This thesis is an exploration of the memorialisation of the 1914-1918 War in Britain. It focuses upon memorials to war dead as sites which were exclusively reserved for carefully sanctioned and specifically negotiated forms of commemorative activity. War memorials engaged with post-war social space and manipulated its boundaries in several ways. The study adopts a thematic perspective to study the conceptualisation of collectivity through the memorialisation of the war in public places in Britain. It is structured in four chapters according to each theme, and these are: the selection of sites, the performance of ceremonies of unveiling, the incising of text into stone, and the formulation and imaging of bodies. Each theme forms a component of what is identified as a 'commemorative spatiality' which was utilised and adapted in the demarcation of communities according to complex socio-spatial arrangements. The main theoretical approach utilised in this thesis is the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, who conceptualised space not as a neural, homogenoeus 'sphere' for human activity, but as socially produced. Focusing primarily upon six memorials the study scrutinises the way in which an image of cultural authority, related to ideas about a 'nationally' unified framework for remembrance, was utilised and adapted by a variety of communities to structure the commemmoration of the war dead and inevitably implied other, unassimilated discourses when produced according to the components of the overaching commemorative spatiality. The commemoration of the 1914-1918 War was broadly predicated upon the conceptualisation of communities according to ideas about place and meaning. It follows that the commemorative spatiality identified in this study has enabled a comprehensive consideration of the ways in which expressions of national coherence, or more diverse and fragmented associations were either expressed or obscured through the production of memorials to war dead.

This is a study of the place of the Balkans in British liberal politics from the late-Victorian era to the aftermath of the First World War. It argues that engagement with the region was part of a wider reformist dynamic in British politics and society in this period. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the emergence of independent successor states in the Balkans against a background of nationalist tension, political violence, and humanitarian suffering. This raised questions and concerns that resonated particularly strongly within British liberal political culture, as revealed through analysis of correspondence and memoir, journalism, public and parliamentary debate, humanitarian initiatives, political activism, and diplomacy. In particular, the thesis considers: the political agitation in response to atrocities in Ottoman Bulgaria in 1876 (chapter 1); the wider impact of this agitation on late-Victorian politics (chapter 2); the renewed activism in response to Ottoman misrule in early-twentieth century Macedonia (chapter 3); the dilemmas and debates generated by the Balkan Wars and the First World War between 1912 and 1918 (chapter 4); and the impact of this on the new internationalist agendas of the 1920s (chapter 5). Liberal engagement with the Balkans is shown to have intersected closely with domestic reformist political agendas, as well as with other international causes, both European and imperial. By exploring these intersections, the thesis re-examines aspects of change, continuity and conflict in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British politics and society, and reconsiders the multifaceted relationships that linked that society to the rest of the world.

This thesis explores the role literature played in the creation and subsequent development of the mythology of the First World War in Britain. In this thesis, the term 'mythology' is used to denote a set of dominant symbols and narratives which characterise how the past is represented and understood. Many historians consider literature to be the source of the British mythology of the First World War, but it is argued here that previous historical approaches have paid insufficient attention to the processes by which books were published, promoted and received. Drawing on Book History methodologies, this thesis therefore also examines these processes with reference to a range of literary works, whilst employing theoretical models advanced in the field of memory studies to interrogate further the relationship between literature and evolving popular attitudes to the First World War. Through a series of case studies this thesis demonstrates that publishers, hitherto overlooked by scholars in this context, played a crucial role in constructing the mythology of the First World War between 1918 and 2014. Their identification of texts, and promotional strategies, were key processes by which this mythology was developed across the twentieth century and beyond. By examining critical and popular responses to literature this thesis also problematizes the linear narrative by which the mythology of the war is often taken to have evolved. It demonstrates that myths of the war have been constructed and contested by various groups at different times, and that the evolving memories of veterans were not always in alignment with those of the wider public. In doing so it provides a powerful counterargument to the assumption that a mythology of the First World War has become hegemonic in recent decades.

This thesis discusses the National War Aims Committee (NWAC), a cross-party, Treasury-funded Parliamentary organisation established in mid-1917 to conduct domestic propaganda. The thesis provides the most comprehensive examination of its organisational structure, expanding upon and correcting existing historical treatments, and demonstrating that it was a more significant element of British wartime society than previously assumed. It also provides much greater discussion of the NWAC's reception by Parliament, the press and the public. The thesis provides extensive analysis of the representation of patriotism in NWAC propaganda. This exceeds existing work, considering all its printed propaganda, but also reports of NWAC events in over a hundred newspapers in thirty localities. This detailed analysis suggests that NWAC propagandists retained many familiar themes of pre-war patriotism and national identity. This observation counters assumptions that pre-war patriotism was nullified by the mass casualties suffered by patriotic volunteers. However, I argue that while basic patriotic themes remained recognisable, NWAC propaganda reconfigured them in a narrative reflective of the experience of war-weary civilians. The propaganda generally revolved around a core idea of duty, supplemented by one or more contextual elements which demonstrated its necessity. I suggest several categories of interactive and interdependent `presentational patriotisms' used by propagandists to influence civilian attitudes. Further, I demonstrate that each category is discernible more widely in pre-war settings, suggesting that, while the model narrative might vary in different situations, the general history of British patriotism might benefit from applying the evidence of my thesis to other examples. I challenge the significance of the familiar `otherness' paradigm of national identity, suggesting that the recognition of difference was only part of the patriotic narrative supplied by the NWAC. Further, my analysis is particularly concerned with the interactions between local, national and supranational sources of identity, often overlooked or under-examined by historians

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This thesis offers a sustained comparative analysis of colonial encounters during the First World War by examining the experience of troops from New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies. While the war is usually understood as a military clash of empires, the thesis argues that it also created fresh spaces for a range of encounters as diverse groups were thrown together. These encounters varied from fleeting interactions to more sustained relationships in changing contact-zones dependent on military mobilisation. While race remains the primary focus in the thesis, the analysis is also nuanced to other categories, such as class, gender, and combatant/civilian status. In the recent ‘global’ turn in First World War studies, more has been learnt about colonial participation and the impact of empire. If much of the work has focussed on particular national or ethnic groups, this thesis adopts a comparative and at times transnational approach to make lateral connections between the colonial groups and their represented experiences. The thesis investigates how the structures and hierarchies of colonialism operated once dislocated by the movements of war, disclosing the complex lived realities of colonial cultures in times of war. The thesis draws upon document and photograph collections at the Imperial War Museum, alongside other archival collections, as well as memoirs, oral testimonies, newspapers, magazines and literary works, and often reads them together in order to recover and analyse this complex history. Many of the non-white troops were non-literate and the subsequent paucity of written material necessitates this broader interdisciplinary approach. Encounters represent a central element of the represented war service of the colonial troops in the source material. The concentration on encounters in this thesis, through the perspective of cultural history, reveals how war challenged and changed identity beyond the space of the battlefield.