Unfit For Heroes : Reconstruction and Soldier Settlement in the Empire between the Wars (Studies in Imperialism)

Rating:
Summary: Finding Land Fit for Heroes
Review: Another volume in the series 'Studies in Imperialism from Manchester University Press, this series aims to promote comparative studies across the very great breadth of British imperial history.

Kent Fedorowich in this volume describes the origins and application of schemes in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya and Southern Rhodesia in the South African and First World Wars.

From high hopes in settling battle-hardened soldiers on the land, then a fashionable idea as the virtues and healthiness of country living were contrasted with the Hell that was urban life for all too many, the reality on the land was impossible for many with an urban background woring marginal lands in an internationhal economy which in time did not want their produce.

Of course the idea of settling soldiers on frontiers had been known since Roman times.

Soldier settlement was thought to be a failure by the 1930s,having failed to boost the economies of the countries which received the former soldiers as settlers, but as war veterans made up eighty per cent of British unemployed aged between thirty and thirty-four by the late 1920s, the importance of soldier settlement should perhaps be seen in reinforcing the crimson threads of Empire which had been slackened during the Great War.

Detailing the application of settlement policies in a wide variety of countries and climates, Kent Fedorowich's work is the result of extensive archival research in Britain, Australia, Canada, and South Africa and includes a bibliography which testifies to the great task he has undertaken in detailing aspects of social and economic history of an attempt to forge new societies in many parts of the Empire.

That this attempt failed is perhaps more due to the onset of the Depression , though the ideological, political and administrative failings outlined by Fedorowich played important roles too.

Written in a lucid and lively manner, the chapter on the failure of the ANZAC legend is seminal reading for anyone trying to understand Australia in the 1920s.

This book should appeal to anyone trying to understand the organisational complexity of the British Empire at the zenith of its geographical spread, and the unravelling of earlier dreams of spreading a stout British yeoman class around the Empire.