This volume is the result of a long commitment of the online journal DEP: Deportate, esuli, profughe to the themes of women pacifists’ thought and activism in the 1900s. The volume is a collection of contributions centred around three main themes. The first part, “Living War: Women’s Experiences during the War”, brings together first-hand accounts from women’s lives as they face the horrors of war, drawn mainly from original sources such as diaries, letters, memoirs and writings. The second, “Thinking Peace: Feminist Thought and Activism”, explores the lives and thought of several key women activists who challenged inequalities and sought to create new opportunities for women, contributing to the definition of a transnational culture of peace. The final section, “International Relations: Toward Future World Peace”, examines the work of a group of women who saw the outbreak of the First World War and the emergence of an international women’s movement for peace as an opportunity to act for their personal emancipation, and, in some cases, for a different idea of politics. The volume fills a notable gap in international history studies, providing a selection of contributions from little-known European contexts such as Italy, Poland, and Austria. The presence and contribution of African-American women, which has been neglected in the history of women’s pacifism, is also explored. Particular attention is given to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and to the International Congress of Women, held in The Hague in 1915.

This book provides fresh perspectives on a key period in the history of humanitarianism. Drawing on economic, cultural, social and diplomatic perspectives, it explores the scale and meaning of humanitarianism in the era of the Great War. Foregrounding the local and global dimensions of the humanitarian responses, it interrogates the entanglement of humanitarian and political interests and uncovers the motivations and agency of aid donors, relief workers and recipients. The chapters probe the limits of humanitarian engagement in a period of unprecedented violence and suffering and evaluate its long-term impact on humanitarian action.

This book examines the connection between notions of gender, diplomacy, society and peacemaking in the period c. 1880 to the mid- to late-twentieth century. The chapters in this volume place gender history at the interface with international history and international relations. They explore a wide variety of themes and issues within the British and European context, especially notions of gender identity, the politics and culture of women’s suffrage in the early part of the twentieth century and the role gender played in the formulation and execution of British foreign policy. The book also breaks new ground by attempting to gender diplomacy. Further, it revisits the popular view that women were connected with the peace movements that grew up after the First World War because the notion of peace was associated with stereotypical female traits, such as the rejection of violence and the nurturing rather than destruction of humankind. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Diplomacy and Statecraft.

The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori is best known for the teaching method that bears her name, but historian Erica Moretti reframes Montessori's work, showing that pacifism was the foundation of her pioneering efforts in psychiatry and pedagogy.

Situating First World War poetry in a truly global context, this book reaches beyond the British soldier-poet canon. A History of World War One Poetry examines popular and literary, ephemeral and enduring poems that the cataclysm of 1914-1918 inspired. Across Europe, poets wrestled with the same problem: how to represent a global conflict, dominated by modern technology, involving millions of combatants and countless civilians. For literary scholars this has meant discovering and engaging with the work of men and women writing in other languages, on other fronts, and from different national perspectives. Poems are presented in their original languages and in English translations, some for the very first time, while a Coda reflects on the study and significance of First World War poetry in the wake of the Centenary. A History of World War One Poetry offers a new perspective on the literary and human experience of 1914-1918.

Between 1900 and 1950, many internationalist U.S. women referred to themselves as "citizens of the world." This book argues that the phrase was not simply a rhetorical flourish; it represented a demand to participate in shaping the global polity and an expression of women's obligation to work for peace and equality. The nine women profiled here invoked world citizenship as they promoted world government—a permanent machinery to end war, whether in the form of the League of Nations, the United Nations, or a full-fledged world federation. These women agreed neither on the best form for such a government nor on the best means to achieve it, and they had different definitions of peace and different levels of commitment to genuine equality. But they all saw themselves as part of a global effort to end war that required their participation in the international body politic. Excluded from full national citizenship, they saw in the world polity opportunities for engagement and equality as well as for peace. Claiming world citizenship empowered them on the world stage. It gave them a language with which to advocate for international cooperation. Citizens of the World not only provides a more complete understanding of the kind of world these women envisioned and the ways in which they claimed membership in the global community. It also draws attention to the ways in which they were excluded from international institution-building and to the critiques many of them leveled at those institutions. Women's arguments for world government and their practices of world citizenship represented an alternative reaction to the crises of the first half of the twentieth century, one predicated on cooperation and equality rather than competition and force.

The forgotten history of the liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians who envisioned free trade as the necessary prerequisite for anti-imperialism and peace Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion. Palen reveals how, for some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war. Palen shows that the anti-imperial component of free trade was a phenomenon that came to encompass the political left wing within the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires. The left-wing vision of a “pax economica” evolved to include supranational regulation to maintain a peaceful free-trading system—which paved the way for a more liberal economic order after World War II and such institutions as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Palen’s findings upend how we think about globalisation, free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace. Rediscovering the left-wing history of globalism offers timely lessons for our own era of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict.