Throughout most of the Anglo-French Wars of 1793-1815, the burden of defending France’s interests against Britain fell primarily upon its navy. Having suffered several major defeats and the loss of New France and other colonies, France and its navy re-emerged to contest Britain’s dominance at sea during the American Revolutionary War in1778-1783. Although the French navy had scored several strategic victories for their American allies, the defeat at the Battle of the Saints in 1782 left France with little to show for its efforts except a massive debt. As a navy required extensive logistical systems to mobilize both its resources and manpower, this endeavour presented ever increasingly strenuous challenge to the French monarchy. Faced with needs to modernize both its fiscal, social, and political structures, the French monarchy failed to navigate the tumultuous process of reform. While the resulting French Revolution removed some of the impediments to reform, it also presented its own difficulties as revolutionary principles often clashed with the needs of military service. Although Napoleon Bonaparte brought relatively stability to France and invested massive amount of resources to regenerate the French navy, his insatiable desire for aggrandizing the French Empire and the nearly constant state of war made it difficult to achieve his naval aspirations.

Britain’s notorious ‘khaki shortage’ in the first year of the war has become symbolic in the historical literature of the country’s chaotic and belated industrial mobilisation. Juxtaposed with similar deficiencies in munitions supply, discussions of the army’s ‘clothing crisis’ have contributed to a broader narrative about the government’s failure to convert the manufacturing sector to war production in 1914.1 The similar timelines of rectifying uniform and munitions shortages have reinforced the impression that both were indicative of the same problem. Supplies of army uniforms finally met demand in mid-1915 – the same time when the newly established Ministry of Munitions began coordinating the engineering trades, regarded as the turning point in organising Britain’s industries for ‘total war’.

Waging war has always been a very expensive endeavour, requiring a solid basis for economic power in order to finance it. In the eighteenth century warring sides frequently resorted to financial help from their well-heeled allies. This chapter examines the peculiar challenges that confronted the Habsburg Empire as it sought to raise funds and resources to sustain its wars against France. Despite the economic and financial problems and the military losses of every single war of the Habsburg monarchy it managed to remain in war against France until 1809. The Habsburg monarchy waged these wars with a great number of soldiers, getting its lands occupied by the enemy and its economy attacked by bad money, yet found a way to remain liquid until state bankruptcy in 1811. In spite of these economic, financial and military crises Austria persevered as European player.

In his War Memoirs, David Lloyd George recorded a visit paid by King George V to a Sheffield shell factory in late September 1915 during one of his tours of arms factories. The king exchanged words with some of the workers, among them an ex-naval colleague, with whom he reminisced about old times. Afterwards, the king’s attention was drawn by a man working with particular effort. Having observed the man’s labours, the king told the unnamed worker, ‘I am glad you realise the importance of the work in hand. Without an adequate supply of shells we cannot expect to win.’1 This was a lesson which had already been impressed upon the country; earlier in the year a shortage of shells on the western front had led to the formation of a coalition government, and facilitated the further rise of David Lloyd George, not as a radical leader, but as a war leader. By the end of the war Britain’s economy had been re-organised to supply the mass armies it was putting into the field, a process which required massive government intervention in private industry, the organisation of labour and capital, and the employment of large numbers of women in industries where they had previously been a negligible presence. The commercial and political talent of the country was yoked to the goal of supplying the growing British armies. New factories and even towns were constructed as the country became aware, to quote one contemporary commentator, ‘that the Herculean struggle was not merely a conflict between armies and navies, but between British chemists and German chemists, between British workshops and the Workshops of Germany.’

The First World War was a turning point in the history of the United Kingdom. The enormous demands of the war, and its vast expenditure (of men, women, and materiel) transformed both economy and society during the war and led to major ramifications afterwards. It was a ‘total war’; one that required the mobilisation not just of the armed services but of society as a whole. This volume focuses on the ways in which the United Kingdom’s home front mobilised for war and the impact of that mobilisation. The key question is: how much did Britain’s economy and society have to change in order to support its war effort? Were there certain areas where change was more pertinent? To what extent were changes already in motion before the war that were subsequently accelerated by the outbreak of conflict? Or did the possibility of ‘total war’ arise from the ways the economy and society had begun to structure themselves before 1914? Embracing the four themes of this volume – politics, economics, society and identity – this chapter establishes what the UK looked like, and the primary issues it faced, in the immediate pre-war period. But first, what did the term ‘United Kingdom’ mean in 1914?

