Military welfare history: what is it and why should it be considered?

Abstract

Military welfare is a major yet abstract sub-field of warfare studies and warfare history, which interrogates the multitude of welfare, care, medical provisions and social policies that have existed at different times and within different social and political spaces relative to and for the benefit of armed forces personnel and their families or dependents. As a scholarly project military welfare history is both well developed and still evolving. It comprises a substantive community of scholars who have produced a robust body of literature. Yet, despite all of the scholarship that has existed since the 1960s, and more especially since the 1990s, military welfare history remains estranged from mainstream warfare history. Thus, it is the purpose of this special edition to encourage transformation in three ways: firstly, by highlighting or reacquainting a cross-section of scholars with the existence of this diverse but exclusive sub-field of warfare and welfare history that has existed as long as warfare itself; secondly, by highlighting the diversity of recent and current scholarship in this sub-field, and thirdly, by highlighting the existence of an academic network that has the explicit purpose of bringing together scholars in this diverse sub-field.

Keywords:

• Military
• welfare
• care
• pedagogy
• veterans
• empire

Acknowledgments

This article was only made possible thanks to the assiduous effort of Amy Carney from the outset. Together both editors of this special edition also thank, firstly, each of the contributors for giving their time and effort to producing the final articles found in this issue, and secondly, all of the peer reviewers who gave their time and constructive criticism to help bring this special edition to fruition. Lastly, we thank the editor and team of War & Society for their support from the outset.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hew F. A. Strachan, ‘Military History,’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 506. Examples of ‘military history’ scholarship includes but is not limited to, David M. Glantz, Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War; 1941–1943 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000); Hew Strachan, The First World War: A New History (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

2 For discussion of this term: Joanna Bourke, ‘New Military History,’ in Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History, ed. by Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 258.

3 Society for the History of War website: <https://www.show.org.uk/about> [accessed 15 May 2023]. Examples of ‘history of war’ scholarship include but are not limited to: Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London, 1980); Desmond Morton, Fight or Pay: Soldiers’ Families in the Great War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004); Kara Dixon Vuic, The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

4 John Southard, ‘Beyond “A Company, B Company” History: A Military History State of the Field,’ American Historian (August 2014), 20–3.

5 Davis R. B. Ross, Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Bourke, 258–80.

6 Examples include Pat Thane, The Origin of British Social Policy (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 17–8; Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 31–43; Daniel Béland, What Is Social Policy? Understanding the Welfare State (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 7, 41, 70–1.

7 A prime historical instance of this is Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, and Peter Starke, eds, Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

8 Some clear examples of this can be found in the British First World War historiography, relative to state allowances for families and widows’ pensions: Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Janis Lomas, ‘“Delicate Duties”: Issues of Class and Respectability in Government Policy Towards the Wives and Widows of British Soldiers in the Era of the Great War,’ Women's History Review 9, no. 1 (2000), 123–47; Eliza Riedi, ‘British Widows of the South African War and the Origins of War Widows’ Pensions,’ Twentieth Century British History 29, no. 2 (2018), 169–98.

9 Mike Hally, ‘Rights Not Charity: The Radical Roots of the British Legion’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2022); Mike Hally, ‘The Deep Roots of The British Legion: The Emergence of First World War British Veterans’ Organisations,’ in Veterans of the First World War: Ex-Servicemen and Ex-Servicewomen in Post-War Britain and Ireland, ed. by David Swift and Oliver Wilkinson (London: Routledge, 2019), 17–33.

10 These questions have been addressed in various ways by Julie M. Powell, ‘About‐Face: Gender, Disfigurement and the Politics of French Reconstruction, 1918–24,’ Gender & History 28, no. 3, (2016), 604–22; Eri Nakamura, ‘Psychiatrists as Gatekeepers of War Expenditure: Diagnosis and Distribution of Military Pensions in Japan during the Asia-Pacific War,’ East Asian Science, Technology and Society 13, no. 1 (2019), 57–75; Stephanie Wright, ‘Of Maiming and Privilege: Rethinking War Disability Through the Case of Francoist Spain, 1936–1989,’ Past & Present 255, no. 1 (May 2022), 317–50.

