scholarly journals The Dominion State at War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tristan Cordelia Egarr

<p>This thesis examines the New Zealand state during the First World War. It seeks to ask, firstly, to what extent did the economic size and legal reach of this state expand during, and because of, the war; secondly, how did was this growth affected by, and how did it impact upon, New Zealand’s relationship with Great Britain? My hypothesis is that, as the wartime New Zealand state expanded in size and power, its relationship with Britain grew tighter and stronger.  Following an introduction, in which I take issue with the use of the term “nation” to describe New Zealand in the early twentieth century, the thesis is divided into four chapters. In the first, I look at the men who led the New Zealand Government during the war, in particular the Prime Minister, William Ferguson Massey, and the Cabinet Ministers James Allen, Alexander Herdman, and Joseph Ward; I also respond to the recent historical reassessments of Massey and his government. In the second chapter, I look at education policy during the war, asking how the war influenced administrator’s attempts to centralise control over schools.  In the third chapter, I trace the growth of the wartime economy, and the even more substantial growth of the state’s role in the economy, paying particular attention to how trade with Britain grew, and impacted upon other economic policies, suggesting that export of pastoral produce to Britain drove both New Zealand’s economy, and much of the Dominion Government’s policies. In the fourth and final chapter, I look at law and order policies during the war, paying particular attention to the erosion of evidence law in war regulations, and the conscription of men to fight overseas. I will ultimately argue that the growth of, and tighter control over, the pastoral export trade to Britain, and the increasing legal powers of the state within New Zealand, together constituted an expansion of the Dominion government directed at pursuing the needs of the Empire, over and above the needs of New Zealanders.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tristan Cordelia Egarr

<p>This thesis examines the New Zealand state during the First World War. It seeks to ask, firstly, to what extent did the economic size and legal reach of this state expand during, and because of, the war; secondly, how did was this growth affected by, and how did it impact upon, New Zealand’s relationship with Great Britain? My hypothesis is that, as the wartime New Zealand state expanded in size and power, its relationship with Britain grew tighter and stronger.  Following an introduction, in which I take issue with the use of the term “nation” to describe New Zealand in the early twentieth century, the thesis is divided into four chapters. In the first, I look at the men who led the New Zealand Government during the war, in particular the Prime Minister, William Ferguson Massey, and the Cabinet Ministers James Allen, Alexander Herdman, and Joseph Ward; I also respond to the recent historical reassessments of Massey and his government. In the second chapter, I look at education policy during the war, asking how the war influenced administrator’s attempts to centralise control over schools.  In the third chapter, I trace the growth of the wartime economy, and the even more substantial growth of the state’s role in the economy, paying particular attention to how trade with Britain grew, and impacted upon other economic policies, suggesting that export of pastoral produce to Britain drove both New Zealand’s economy, and much of the Dominion Government’s policies. In the fourth and final chapter, I look at law and order policies during the war, paying particular attention to the erosion of evidence law in war regulations, and the conscription of men to fight overseas. I will ultimately argue that the growth of, and tighter control over, the pastoral export trade to Britain, and the increasing legal powers of the state within New Zealand, together constituted an expansion of the Dominion government directed at pursuing the needs of the Empire, over and above the needs of New Zealanders.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne L. Kaeppler

Four early photographers are examined here in relation to their encounters with Tongans and Tonga. These photographers are Andrew Garrett, Gustav Adolph Riemer, Clarence Gordon Campbell and Walter Stanhope Sherwill. Garrett, an American natural historian who specialized in shells and fish, took two ambrotypes of Tongans in Fiji in 1868, which are two of the earliest Tongan photographs known. Riemer, born in Saarlouis, Germany, was a marine photographer on S.M.S. Hertha on an official diplomatic visit and took at least 28 photographs in Tonga in 1876. Campbell, a tourist from New York, took 25 culturally important photographs in 1902. Sherwill, a British subject born in India, moved to Tonga about the time of the First World War. He probably took many photographs with more modern equipment, but only two have been identified with certainty. This article presents information about the photographers and those depicted, where the original photographs can be found and the research that made it possible to glean cultural information from them. These early photographers are placed in the context of other more well-known early photographers whose works can be found in archives and libraries in New Zealand, Australia, Hawai‘i and Germany. In addition, summary information about two Tongan-born photographers is presented, as well as where their photographs/negatives can be found.


2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (8) ◽  
pp. 274-275
Author(s):  
Wyn Beasley

Arthur Porritt, whose adventures, accolades and achievements spanned the globe, was both a surgeon himself and the son of a surgeon. His father, Ernest Edward Porritt, qualified in Edinburgh, became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1898, and practised in Wanganui in new zealand, where Arthur was born on 10 August 1900. His mother, Ivy McKenzie, died in 1914, when Arthur was in his first year at Wanganui Collegiate School; and when his father shortly went overseas to serve in the First World War, the boy became a boarder. The future Olympian distinguished himself as athletics champion, a member of the First XV and a prefect; and for a year after leaving school himself, he taught at a boys' school.


