Turning Point 1917: The British Empire at War

202 Pages·2017·5.034 MB·English

by  Douglas E Delaney, Nikolas Gardner

Turning Point 1917

Turning Point 1917
The British Empire at War
Edited by Douglas E. Delaney and Nikolas Gardner
IN MEMORY OF OUR FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE,
KEITH NEILSON
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Turning Points and Tapestries
Douglas E. Delaney and Nikolas Gardner
1 Never Over by Christmas: Meeting the Challenges of Interminable War
William Philpott
2 The Blockade in 1917
Keith Neilson
3 The Imperial Munitions Board and Merchant Shipbuilding in Canada
Chris Madsen and Michael Moir
4 A Question of Command: GHQ and the Dominions, 1917
Ian F.W. Beckett
5 The Egyptian Expeditionary Force in 1917
Jeffrey Grey
6 “The Willing Horse Is Being Worked to Death”: New Zealand’s Manpower Problems and
Policies during 1917
John Crawford
7 The Africanization of British Imperial Forces in the East African Campaign
Tim Stapleton
8 Vimy’s Consequence: The Montreal Anti-Conscription Disturbances, May to September
1917
Serge Marc Durflinger
9 The British Media and the Image of the Empire in 1917
Mark Connelly
A Few Concluding Remarks
Douglas E. Delaney and Nikolas Gardner
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would not have come to fruition without considerable assistance from numerous
individuals and organizations.
To start, a connection grant through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada (SSHRC) provided the funding to assemble a distinguished group of scholars from
Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand at the Royal Military College of
Canada (RMC) in November 2014, for what really amounted to a mini-workshop for the
volume. At RMC, we are grateful to the head of history, Jim Kenny, for his support in this
endeavour, and we would also like to thank Catherine St. Georges, Suzanne Robertson, and
Mary-Anne Smith for making a myriad of administrative arrangements and navigating the
sometimes treacherous shoals of RMC administration. Kevin Connolly and Robert Engen were
invaluable assistants, both in planning the event and in managing work parties when we got to
the execution stage.
For the volume, we first must thank our contributors for the wonderful chapters they gave
us and for their patience with us as editors. We are grateful to Katelyn Beaudette, who
formatted the manuscript and made it ready for peer review, as we are to Mike Bechthold, who
drew the maps. We also owe our thanks to the anonymous reviewers, whose insightful
comments helped improve the final product, as well as those reviewers working on behalf of
the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program, who graciously recommended that this book be
granted funding. At UBC Press, Emily Andrew was as helpful and encouraging as ever. So too
were Holly Keller, who guided the manuscript through the production phase, and Deborah
Kerr, whose copy editing was second to none.
Finally, this book is dedicated to our friend and fellow contributor Keith Neilson, who
passed away on 15 April 2015. Keith was a world-class scholar and a world-class colleague.
He could not have been kinder to us two junior scholars who followed in his footsteps. He
gave us guidance. He gave us encouragement. But, most of all, he gave us the example of his
work. We miss him dearly.
Turning Point 1917