The First World War does not occupy a prominent place in histories of local government in England. In surveys of the general development of English Local Government, this is perhaps understandable; the war years did not bring about lasting changes to the scope or structure of local government, and its legacy was much less than that of the Second World War.1 Looking at local experiences of the Great War, however, local authorities played a prominent and evolving role, particularly as state intervention increased from 1916.2

This chapter investigates how Napoleon funded his war effort during the fifteen years that he was in power. Coming to power in the wake of the French monarchy’s financial insolvency and the profound turmoil of the French Revolution, Napoleon chose to become personally involved in financial affairs of the nation, opting for radical but effective solutions. This aspect of his accomplishments is usual forgotten. This is all the more unfair as his successes were real and stark. By rationalizing old principles, the winner of Austerlitz gave himself the means to embody the “God of war” but failed to win the battle for credit due in large part to the disastrous legacy he received from regimes that had preceded him.

Changes in the way the Cabinet worked during the First World War can be seen as marking the beginnings of modern government in Britain.1 The leisurely methods inherited from the eighteenth century proved to be inadequate in a world where communication by telegraph and telephone encouraged centralised decision-making in London. However, changes necessary for efficient waging of war were not easily reconciled with the Cabinet’s traditional responsibility for the unity and coherence of government, and ministers’ collective responsibility for policy. Moreover, modern warfare required unprecedented mobilisation of national resources, and therefore a greater role for the state in the economy and society. This chapter addresses three questions. First, what changes occurred in the ways the Cabinet worked; second, how far did the scope of Cabinet government grow; and third, to what extent did the public’s expectations of government change?

In 1801-1802 Napoleon dispatched the largest colonial venture of his reign to Haiti. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte’s once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence.

During the First World War, Britain interned hundreds of thousands of people within its shores. From about 1917 the majority of these came from French battlefields, but throughout the conflict a significant percentage consisted of non-combatants. The latter came from two sources. Most originated from the German community in Britain, whose number totalled 53,324 according to the census of 1911. They consisted of both permanent settlers and those who happened to find themselves in Britain in the summer of 1914.1 However, London became the centre of an international system of incarceration of Germans and other enemy aliens during the Great War. This coordination of imperial internment meant that different parts of the empire from Canada to India and Australia followed the Home Office lead once it began imprisonment from August 1914. This global system also meant that Germans, in particular, found themselves transported from one part of the British Empire to another, while overrun German imperial possessions in Africa also witnessed a system of transportation, which resulted in journeys to camps in Britain.

At the outbreak of the First World War, families across Britain, were infinitely varied. An assortment of combinations of individuals resided together in a multitude of different types of homes, which in their own diverse ways acted as the focus of families’ economic activities and as spaces of emotional belonging and comfort. Homes could contain several generations, a widow supported by her sons, a co-habiting couple, perhaps with previous partners they could not afford to divorce,1 combinations of grown-up siblings, relatives, lodgers and domestic servants living together. Families and homes were often finely balanced economic units, relying upon a range of methods of production and consumption to make ends meet. Class, economic circumstances and the particularity of the geographical locale in which a family resided all shaped the day-to-day practices of domestic life, and the contributions that different members needed to make to the economic survival of the home.

This chapter seeks to offer an overview of the legal powers at the disposal of the British government to secure its domestic objectives during the First World War.1 It argues broadly that a flexible and frequently changing legal framework for wartime domestic policy, notwithstanding instances of legal bluffing and occasional repressive action by the executive against industrial militants and the critical press, reflected sensitivity on the part of the authorities to the stresses and tensions caused by wartime legal restrictions and shortages. The most important of these legal powers were those granted under a succession of Defence of the Realm Acts (DORA) enacted throughout the war. These acts authorised the promulgation by the Privy Council of hundreds of Defence Regulations covering most facets of economic and social life on the home front. Those regulations, in turn, devolved legal powers to more subordinate governmental levels, normally ministers of the crown, where ‘notices’, ‘orders’, and ‘rules’, whether of local or of more general application, industry-wide or narrowly focused, would be issued. It may also be noted that wartime delegated or sub-delegated powers could be granted by pre-August 1914 legislation, and could be conferred on statutory bodies, not just on ministers. For example, the Scottish Insurance Commissioners were granted powers under the National Insurance Act 1911 to make regulations during the war whereby individuals who represented insured persons on insurance committees, and who were absent on war service for more than six months without leave of the committee, would not be deemed to have ceased to be members of the insurance committee.

