The Great War,the child’s body and the American Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.     

Ottoman Maps of the Empire’s Arab Provinces, 1850s to the First World War

In recent years the central Ottoman archive in Istanbul has been gradually releasing and computerizing thousands of maps stored in its collections. Our study introduces 137 maps already available to researchers that focus either directly or indirectly as part of broader presentations of imperial domains on the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces. These maps, which all date to between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War, differ widely in character, content and function. The maps are briefly described according to their content and set in their historical context.     

‘Accurate to the Point of Mania’: Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Making in Australia's Official Paintings of the First World War

The collection of official war art housed in the Australian War Memorial has played an important role in shaping a memory of the First World War for almost a century. This article explores the importance of eyewitness testimony in the production of war paintings for the Memorial's collection during the interwar years. Focusing on the repainting of official artist Harold Septimus Power's canvas Saving the Guns of Robecq, it explores the reasons why—in the inevitably contested construction of memory—Charles Bean and John Treloar privileged veterans’ memories over artists’ interpretations of the conflict. It argues that in the process of memory making aesthetics mattered less than portraying the war in a way acceptable to the men who had experienced it.     

Economic neutrality during the Cold War: the World Bank,the United States,and Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1977

This paper reconstructs the unknown Chile-World Bank interactions during the formative years of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1977). Prevalent understandings of the WB portray it as a loyal Washington ally. However, new evidence from the WB Archives and additional documents reveal that US efforts to make lending contingent on human rights considerations, thereby forcing the Bank to abandon its so-called economic neutrality, were only partially effective. Pinochet’s case provides a new prism to examine the cold war in Latin America and the Bank’s use of its ‘neutrality’ as a means to reach increasing autonomy from its strongest member states, mainly the United States.     

The Road to the Chaco War: Bolivia’s Modernisation in the 1920s

When Bolivian and Paraguayan leaders entered into war over the contested Chaco Boreal in 1932, they unleashed powerful, violent forces that would dramatically alter history. Understanding the Chaco War as the most pivotal event in Bolivia’s modern history, this article seeks to clarify the modernisation programme that had been underway in Bolivia during the 1920s. Reforms marked the decade and intersected with and accentuated a tense political environment. The political dynamic of the years prior to the outbreak of war showed how fragile the Bolivian system was and how the global economy further eroded the government’s manoeuvrability to avoid war.     

Ending Cold War fears: expectation and interpretation in Mass Observers’ responses to the Gulf War, 1990–1991

This article considers responses to the Mass Observation Project’s Gulf Crisis sub-directive. It argues firstly that observers’ responses show how a potential war within Iraq in 1990/1991 was framed by fear of global conflagration and suggests that these fears were rooted in memories of the later cold war. Secondly it argues that the Gulf War was interpreted as a rapid and successful conflict, which dispelled pre-war fears of global conflagration/nuclear war, and demonstrated that the UK could be involved in large-scale modern military conflicts without risking escalation and global catastrophe.     

Imperial Outposts and the War Beyond: Singapore,Hong Kong and the British Empire’s Land Force Contribution to the Korean War

Histories of the British Empire’s strategic outposts in the Far East have traditionally focused on their traumatic loss to the Japanese adversary during the Second World War. Only in the past decade-and-a-half have historians begun to examine the post-Second World War importance of these outposts to the continued defence and security of Britain’s empire in the Far East. In taking this line of historical enquiry still further, the article examines how Singapore and Hong Kong were used to project British military power, specifically army deployments, across the Far East, and far beyond the imperial frontier, in support of Britain’s involvement in the 1950–53 Korean War and therefore in pursuit of the empire’s foreign and defence policy objectives. It adopts an essentially operational analysis to this end, relying on operational and army ‘ground-level’ sources from the records of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices at the British National Archives. It uncovers the hidden workings of the mechanisms of imperial military power projection through strategic outposts, which ranged from training to logistical support to the exercise of command and control, and how these mechanisms and outposts were utilised by the British Far Eastern land forces involved in the Korean War. In so doing, the article sheds much valuable and original light on the historical importance of these strategic outposts to imperial defence.     

The Making and Breaking of the Slovak Clerical Council, 1918–19

Abstract

This article examines the Slovak Clerical Council, one of a number of clerical councils which were founded in Central Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. On the basis of primary sources and extensive familiarity with the relevant secondary literature, it challenges the existing historical consensus that this clerical council was merely one manifestation of Slovakia’s desire to break away from Hungarian rule and was, therefore, of limited scope and import. Instead, it argues that the clerical council’s nationalist agenda manifested itself not only in its eagerness to support and in?uence the establishment of the Czechoslovak state but also in its determination to reconstruct and reinvigorate the Catholic Church in Slovakia. It also explains why the ambitions of the council, and the threat it posed to the unity of the Church in Slovakia, were stymied. This account of the Slovak clerical council serves, therefore, as a case study of both the radicalizing impact of nationalism in the aftermath of the First World War and the limits of that radicalization. No account of any of the post-war clerical councils has, hitherto, been published in English, and thus this article will contribute to a clearer understanding not only of developments in Slovakia in 1918–19, but also of the broader challenges affecting the Catholic faith in Central Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.