This chapter draws our attention to the complexities of protecting refugees and their rights within urban environments. As refugee crises become increasingly urbanised, protecting refugees becomes more complex. Unlike camp settings, urban environments are spatially fragmented and subject to various financial and political changes that are linked to, yet distinct from, those at the scale of the nation state. In cities in the Global South where much of urban displacement takes place, protecting refugees can be highly varied and subject to the whims of local communities and power brokers. Here, refugees share the same kinds of socio-economic struggles as the urban poor. Therefore, privileging one over the other can cause tensions and resentments among the local communities. The authors note that in such a condition, insisting on formulaic, rights-based approaches may be counter-productive. Rather, humanitarian organisations may benefit from working stealthily with local organisations, including state institutions, to insert protections for refugees into local by-laws. This may not be the model donors envision when funding humanitarian responses, but in an increasingly urban and dynamic world, there is a need to abandon earlier methods of protection and adopt tactics that tap into the needs and interests of local communities.

Chapter five moves out of the city to the countryside. Planners in Britain had long insisted that the concepts of town and country should be keep apart, but this division was recast by the threat and experience of air war, when urban and rural areas were redefined as evacuation and reception areas, respectively. Plans for ‘New Towns’ and industrial dispersal brought civilian and military planning imperatives together, while anxieties about threats to rural landscapes connected modern war to broader concerns about industrialisation and urbanisation. Sensitive to this, architects and planners debated how wartime camouflage techniques might be used in peacetime to limit the impact of industrial dispersal on rural scenes. The severe economic difficulties of post-war Britain, and the uncertainty over the possibility of any meaningful passive defence from nuclear weapons, meant that ambitious Cold War dispersal policies largely failed to take root. The chapter finishes with a case study of debates about the location of electricity stations which demonstrates the limits of these planning visions.

By exploring Mary Bridges Adams's politics and politicisation, this chapter shows the workings of a political life at local level in the context of war and peace. Mary's activism is quite lost to historical view in the popular histories, the 'myths' that Labour Party activists have internalised about their party's past. She represents the common, unnamed socialist woman who was anxious to identify herself with the cause of the working class. She always stressed the influence of William Morris, and she had a vision that socialism would end the poverty and suffering that working people faced, especially working-class children. During her Woolwich activism, there are shades of the ethical reformer who believed that art should be a central concern of education for all and wanted to change the workers' outlook to ensure they were better prepared for Utopia.

This chapter examines the Jewish community in Edwardian Leeds, by which time it was not just an immigrant community. The Aliens Act limited further mass migration and so the community grew naturally. It is shown how local institutions developed, such as synagogues and friendly societies. The chapter takes issue with the widespread belief, which underlay the 1917 anti-Semitic riots, that Jews were not contributing to the war effort. Numbers are provided of those Jews who served and died in the First World War. The importance of war memorials is stressed.

This chapter develops a new perspective on the perennial question of how far Victor Emmanuel's imperial throne lay behind the Duce's authoritarian power. Background on the king's appointment of Mussolini is essential to both grasping the ambiguities of the political relationship and considering the significance of royal pageantry within a fascist regime. Reconstruction of the tours can then focus on the way they were represented to the Italian public. Few historians would disagree with Alessandro Pes's claim that the regime's propaganda represented 'Africa Italiana' as a fascist achievement. Indeed, all royal tours of Italian foreign possessions took place within the fascist period. The first, to Tripolitania, took place in 1928. This was followed by journeys to Eritrea in 1932, Cirenaica in 1933, Somalia in 1934, and finally, as emperor, to Libya again in 1938.

This section highlights the connections between the development of airpower and the work of planners and architects in mid-twentieth century Britain. Both military thinkers and town planners were drawing images of the future and making projections about the shape of the world to come, and these visions transformed contemporary perceptions of cities, as the danger of bombing was drawn ever closer to reality and civilian urban spaces were militarised. Airpower created a permanent threat, and the decision to target cities meant that the boundaries between peacetime and wartime became increasingly blurred. The key questions addressed in this book and the range of source materials used stress the importance of a study in this field that is focused on Britain.

This chapter examines the assumption from the perspective of both Dutch and Indonesian royal courts. It argues that Queen Wilhelmina presided over her country's colonial possessions in absentia, without ever gracing the East Indies, West Indies or Suriname with a personal tour for the duration of her half-century reign, such an examination is long overdue. Indeed, the only direct encounters between the Dutch monarch and Indonesian royals happened in the Netherlands, at her court. The chapter shows how such meetings were represented in Dutch print media and how they were privately assessed by the Dutch court. It also shows how Indonesian royals negotiated their own status as aristocrats during these encounters, by conforming in person but asserting some agency in the gifts they presented to the queen and her household. The opportunities and costs of encounters between Dutch and Indonesian royals were complex and required careful negotiation for both sides.

This chapter draws our attention to the politics of hosting refugees among Global South countries in an era of growing security concerns and diminishing power by the UN to protect the rights of refugees The author alerts us to the unevenness of the global humanitarian system whereby those countries who are often least equipped to host large numbers of refugees find themselves doing so over long periods of time. While countries in the Global South are tasked with hosting large numbers of refugees, their security concerns tend to be overlooked. They thus undertake problematic practices against displaced populations. The chapter focuses on how Bangladesh has hosted the Rohingya over the last several decades as Myanmar has engaged in repeated ethnic cleansing practices against them. The author looks at how in countries like Bangladesh there are attempts at trying to limit the numbers of refugees or repatriate them or resettle them in geographical problematic areas. The chapter shows us how, as a result of the diminishing power of the UN, a change in the geopolitical landscape of the world and the emphasis on security concerns, the rights of refugees continue to be eroded.

This chapter considers the dissonance between the construction of her son's educational trajectory and the way in which Mary Bridges Adams approached questions of class as a campaigner for state schools. In the winter of 1901/2 Mary's convictions, allied to growing concern about retrogressive moves in educational terms, prompted her to set up the National Labour Education League. The 'restoration of the educational endowments which have been stolen from the poor' was crucial to the realisation of the education programme of the trade union movement and Mary was tireless in her campaigning on the issue. The issue quickly became a sticking point between Mary and her supporters, and Albert Mansbridge, founder of the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) in 1903. John Richardson's utopian description of life under socialism includes a blueprint for a State Education Act setting out proposals for co-educational schools organised in age-defined stages.