LAUSR

The Great War and the British Empire: Culture and Society is the second edited collection published from the proceedings of the 2014 international conference ‘The British Empire and the Great War’ held at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In their first book, conference convenors and editors Michael J.K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava explored the Australian relationship with the British Empire through the lens of the First World War, curating an interesting selection of essays that examined (among other issues) the effects of the war on Australians at home and the tensions between history, memory and mythology in Australia during the war and more recently. In this second publication they have focused on the nexus between cultural production and the war and have brought into the framework other colonial and dominion perspectives, from Ireland to India and Canada to Cyprus. The result is a wide-ranging collection that tackles musical and artistic representations of the First World War, questions of national and imperial identity, and the politics of remembering and forgetting across the British Empire. After a foreword from renowned British art historian and critic Richard Cork, the collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by the editors. This is followed by John MacKenzie’s thought-provoking take on the ‘First World War as beginning of the end of empire’ idea. Far from following a downwards trajectory in the years following the war, MacKenzie argues, the British Empire entered a new dawn after 1918; though power became more decentralised and shifted away from London, this was not the catalyst for what other historians have claimed was the ‘inevitable’ decline of the empire. Part Two focuses on imperial identities and responses to the war. Richard Scully examines cartoonists’ portrayals of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Britain and the dominions (among other territories), and convincingly argues for a more thorough understanding of the importance of comic art as a historical source; Emma Hanna explores the behavioural and educational effects of music for British Empire troops; Gregory Hynes assesses the relationship between local New Zealand and broader British identities in New Zealand’s war propaganda; Jan Asmussen discusses the little-known impacts of war on the isolated island of Heligoland, a former British colony ceded to the Germans in 1890, and how its inhabitants found themselves caught up in the conflict between the two imperial powers; and Matthew Kennedy argues that the success of the British proposal for the post-war ‘Singapore Strategy’ rested as much on the powerful influence and authority of the empire’s victorious First World War heroes as on clear defence strategy.