An unbroken connection? New Zealand families, duty, and the First World War

<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>

An unbroken connection? New Zealand families, duty, and the First World War

<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>

Queen Victoria

This book evokes the pervasive importance of religion to Queen Victoria’s life but also that life’s centrality to the religion of Victorians around the globe. The first comprehensive exploration of Victoria’s religiosity, it shows how moments in her life—from her accession to her marriage and her successive bereavements—enlarged how she defined and lived her faith. It portrays a woman who had simple convictions but a complex identity that suited her multinational kingdom: a determined Anglican who preferred Presbyterian Scotland, an ardent Protestant who revered her husband’s Lutheran homeland but became sympathetic towards Roman Catholicism and Islam, a moralizing believer in the religion of the home who scorned Sabbatarianism. Drawing on a systematic reading of her journals and an extensive selection of manuscripts from British and German archives, it sheds new light not just on Victoria’s private beliefs but also on her activity as a monarch, who wielded her powers energetically in questions of church and state. Unlike a conventional biography, this book interweaves its account of Victoria’s life with a panoramic survey of what religious communities made of it. Drawing on sermons, newspapers, and other sources from around the British world, it shows how different churches and world religions expressed an emotional identification with their Queen and Empress, turning her into an embodiment of their different and often rival conceptions of what her Empire ought to be. The result is a biography of a Queen which also argues that monarchy and religion remained close allies in the nineteenth-century British world.

How Extraordinary Was the Arab Spring? Examining “Protest Potential” in the Muslim World

Before the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region was cited for its low levels of political mobilization, but recent events call for a more systematic study of “protest potential” in MENA and the broader Muslim world. Combining surveys from 141 countries, this chapter identifies a significant participation gap in Muslim-plurality countries: individuals living there are less likely to have participated in politics and are also less likely to self-report being willing to do so, a difference that holds across all demographic categories. After confirming the validity of retrospective and prospective self-reports using a survey of participants in Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests, the chapter explores the role of religion in the Muslim world’s participation gap: while Islam, as a doctrine, does not inhibit activism, certain forms of religiosity do undermine participation. In particular, private beliefs and practices limit protest potential in the Muslim world, while collective religious engagement bolsters it. The latter, the chapter argues, supports activism by helping address the collective action problem underlying mass politics.

Conscience, Abortion and Jurisdiction

Conscientious objection has achieved a particular place in contemporary law and culture. Lawyers, political theorists, ethicists, health professionals and others have debated how we best negotiate the tensions that can exist between professional obligations and private beliefs. Conscientious objection to abortion care has been a particular focus of these discussions. In this article, we draw on theoretical work on ‘jurisdiction’ to provide an account of what is embedded in claims to conscience and what the effects of such claims are. We focus specifically on refusals of abortion care enabled by section 4 of the Abortion Act 1967. We argue that legitimating narratives on conscience seek to achieve seemingly contradictory goals: entrenching abortion as morally ambiguous while securing it as part of medicine’s monopolistic practice. While section 4 provides the focus, our concerns extend to the wider landscape and impact of claims to conscience. Through our jurisdictional analysis, we seek to better understand such claims and dramatically reorient thinking by grounding the conscience clause squarely in the politics of ‘task areas’, professional domains, market control and claims of epistemological authority.

The Good Lawyer: State-Led Professional Socialization in Contemporary China

How do authoritarian states define and communicate notions of appropriate work conduct and professional excellence? This article examines three channels of communication used by the Chinese state to signal professional expectations to the bar: the bar exam, the administrative rules governing lawyers, and the state-sanctioned National Outstanding Lawyer Award. We find that China’s state narrative about “the good lawyer” celebrates lawyers willing to work closely with the authorities and asks more stringent critics to separate private beliefs from public behavior. In contrast to assumptions often made in research on authoritarian law, this article highlights how lawyers can participate in politics without opposing the regime and how much work goes into curating an appealing state strand of legal professionalism rather than relying on coercion alone. We end with a call for future work on “varieties of legal professionalism” to better understand which state signals are most visible and persuasive to different segments of the Chinese bar, as well as the conditions under which alternate ideas about professionalism gain traction.

The Development of Thanatology in Japan and its Position in East Asia, with a Focus on Thanatology’s Relationship to Religion

This article deals with the religiosity of thanatology in Japan, which was introduced under the name shiseigaku (death and life studies) in the 1980s. Although many religious believers and scholars of religious studies have been connected with this field in Japan, religions are not necessarily highlighted by studies of Japanese thanatology. The Japanese pioneers of thanatology did not have clear ideas on the positioning of religion in this field, but they unconsciously merged their own faith into their discipline. Later, other scholars tried to re-construct this field by weakening its religious orientation. The Japanese case is in contrast to Taiwanese thanatology, in which the pioneers tried to position religious beliefs as the essential element of the field. Indeed, this difference was partially influenced by the religious traditions of both societies, but other factors such as the historical processes of this academic field and the private beliefs of researchers were important causes of that difference.

AGAINST INTOLERANCE: THE RED SCARE ROOTS OF LEGAL LIBERALISM

This article argues that important antecedents of post-New Deal American liberalism emerged in response to the First Red Scare. As war hysteria gave way to patent antiradicalism, the pervasiveness of peacetime state-sponsored repression undermined progressive confidence in administrative governance and generated support for so-called personal rights. At the same time, the suppression of meaningful labor activity during the early 1920s buttressed conservative confidence in the judiciary and emboldened lawyers and business advocates to oppose state policing of putatively private beliefs. The result was increasing convergence around a new liberalism, defined against “intolerance,” which laid the groundwork for judicial enforcement of free speech and minority rights.

On the Nature of Belief in Pluralistic Ignorance

I apply recent research on the links between belief, truth and pragmatism based on Williams (1970) statement that “beliefs aim at truth,” to the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance, in which agents act contrary to their private beliefs because they believe that other agents believe the contrary. I consider three positions; an epistemic position, a pragmatic position, and a third position coordinating the first two. I apply them to pluralistic ignorance while considering the recent study of Bjerring, Hansend and Pedersen (2014). I conclude that a purely epistemic approach is better for understanding pluralistic ignorance.