John H. Morrow Jr. The Great War: An Imperial HistoryThe Great War: An Imperial History by John H.  MorrowReview by: Kathryn M. HunterJournal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3 (July 2006), pp. 693-694Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/507245 .

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BOOK REVIEWS � 693

of witnesses to justify its decision, a player was allowed no legal representation. It is nosurprise that the accusation of “palpable inefficiency” marked the end of several players’careers. What is surprising is the evidence presented, which shows that those few playerswho did choose to appeal against the termination of their contracts to the League’s Man-agement Committee were often successful: over the period 1912–32, sixteen players hadtheir appeals sustained, while only thirteen had their appeals dismissed. That said, as Taylornotes, “it is unclear what future prospects, if any, a player had in League football in thosecircumstances” (97). Other players were more fortunate. There is a revealing discussion ofthe opportunities that players had to make money beyond the contractual terms agreedwith their club. The discussion on additional income that star players like Dixie Dean, BillyMeredith, and Jimmy Guthrie could earn either through “under-the-counter” payments orthe advertisement and endorsement of goods is all the more intriguing in the context ofthe current interest of the UK tax authorities in both the payment schemes employed byclubs like Arsenal to mitigate players’ tax bills and the use of companies to manage players’image rights and avoid taxation.

The book is extremely well researched, making extensive use of archival materials, and iswell written. It will be of interest and of use to academics studying sport from historical,social, and economic perspectives. But more than that, The Leaguers will be greatly infor-mative to football supporters who seek to understand the foundations upon which organizedfootball is played in England today.

Stephen Morrow, University of Stirling

JOHN H. MORROW Jr. The Great War: An Imperial History. London and New York:Routledge, 2004. Pp. 323. $22.95 (cloth).

The aims of John H. Morrow’s history of the First World War are grand: to mesh themilitary history of the war with the political, social, economic, and cultural (xi); to “broadenthe knowledge of all readers”; and to provide them with “a new perspective on the war”(xiii). The book’s rationale is essentially a dissatisfaction with other histories. They are tooEurocentric, neglecting what he calls the “imperial” element of the war; they are thematicallyor topically organized, compartmentalizing the war to the extent that the interrelatednessof total war is lost. What results is a book that has two broad-brush chapters, one on theorigins of war and the other on the aftermath, and one chapter for each year of the war.These “war years” chapters each contain sections on the major theaters—Western Front;Eastern Front; Southwestern Front; “Ottoman Fronts,” including the Middle East, Africa,and the war at sea; and the Homefronts (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary,Russia, Japan, and the United States)—yes, all this in 323 pages!

Morrow’s history is a rollicking ride through the war, yet by incorporating significantmaterial on Africa and Africans, he expands the idea of the war beyond France and Europe.Indian troops too are reasonably prominent. This raises the question of what Morrowmeant by an “imperial” history of the war. The notion of an “imperial history” calls fordiscussion of some length about what “imperialism” means in this context and how thisapproach might shed further light on a fairly well-trodden history. It is not possible towave “imperial” in the faces of historians, especially cultural historians, and not be rig-orously questioned about its use. A cynic might conclude from Morrow’s book that inthis context, “imperial” has simply been a matter of “add Africa/African and stir.” Thereare many questions of imperial relationships, the quest for suffrage, “national identity,”independence, and self-determination, as well as of the anxious postwar metropolis thatwere not addressed here. Morrow relies heavily on the excellent studies of Senegalese

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694 � BOOK REVIEWS

troops by Joe Lunn, and of Indian soldiers by David Omissi, and yet given the implicitintention of the book to highlight the colonial troops, a surprising omission is substantialreference to the British West Indies Regiment and the very useful studies of this regimentby Glenford Howe (which do not even appear in the bibliography). It was also curiousto me, perhaps idiosyncratically, that while African-American troops were the focus of alarge part of the sections on the United States, Native American troops were not men-tioned at all, and yet one-third of all Native American men (not merely those who wereeligible) enlisted.

Given the scope of the book and the necessity of covering the key military events,Morrow pays admirable attention to some of the nuances of class and race. He is careful,for example, to allow for some resentment of women on the part of upper-middle-classBritish soldiers, as reflected so memorably in the words of the war poets, but to also notethat for the “mass of peasant soldiers” (174; and, as is demonstrated so ably in JoannaBourke’s work, for middle- and working-class soldiers) domesticity and womenfolk becamethe objects of yearning and the source of emotional sustenance. Glibness, however, is ahazard of this kind of text. The condensation of so much material necessitates skirtingover complex and contested material. It inevitably leads to simplification and the per-petuation of myths. The oft-repeated idea that men from rural backgrounds made “nat-urally” better soldiers is repeated here (120–21) even though this has been debunked bya range of historians from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (whose national war mythsrested on this idea), and although there is solid evidence that men from rural backgroundswere very often struck down with illness upon arriving in Europe because they had grownup in relatively isolated conditions. Glib generalizations and myths were particularly no-ticeable (perhaps owing to my familiarity with this area) in Morrow’s treatment of womenand gender more generally. The myth that all men were at the front and women, apartfrom some hardy nurses, were on the home front kept the line between soldiers andcivilians firmly drawn in this book. All men were not soldiers, and indeed, the majorityof men were not soldiers; the “home front” is not a given, especially in the French contextwhere the word does not exist, but rather it is l’arriere (the rear); and one only has toperuse the rates of venereal disease among soldiers to see that the line between soldiersand civilians was so often crossed as to perhaps erase it.

Morrow has deftly summarized a large number of major works on the war. In doing so,readers, particularly students, can glimpse the wide variety of scholarship on aspects of thewar. There is, for example, an aside about the composition of crowds who celebrated theoutbreak of war and said farewell to the first contingents (38–39) and a very brief mentionof the advances in medicine that were one of the ironically beneficial side-effects of the war(71–72). (Shell shock and war neurosis, curiously, rate only a few lines and no entry in theindex.) To add to this function of the book, however, the bibliography could have beenmore extensive, going well beyond other general histories of the war.

My broad dissatisfaction when reading this book was that the purpose of it seems confused.I doubt that scholars of the war will find anything new here and, indeed, will be irritatedby the simplifications and many errors. These will be particularly annoying to military his-torians, I fear, who may find more than I did. So, while the book is feted by the publishersas a “landmark new history,” I do not think that it is. If, on the other hand, the purposeof this book is that of an undergraduate text that serves to free students’ images of the warfrom the grip of Western Front trenches, then, errors aside, it succeeds quite well. Studentsusing this text will certainly emerge with a sense of World War I as a multinational, mul-ticontinental conflict involving troops from a vast array of linguistic, national, and ethnicbackgrounds.

Kathryn M. Hunter, Victoria University of Wellington

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