Finance during the First World War might seem an arid topic, but in fact it mainlines us deep into Britain’s twentieth-century history, on at least four different levels. Firstly, and most obviously, it helps us understand the character and conduct of the war itself. Since at least the time of Thucydides, war has been ‘a matter not so much of arms as of money’, and grasping how efforts – successful or not – were made to obtain that money has been crucial to understanding any conflict.1 Secondly, by analysing the enthusiasm with which the public accepted an increased tax burden, and subscribed to war loans, we can perhaps explore levels of popular support for the war.

This chapter examines a paradox which I have previously noted regarding ‘pacifism’ in the First World War.1 That word, coined in 1901, was then used in three senses. The first two were associated with the peace movement: the absolute pacifism that conscientiously objected to all fighting; and the pacificism that sought to abolish war (for example, by creating a league of nations) but accepted that in the immediate future force (for example, military sanctions) might still be needed. The third and loosest sense of pacifism described war-weariness or defeatism that was unrelated to the peace movement’s confidence that international relations could be reformed: it was merely anti-war. The paradox is that where, as in the UK, the peace movement was deepest-rooted, public support for the war effort was nonetheless best maintained. In other words, the first two senses of pacifism correlate negatively with the third.

Societies need food to function and to help their citizens reach their potential. People who are satiated are, in general, not only healthier than people who are hungry, but also happier. Healthier and happier people experience increased well-being, which benefits not only themselves and those around them, but also the societies in which they live1. In wartime, the food of a society or nation is no less important than it is in peacetime, for similar reasons of health and happiness. Without sufficient food, soldiers will not have enough energy to engage in battles and may develop distrust in their leaders. Civilians on the home front, like civilians in peacetime, require adequate food in quantity and quality to engage in critical work to support the economic production of their nations, which in turn is vital for any war effort. Adequate food is thus necessary for civilians to maintain a modicum of belief in their leaders. When governments break the unspoken contract of ensuring, whether through private or public means, that a significant proportion of their populations have enough to eat, not only are individual people more hungry and less happy, societies at large suffer, and the legitimacies of states are weakened. This legitimacy weakens as the duration and intensity of food insecurity increases.

This chapter examines Napoleon’s 1796-1797 Italian Campaign, which covers a crucial period in the French Revolutionary Wars. During this campaign the young, largely unknown Corsican, in his first command, led the French Army to triumph over the superior forces of the Austrian and Sardinian Armies. In just ten months, the French marched to one victory after another until their Austrian enemy was pushed back to Vienna and the war was triumphantly concluded with a peace treaty that consolidated France’s dominant position in Western Europe.

Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1812 was his last and greatest effort to secure the French imperium in continental Europe. It resulted in war on a colossal scale and produced results diametrically opposite to those the French emperor wished to attain. This six-month long campaign furnished numerous episodes of triumph and hardship, transcendent courage and wanton depravity, but it offered many military lessons as well. In the grandeur of its conception, its execution, and its abysmal end, this war had no analogy until the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. The campaign had a profound impact on political situation in Europe. Its direct result was the general uprising against Napoleon in northern Germany and the complete overthrow within one year of the French imperium in Central Europe.

In October 1914, a small but revealing ceremony took place at Tikitiki, in the district of Waipu in New Zealand. There, almost 12,000 miles away from the battlefields of Europe where war had been raging for weeks, Maori gathered around a flagstaff whose erection had been funded by subscription for one singular purpose: hoisting the Belgian flag under the New Zealand ensign as a tribute to the Belgian nation, which had bravely arisen against the German invasion.

In the summer of 1789, a revolution broke out in France. No previous movement had so profoundly shaken the foundation of society as the one championing ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’.

In 1912, two years before the outbreak of the First World War, the London publishers, Methuen and Co., brought out ‘a completely new edition, revised and brought up to date’, of G. R. Porter’s The Progress of the Nation in its Various Social and Economic Relations from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Porter was a founder of the Statistical Society who, when the Board of Trade was restructured in 1834, was appointed to head its statistical section. He produced the first edition of The Progress of the Nation in 1836–8, and revised it twice, in 1846 and 1851, before his death in the following year.