For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization across the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. As communities organized to raise recruits or donate funds, their efforts strengthened communal bonds, but they also reinforced class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier’s wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for local soldiers or for Welsh soldiers in the British Army? Should Māori volunteers enlist with their home regiment or with a separate battalion? Voluntary efforts reflected how community members understood their relationship to one another, to their dominion, and to the Empire. Steve Marti examines the motives and actions of those involved in the voluntary war effort, applying the framework of settler colonialism to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.

Steve Marti is a historian based in Kingston, Ontario. He is a co-editor of The Great War: From Memory to History and Fighting with the Empire: Canada, Britain, and Global Conflict, 1867–1947.

Marti’s research is impressive and suggestive, and the comparative approach will add substantially to further efforts to understand the Great War in the British Dominions. --- Marti weaves together multiple strands of historiography to present fresh insights into the wartime societies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada...[his] level of detail and meticulously supported arguments offer little room for critique. --- Steve Marti’s lively and informative monograph For Home and Empire: Voluntary Mobilization in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the First World War will be a worthwhile addition to the reading list of anyone interested in understanding the impact of the Great War on the British Empire.