The dominant images of the First World War are of a land war fought in the trenches of north-western Europe. Yet the war was ‘as much a war of competing blockades … as of competing armies’.1 These blockades aimed at interdicting enemy powers’ seaborne trade and the shipping that carried it, which the ‘first wave of globalization’ had placed at the heart of the economies of Europe and North America.2 No belligerent power was more dependent on trade and shipping than Great Britain, and it would therefore be difficult to overstate their importance to the British and Allied war effort. Moreover, shipping, ‘the world’s key industry’, as one recent study has termed it, was the one major British industry situated on the front line, directly and constantly exposed to enemy action.3

The post-Frederician Prussian army cultivated the glory of the past, but also experienced continuous debates and reforms intending to optimize the army according to the principles of enlightened rationalism. The confrontation with the French revolutionary armies activated intensive discussions, but for the military authorities, the experiences did not call for principal doubts about the suitability of the army. The defeat of 1806, however, did. The following reforms had to handle elementary needs to re-establish the armed forces, but also took the opportunity to create new organisational frameworks and to introduce new principles for recruitment, military justice and officers’ careers. From a quantitative perspective, the important measures converged on the implementation of a general conscription, and from a qualitative perspective, they especially targeted reconciling the educated middle-class with military service. When the break with France in 1813 effaced the previously existing restrictions, the plans resulted not only in an augmentation of the standing army, but in the establishment of complementary military formations of own characters. Their coexistence reflected organisational constraints, as well as different aspects of the previous debates. Although not without improvisations, the authorities were able to increase the armed forces more than sevenfold within about nine months.

Often depicted by historians as a ‘forgotten’ war in the United States and unwanted distraction for Britain and its empire (with the exception of Canada), the Anglo-American War of 1812 for contemporaries was a conflict with high states. For the divided United States, the war was fought for a myriad of reasons, including outrage over British impressment of American sailors and infringements free trade, fear of American Indians, and a desire to re-assert American independence and lay claim to the position of pre-eminent power in North America. While victory offered tangible and moral prizes, defeat risked the shattering of the already-frail political unity of the young republic and relegation to secondary status in North America. For the British Empire, the war meant conflict with its primary overseas trading partner, which risked economic ruin for its manufacturing and shipping industries and resulted in severe opposition in some parts of the country. Victory, however, presented the tantalizing opportunity to avenge the embarrassment of the American Revolution and reaffix the young republic to the British sphere of influence. While the conflict itself resulted in few casualties and a treaty that recognized no victor, it ultimately shaped the future of North America and the direction of the British Empire.

The great majority of English, Welsh and Scottish workers supported the war, as did a minority of Irish labour, not just in the Ulster counties. In a war of production, labour was in near unlimited demand both for the armed forces and for industrial and agricultural production. In Britain, perhaps a little under 40 per cent of the pre-war male workforce, 5,670,000 men, went into the Armed Forces in stages between 1914 and 1918.1 In Ireland some 210,000 men (just under 14 per cent) served in the British Army. The state soon had to determine priorities as to what could be imported and, to an increasing extent, where labour should be deployed.

During the First World War, the British royal family played a major role in national and imperial mobilisation, but one which has been significantly overlooked in the historiography of the conflict.1 Indeed as David Cannadine has pointed out, the British monarchy in the twentieth century has yet to receive its due attention from academic historians.2 This chapter argues that monarchism was an important cultural force in the British war effort and was a key element in the wartime creation of the idea of a specifically ‘British’ home front. The king and the royal family were seen as an important wartime symbol of ‘home’. They contributed to home front cohesion through wartime work, including fundraising, visiting the wounded, and defusing working-class discontent through royal visits to munitions factories, mines and shipbuilding industries. The royal family was largely successful in dealing with the challenges that waging ‘total war’ presented for the monarchy. The role of the monarch was central to both home front political and popular culture and to national morale, while the royal family’s involvement in the war effort also illustrated the wartime tensions within the United Kingdom between tradition, modernisation and innovation. Moreover, the conflict created an important longer-term legacy for the monarchy.

In standard histories of both the First World War and charity a myth has arisen that is as pernicious as those about the Christmas Truce or ‘donkey’ generals.1 The story goes that on the outbreak of war a troop of middle-class ladies began a frantic spate of sock knitting that not only had little impact on the war effort but was equally transient in its effect on both philanthropy and those involved. Of course, some notable exceptions are admitted but only when charity reached the ‘front line’ in the form of Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), the Scottish Women’s Hospitals or the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). On the home front, charity gets little coverage other than work in aid of Belgian refugees.2 In some ways this is not surprising, as a good deal of contemporary coverage was equally dismissive. The soldier with more knitted ‘comforts’ than he knew what to do with was quite pervasive whether in the cartoons of Punch or the inflated memoirs of Robert Graves.3

This chapter, which draws on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources, first attempts to assess the scale and scope of the fisheries of the British Isles immediately prior to the outbreak of the war before discussing the various facets of the fish trade’s involvement and response to the conflict. Finally, it seeks to examine something of the longer-term impact that the First World War had on the nature, structure and subsequent direction of this somewhat unique activity

At the outbreak of the First World War the United Kingdom produced the majority of its iron and steel from high grade non-phosphoric hematite iron ores. Over the preceding three to four decades demand had outstripped home production of those ores and the associated steel alloy minerals, and the country was heavily reliant on imports. Those imports were increasingly vulnerable to enemy action at sea and, since the iron and steel industry responded to the demand for munitions, not just for the British forces but also for the French who had lost the majority of their steel industry to German advances, significant changes were required.