The religiosity of British soldiers naturally reflected patterns in civilian society but had distinctive features. The Army had long been a target of missionary effort by civilian religious agencies, and this work continued to be felt, especially in the distribution of Scripture. While the religious profile of the Army mirrored the decline of the mainstream churches and the weakening Christendom culture of the Army, this was qualified by several significant factors. If only for instrumental reasons, officers were still expected to show a modicum of religious leadership. Recruitment also mattered. By the 2000s, the Army drew disproportionate numbers of recruits from Northern Ireland’s Protestant community and from culturally conservative regions of mainland Britain. The vitality of global Christianity was also injected by ‘Foreign and Commonwealth’ recruits. Active service also served as a spur to religiosity, with prolonged operations in Afghanistan revealing that there were still relatively few ‘atheists in foxholes’. Furthermore, religion still framed potent idioms of mourning and Remembrance, especially in the poignant repatriation and vigil services arising from the ‘War on Terror’.

The Conclusion chapter summarises the reasons why today it is well worth engaging with Beauvoir’s philosophy. It is suggested that different writings will appeal to people in different age ranges and with different interests. Chimisso argues that Beauvoir’s ideas can significantly contribute to the reflection on particular current issues, like the apparent renewed trust in strong individuals, the promotion of role models, a surge in xenophobia and racism in many parts of the world that leads to the dehumanisation of ‘the Other’, and the weakening of a sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility.

This chapter opens the doors and allows readers to enter French courtrooms. It examines the architecture and dynamics of French terror courtrooms, focusing on the spatial layout and the positioning of actors within the courtroom setting. By analyzing the physical structure, we reflect how space and reinforces the roles of participants, from judges and prosecutors to defendants and victims. In addition, the chapter outlines the methodology developed during our research, our immersive approach within the courthouse. This immersion includes participatory observation beyond the courtroom itself to include the cafeteria, the courts’ corridors, security lines and the courtyard. These seemingly mundane settings reveal significant insights into the routines, relationships, and informal exchanges that frame the broader judicial process. By bridging architectural analysis and ethnographic observation, this chapter provides a presentation of the French terror trial setting as both a physical space and a site of social interaction.

This chapter analyzes the colonial dimensions of, and contributions to, the two world wars. Those conflicts present clear parallels in terms of troop recruitment strategies, forms of discrimination, and the logics of so-called martial races, among others. However, they also present certain ruptures, for instance those regarding the nature of nationalist claims or the extent of combat in colonial theaters of war. Considering multiple empires in tandem, including non-European ones, this chapter reflects a trend towards globalizing the two world wars, be it by focusing on the liberation of metropoles by their colonies, on the trench experiences of non-European combatants, or on the claims these same African and Asian troops formulated in the wake of the two conflicts.

This chapter looks at Maria Edgeworth’s writings on Edmund Burke from 1805 to 1814, culminating in her novel Patronage published in that year. It looks at the reputation of Burke and the charges against his style by the Irish writer George Ensor as a way of thinking about how Burke’s mixed style of rhetoric may have influenced Edgeworth’s fictional practice. The relationship between rhetoric and realism is considered, as well as reasons for Edgeworth’s fall from literary favour in later years.

This chapter explores the cultural, social, and emotional significance of food in wartime. It does so through a transnational lens, exploring Australian nurses’ encounters with food as they served in diverse theatres of war and negotiated a dazzling array of cross-cultural encounters. The meanings of food proved varied and complex. Truly global in their reach, foodways linked battlefield to home front. Food could encode racial difference and confirm imperial hierarchies, but it also expressed unexpected intimacies and provided a bridge from one culture to another. It proved a medium of emotional exchange that at once expressed and transcended cultural difference.

The notion that human beings are products of history, conditioned by particular and changing political, social, economic, material, and technological circumstances, is itself historicizable as an outlook that came to prominence in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. A historical and, indeed, historicizing self-consciousness informed new logics of division between old and new, premodern and modern, in the reorganization of knowledge as in the reconstitution of political life, in relation to secularizing shifts in the grounds of authority. Yet such historical self-consciousness was not uniform but multiform. From apocalyptic millenarianism to cyclical or stadial conceptions of historical change to linear models of progress to geologically informed notions of “deep time,” thinkers and writers of the Romantic period showed in sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping ways a common preoccupation with how human beings are situated in history and time.

The Introduction sets the scene by outlining the lives of the book’s main protagonists, young women in Calabar, and the types of uncertainty that shape their lives. The discussion builds up an understanding of the complex and opaque social terrain that these young women must deftly navigate as they work towards a future marked by marriage. In urban Nigeria, the belief in the unseen compounds other political, economic, and physical uncertainties that shape everyday life, contributing to an understanding that nothing is ever quite as it seems. The discussion outlines how young women, far from only falling victim to the irregularities of life in Calabar, turn uncertainty into a resource that they can use to manage their reputations and realise their much hoped-for futures. As well as establishing how the book contributes to anthropological and Africanist literature on uncertainty, the Introduction also opens the debate on the time of youth in Africa by focusing on feminine livelihoods and respectability. The Introduction also provides context of fieldwork and research methodology and provides a chapter outline of the rest of the book.

What were the global dimensions of hunger during the First World War and its aftermath? By reviewing the causes, worldwide scale, and national specificities of wartime starvation, the development of transnational food and humanitarian networks can be explored. These linked hungry Europe to not only the United States but also to Japan, Australia, and various Scandinavian, South American, Middle Eastern, and African nations. The global experience of hunger helped to create and expand empathy for civilians and displaced populations abroad, above all for children as the iconic symbols of war victimhood. The saga of widespread hunger initiated by the First World War illustrates how humanitarian crises generated new approaches as well as emotional linkages between hungry populations and aid workers, transforming global public opinion.

Kenya’s labour movement was deeply embroiled in the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule and the colonial campaign against the insurgency between 1952 and 1956. Militant labour leaders were integral to the growth of the rebellion in Nairobi, but the colonial government sought to use the opportunity presented by the State of Emergency declared in October 1952 to bring the entire labour movement to heel. This created an opportunity for a young Tom Mboya, who became leader of the Kenya Federation of Registered Trade Unions, later renamed as the Kenya Federation of Labour. Mboya used the organisations links to the British Trades Union Congress and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to campaign for the release of wrongly arrested moderate trade unionists, and to develop further opportunities for trade union training, including a scholarship for him to study in Oxford and his attendance at an ICFTU seminar in India. However, Mboya became frustrated with the limited appetite within the ICFTU or TUC to support the adoption by the KFL of an avowed anti-colonial stance, which in turn pushed him towards the United States.

The First World War confirmed combat operations as the ultimate test and practical justification for Army chaplaincy, inspiring G. A. Studdert Kennedy’s famous admonition to ‘Live with the men, go where they go … share all their risks, and more, if you can do any good.’ This, however, was constrained by circumstance. Chaplaincy’s standard expression was garrison or station ministry, increasingly among a sizeable population of soldiers’ families. This was not a milieu in which the wisdom of Studdert Kennedy (aka ‘Woodbine Willie’) could be easily followed, and chaplains generally became familiar with their soldiers through exercises (the longer the better) or on operations. However, the latter varied enormously. In Cyprus, chaplains were targets for EOKA; in Northern Ireland, they went largely unmolested. Both were a far cry from battlefield ministry in the Falklands, the Gulf War or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While the War on Terror, especially in Afghanistan, highlighted the controversial question of chaplains bearing arms, its nature and longevity enhanced the role and stature of the chaplain, enabling the wisdom of Studdert Kennedy to be applied to striking effect.