not be overturned other than by appeal to similar bodies. Wielding unprecedented power yet acutely sensitive to the contradictions inherent in their task, they were obliged, often at a conveyer belt’s pace, to make decisions that often determined the fate of men, their families, and ultimately, their communities. That some of these decisions were capricious or even wrong is indisputable; the sparse historiography of the Tribunals has too often focused upon the idiosyncratic example while ignoring the wider, adverse impact of imprecise legislation, government hand-washing and short-term military exigencies. Evaluating in depth that impact, and illuminating the social dynamics that often marked proceedings in the Tribunal chamber, this study attempts to redress the balance of an enduringly damning historical judgment.
eBook
British military service tribunals, 1916-1918
Military Service Tribunals were formed following the introduction of conscription in January 1916, to consider applications for exemption from military service. Swiftly, they gained two opposing yet equally unflattering reputations. In the eyes of the military, they were soft, obstructionist ‘old duffers’. To most of the men who came before them, they were the unfeeling civilian arm of a remorseless grinding machine. This work, utilising a rare surviving set of Tribunal records, challenges both perspectives. Wielding unprecedented power yet acutely sensitive to the contradictions inherent in their task, the Tribunals were obliged, often at a conveyer belt’s pace, to make decisions that often determined the fate of men. That some of these decisions were capricious or even wrong is indisputable; the sparse historiography of the Tribunals has too often focused upon the idiosyncratic example while ignoring the wider, impact of imprecise legislation, government hand-washing and short-term military exigencies.
eBook
A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making Against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century
This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in
international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the
British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to
abolish the slave trade. The treaty system was extraordinarily
wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the
Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and “Native
Chiefs” on the western coast of Africa. It therefore allows for a
comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made,
depending on the identity of their contracting partners. The article
argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best
explanation of why these variations emerged. Although British
treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the
states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the
treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late
eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance
of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between
the “family of civilized nations” and “barbarous
peoples.”Some of the arguments in
this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and
I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for
several valuable constructive criticisms. I would also like to thank
Duncan Bell, Molly Cochran, Steve Hopgood, Andy Hurrell, Katja Weber, and
the journal's two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on
earlier drafts of the article.
Journal Article
Against the Draft
Around the world and for hundreds of years, men and women have refused to be drafted into bearing arms for their nations' wars. These conscientious objectors to the draft are the subject of Peter Brock's latest collection, Against the Draft . Brock, the world's leading historian on pacifism, has assembled twenty-five of his essays on conscientious objection to the draft from the beginning of the Radical Reformation in 1525 to the end of the Second World War.
Included in the collection are essays on little known facets of the anti-draft movement including the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition of military exemption that started with the outset of the Radical Reformation in 1525 and has continued, with variations, until the present. Further articles deal with the Quakers in a number of countries, Civil-war America, Leo Tolstoy (who became a convinced pacifist in the later part of his life), British conscientious objectors in the Non-Combatant Corps, the emergence of conscientious objection in Japan, and the fate of conscientious objectors in the psychiatric clinics of Germany and in interwar Poland. Essays on the Central European Nazerenes and on Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany highlight the exceptionally harsh treatment meted out to conscientious objectors belonging to these two sects, and their steadfast resistance to the state's demand to bear arms. Against the Draft makes an important contribution to the growing study of pacifism and conscientious objection, and represents a key work in the career of the field's foremost scholar.
eBook
Militarism and Anti-Militarism: Socialists, Communists and Conscription in France and Britain 1900–1940
Morgan focuses on two periods in which the prospect or achievement of Franco-British military collaboration encouraged transnational exchanges of a notably heterodox character. He explores the French and British left-wing attitudes to conscription prior to 1914, when already these alignments cut across national as well as political boundaries and exploited both positive and negative transnational exemplars and shows how, in the context of military alliance, British socialists during the First World War were already confronted by domestic critics with the pro-conscriptionist sentiments of their French counterparts. Furthermore, he concludes that when finally conscription was abandoned in Britain, it was on the initiative of a Conservative government. Britain's communists upheld the concept almost to the last; while in France the idea of a citizens' army continued to retain its force. A sequel remains to be told in which issues of freedom and national service were once again recast in complex ways, and once more both within and across national boundaries.
Journal Article
“We are Alienating the Splendid Irish Race”: British Catholic Response to the Irish Conscription Controversy of 1918
Furthermore, just when Britain accepted the inevitability of, and offered to grant her, Home Rule at the height of the conscription controversy in 1918, the Irish rejected the offer. By the time of the German Spring Offensive, the situation was growing desperate and David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, conceded-under pressure from Ulstermen such as General Sir Henry Wilson5-that Ireland could not be exempted from compulsory military service yet again.
Journal Article
The Political Economy of War Mobilization: From Britain's Limited Liability to a Continental Commitment
How does war affect the structure of domestic interests in democratic capitalist states and how are these interests reflected in the conduct of the war? Developing a second image reversed 'plus' argument (outside-in and then inside-out), I contend that war can alter the domestic balance of political power, and can thereby affect the orientation of a state's security strategy. Wars that induce the extraction of wealth and the mobilization of resources will empower a coalition of domestic actors and interest groups who will lobby the government for an offensive security policy, including greater defense spending, military and industrial conscription, state planning and intervention in the economy, and protectionism. I apply this model to Britain and use a research design based on a longitudinal-controlled comparison over the periods of 1912-1914 and 1914-1916 to examine why Britain escalated its involvement in World War I from Limited Liability prior to the outbreak of the war and during the initial years of the war to a Continental Commitment by April of 1916. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article