11 Jennine Hurl-Eamon and Lynn McKay, eds, Women, Families, and the British Army, 1700–1880, six volumes (London: Routledge, 2020); Eliza Riedi, ‘Assisting Mrs Tommy Atkins: Gender, Class, Philanthropy, and the Domestic Impact of the South African War, 1899–1902,’ Historical Journal 60, no. 3 (2017), 745–69; Paul Huddie, ‘SSFA, Ex-Servicemen and Their Families 1919–21,’ in Veterans of the First World War, 34–47; Amy Carney, Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

12 Adam Luptak and John Paul Newman, ‘Victory, Defeat, Gender, and Disability: Blind War Veterans in Interwar Czechoslovakia,’ Journal of Social History 53, no. 3 (Spring 2020), 604–19.

13 Robert Dale, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Alexandre Sumpf, The Broken Years: Russia’s Disabled War Veterans, 1904–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Natalia Danilova, ‘The Development of an Exclusive Veterans’ Policy: The Case of Russia,’ Armed Forces and Society 36, no. 5 (October 2010), 890–916.

14 For example, on the issues of war brides of American soldiers as well as the legitimate and illegitimate children of US soldiers: Philip E. Wolgin and Irene Bloemraad, ‘“Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers”: Military Spouses, Family Re-Unification, and Postwar Immigration Reform,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 1 (Summer 2010), 27–60; Angela Wanhalla and Erica Buxton, ‘Pacific Brides: US Forces and Interracial Marriage During the Pacific War,’ Journal of New Zealand Studies, 14 (January 2013), 138–51; Kelly Condit-Shrestha, ‘American Fathers, German Mothers, and “Brown Babies”: The Intersection of Race, Empire, and Kinship in U.S. Transnational Adoption,’ Zeitgeschichte 48, no. 1 (2021), 12–33; William Skiles, ‘Gisela Kriebel: A History of a German War Bride,’ Journal of Genealogy and Family History 5, no. 1 (2021), 29–40.

15 Dónal Hassett, The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2022).

16 Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 278–79, n. 2.

17 Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); A. Ruthenberg, ‘The Mark of a Man: Changing Perceptions of Masculinity and Military Service, 1945–1973,’ Maryland Historian 30–31 (Summer 2008), 12–26; Effie Karageorgos, ‘The Bushman at War: Gendered Medical Responses to Combat Breakdown in South Africa, 1899–1902,’ Journal of Australian Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2020), 1–15.

18 All details about the Military Welfare History Network can be found on its website: <https://militarywelfarehistory.wordpress.com/> [accessed 15 May 2023].

19 Jane Brooks and Christine E Hallett, eds, One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Marjorie Gehrhardt, The Men with Broken Faces: Gueules Cassées of the First World War (Bristol: Peter Lang, 2015); David Appleby and Andrew Hopper (eds), Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). See also Michael. Robinson, Shell-Shocked British Army Veterans in Ireland, 1918–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) and David Edgerton, ‘War and the Development of the British Welfare State,’ in Battle-Scarred, 200–29.

20 See footnote 16.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Huddie

Paul Huddie is an historical researcher interested in war and society, principally within the British Empire in the long nineteenth century. He has particular specialisms around the history of the British Army wife and the evolution of the triangular relationship between her, Victorian and Edwardian British military charities, and the British State. He is a graduate of University College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast and the author of The Crimean War and Irish Society (2015). He has been an Executive Committee member of the Irish Association of Professional Historians since 2015 and is the founder and coordinator of the Military Welfare History Network (est. 2019).

Amy Carney

Amy Carney is an Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College. She teaches courses in modern European history, including classes on both world wars, fascism and National Socialism, and the Holocaust. Her research, including her book Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS, (University of Toronto Press, 2018) focuses on family history in the Third Reich.