1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Ewing

The British controlled their empire in India through the twin instruments of the army and the civil services. But the army was never used much to administer British territories and the day-to-day business of law and order was left to the civil services, headed by the élite corps of covenanted officers, the Indian Civil Service. This corps was the vital link that carried the dictates of the centre to the two hundred and fifty districts that made up British India. Obviously a Service only a thousand or so strong had a presence too thin to achieve what some hagiographers have claimed but it was, nonetheless, a vital part of the structure of British rule. In the years immediately following the first world war, this vital part seemed unable to cope with the galaxy of problems with which it was beset: its own members increasingly questioned the value of their role; Indian politicians attacked what they saw as the remnant of imperial control whilst, on the widest scale, the complex task of governing India seemed to be beyond the creaking, anachronistic and overworked I.C.S.


Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 191-217
Author(s):  
Dragan Bakic

This paper analyses the role played by Regent Alexander Karadjordjevic in Serbia?s politics and military effort during the First World War. He assumed the position of an heir-apparent somewhat suddenly in 1909, and then regency, after a political crisis that made his father King Peter I transfer his royal powers to Prince Alexander just days before the outbreak of the war. At the age of twenty-six, Alexander was going to lead his people and army through unprecedented horrors. The young Regent proved to be a proper soldier, who suffered personally, along with his troops, the agonising retreat through Albania in late 1915 and early 1916, and spared no effort to ensure the supplies for the exhausted rank and file of the army. He also proved to be a ruler of great personal ambitions and lack of regard for constitutional boundaries of his position. Alexander tried to be not just a formal commander-in-chief of his army, but also to take over operational command; he would eventually manage to appoint officers to his liking to the positions of the Chief of Staff and Army Minister. He also wanted to remove Nikola Pasic from premiership and facilitate the formation of a cabinet amenable to his wishes, but he did not proceed with this, as the Entente Powers supported the Prime Minister. Instead, Alexander joined forces with Pasic to eliminate the Black Hand organization, a group of officers hostile both to him and the Prime Minister, in the well-known show trial in Salonika in 1917. The victories of the Serbian army in 1918 at the Salonika front led to the liberation of Serbia and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), while Alexander emerged as the most powerful political factor in the new state.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rachel Patrick

<p>This thesis explores the topic of families during the First World War through a single New Zealand family and its social networks. The family at the core of the thesis, the Stewarts, were a well-to-do Dunedin family who moved in the most exclusive circles of colonial society. As members of the elite, and as prominent figures in the leadership of wartime patriotic organisations, they conceived of their wartime role as one of public benevolence and modelling patriotic virtue for others. Yet, like countless other families, their personal lives were shattered by the war. Drawing upon the extensive records left behind by the Stewart family, as well as associated archives, the thesis advances a number of larger arguments.  It is the overarching claim of this study that families – in their emotional, material and symbolic manifestations – formed an integral part of the war experience and provide a significant way of understanding this global event and its devastating human consequences. The Stewart family’s extensive surviving archive of personal correspondence provides a window into the innermost emotions, beliefs and values of the family’s individual members. Episodes in their wartime lives shape the wider thesis themes: the impact of family separations, grief and bereavement, religious faith, duty and patriotism, philanthropy, the lingering shadow of war disability – and the inflection of all of these by gender and class. Analysing the letters that the family exchanged with other correspondents demonstrates the embeddedness of family in larger networks of association, as well as identifying the aspects of their world view they shared with others in their predominantly middle- and upper-class circles. The records of patriotic organisations members of the family were associated with provide a means of examining how they translated their private beliefs into public influence.  The continual interplay between mobility and distance forms another of the study’s substantive themes. The distance created by the geographical separation between battlefronts and homefronts was a defining feature of the war for families in far-flung dominions such as New Zealand. But distance could be overcome by mobility: through the flow of things, money and people. Such movements, the thesis argues, blurred the boundaries between home and front. Thus, the correspondence members of the Stewart family exchanged during the war enabled them to sustain intimate ties across distance and helped them to mediate their own particular experience of wartime bereavement. The informal personal and kinship networks sustained by the female members of the family formed an important constituent of wartime benevolence, providing a conduit for the flow of information, goods and financial aid across national boundaries. During the war, the leadership of women’s patriotic organisations promoted an essentialised vision of feminine nature to justify their organisations’ separate existence and to stake a claim for women’s wider participation in the war effort. In doing so, they drew upon enlarged notions of kinship to argue that their female volunteers were uniquely qualified to bridge the distances of war, and to bring the emotional and practical comforts of home to frontline soldiers.  An alternative perspective to the Stewart family’s story of war is provided in this thesis through counterpoints from casefiles of the Otago Soldiers’ and Dependents’ Welfare Committee, with which the Stewarts were involved. Here, the economic interdependence and mutual reliance of working-class families is laid bare in ways that differ markedly from the experience of the Stewarts, but which nevertheless underscores the centrality of the family as an institution for people of all social backgrounds. For some families the geographical separation imposed by the exigencies of war proved insurmountable. The very different kinds of families in this thesis illustrate that whether through their successes, or the sometimes dire consequences of their failures, families are nonetheless indispensable to understanding the First World War.</p>


Author(s):  
Philip Morgan

This article takes an unashamedly political line on Italian fascist economic policies, on the grounds that fascism without the politics is barely fascism at all. It attempts to outline what was ‘fascist’ about the running of the Italian economy during the fascist era. The concern throughout is to articulate what fascism's efforts to control the national economy tell people about the nature of fascism, rather than about the nature of Italian economic development. After the First World War, the corporations' job was, under the totalitarian regime's auspices, to bury for good counter-productive and divisive class conflict, by forcing the various human factors of production to cooperate in the national interest of maximizing economic output.


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