Around 250,000 Belgian refugees who fled the German invasion spent the First World War in Britain – the largest refugee presence Britain has ever witnessed. Welcomed in a wave of humanitarian sympathy for ‘Poor Little Belgium’, within a few months Belgian exiles were pushed off the front pages of newspapers by the news of direct British involvement in the war. Following rapid repatriation at British government expense in late 1918 and 1919 Belgian refugees were soon lost from public memory with few memorials or markers of their mass presence. Reactions to Belgian refugees discussed in this book include the mixed responses of local populations to the refugee presence, which ranged from extensive charitable efforts to public and trade union protests aimed at protecting local jobs and housing. This book also explores the roles of central and local government agencies which supported and employed Belgian refugees en masse yet also used them as a propaganda tool to publicise German outrages against civilians to encourage support for the Allied war effort. This book covers responses to Belgian refugees in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in a Home Front wartime episode which generated intense public interest and charitable and government action. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora.

The fullest account yet of the British home front in the First World War and how war changed Britain forever.

Following the First World War and in actions that challenged Britain’s reputation as a liberal democracy, various government departments implemented policies of mass repatriation from Britain of populations of colonial and friendly migrants and refugees. Many of those repatriated had played a significant part in the war effort and had given valuable service in the combat zones and on the home front: serving in the armed forces, in labour battalions and employed in key wartime industries, such as munitions work, the merchant navy and wartime construction. This book sets out to uncover why central government decided to implement a policy of repatriation of "friendly" peoples after the war. It also explores the imposition of wartime and post-war legal restrictions on these groups as part of a major shift in policy towards reducing the settlement and limiting the employment of overseas populations in Britain.

With several terms from the First World War still present in modern speech, Languages and the First World War presents over 30 essays by international academics investigating the linguistic aspects of the 1914-18 conflict. The first of the two volumes covers language change and documentation during the period of the war, while the second examines the representation and the memory of the war. Communicating in a Transnational War examines languages at the front, including the subject of interpretation, translation and parallels between languages; communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; and recording language during the war. Representation and Memory examines historiographical issues; the nature of representing the war in letters and diaries; the documentation of language change; the language of representing the war in reportage and literature; and the language of remembering the war. Covered in the process are slang, censorship, soldiers' phrasebooks, code-switching, borrowing terms, the problems facing multilingual armies, and gendered language.

This book challenges scholarship which presents charity and voluntary activity during World War I as marking a downturn from the high point of the late Victorian period. Charitable donations rose to an all-time peak, and the scope and nature of charitable work shifted decisively. Far more working class activists, especially women, became involved, although there were significant differences between the suburban south and industrial north of England and Scotland. The book also corrects the idea that charitably-minded civilians’ efforts alienated the men at the front, in contrast to the degree of negativity that surrounds much previous work on voluntary action in this period. Far from there being an unbridgeable gap in understanding or empathy between soldiers and civilians, the links were strong, and charitable contributions were enormously important in maintaining troop morale. This bond significantly contributed to the development and maintenance of social capital in Britain, which, in turn, strongly supported the war effort. This work draws on previously unused primary sources, notably those regarding the developing role of the UK’s Director General of Voluntary Organizations and the regulatory legislation of the period.

Both Britain and the United States have had a long history of harbouring foreign political exiles, who often set up periodicals which significantly contributed to community-building and political debates. However, this varied and complex journalism has received little attention to date, particularly regarding the languages in which it was produced. This wide-ranging edited volume brings together for the first time interdisciplinary case studies of the exile foreign-language press (in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Flemish, Polish, among other languages) across Britain and the US, establishing a useful comparative framework to explore how periodicals tackled key political, linguistic and literary issues from the 19th century to the present day. Building on the existing literature on the exile foreign-language press in the United States and developing the study of this phenomenon in the British context, Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in the UK and in the US offers fresh perspectives into how these marginalised periodicals influenced the political, economic and social contexts that brought them into existence. This is a major contribution to the burgeoning field of transnational periodicals and will be of interest to anyone studying the history of the Anglo-American press, the history of immigration and cultural history.

This book examines the particular experience of ethnic, religious and national minorities who participated in the First World War as members of the main belligerent powers: Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Individual chapters explore themes including contested loyalties, internment, refugees, racial violence, genocide and disputed memories from 1914 through into the interwar years to explore how minorities made the transition from war to peace at the end of the First World War. The first section discusses so-called ‘friendly minorities’, considering the way in which Jews, Muslims and refugees lived through the war and its aftermath. Section two looks at fears of ‘enemy aliens’, which prompted not only widespread internment, but also violence and genocide. The third section considers how the wartime experience of minorities played out in interwar Europe, exploring debates over political representation and remembrance. Bridging the gap between war and peace, this is the ideal book for all those interested in both First World War and minority histories.

This book explores the differing ways in which language has been used to try to make sense of the First World War. Offering further developments in an innovative approach to the study of the conflict, it develops a transnational viewpoint of the experience of war to reveal less expected areas of language use during the conflict. Taking the study of the First World War far beyond the Western Front, chapters examine experiences in many regions, including Africa, Armenia, post-war Australia, Russia and Estonia, and a variety of contexts, from prisoner-of-war and internment camps, to food queues and post-war barracks. Drawing upon a wide variety of languages, such as Esperanto, Flemish, Italian, Kiswahili, Portuguese, Romanian and Turkish, Multilingual Environments in the Great War brings together language experiences of conflict from both combatants and the home front, connecting language and literature with linguistic analysis of the immediacy of communication.

This book provides a comprehensive study of refugee movements and population transfers across Europe during the First World War and the early postwar period. Drawing parallels with contemporary migration issues, the book serves a social and educational purpose by highlighting Europe's history of migration and emphasizing the relevance of past experiences to current challenges. It seeks to enhance understanding, raise social awareness, and contribute to the broader discourse on war refugeeism by applying historical insights to address contemporary migration crises. The authors discuss how issues of refugee movements and population transfers were addressed in different contexts and reflect on refugees as both war-induced migrants and political tools for authorities. The book covers a range of topics including humanitarian systems during the war and the early postwar period, refugee locations, policy influence, national issues, self-organization, and aid for refugees, as well as immigration control in time after bordering the postimperial Europe. It also addresses the composition of populations in postwar reconstruction processes and its population dynamics. This volume will be of value to those interested in modern European history, social and political history.

Jack Pease was at the heart of the British Liberal government from 1908 to 1915, holding the position of Chief Whip through two general elections, and a member of the Cabinet confronting domestic tumult, international tensions, and war. Pease was an unassuming participant in the deliberations of a unique gathering of political talent. His journals as President of the Board of Education from 1911 to the formation of the coalition ministry in 1915 are a closely observed, unvarnished record of what he saw and heard in Downing St and Westminster: constitutional and Home Rule crises, industrial conflict, electoral reform, women's suffrage controversies, struggles over budgets, naval estimates, and foreign policy. Despite his Quaker beliefs, Pease committed to supporting war against Germany, and his troubled conscience is laid bare in letters to his wife and friends. Replete with intimate portraits of his revered chief H. H. Asquith and the Prime Minister's social circle, the journals also provide evocative observations of the contest of ideas, arguments, and moods of prominent contemporaries, especially David Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill as Home Secretary then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Pease's candid accounts, augmented by the diaries and letters of others privy to Cabinet policy secrets and personal rivalries, reveal the stories not told in the Prime Minister's reports to the King. Together with the editors' biographical introduction, extensive explanatory commentaries, and bibliographical guidance, Pease's text provides a uniquely comprehensive understanding of Asquith's Liberal government in peace and war.