For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War (Cambridge University Press)

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2021, hardcover, illustrated, index, 572 pages, condition: new.

This is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereavement, gender norms, as well as at its political and military powers and its relationship with Ireland and the empire. She considers the role that monarchism played in military culture and examines royal visits to the front, as well as the monarchy's role in home front morale and in interwar war commemoration. Her findings suggest that the rise of republicanism in wartime Britain has been overestimated and that war commemoration was central to the monarchy's revered interwar status up to the abdication crisis.

The book's proposition is interesting: it argues that war plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of monarchies in the modern world. This argument is based on the reasoning that in a modern world moving towards democracy where the masses increasingly participate in political decision-making, the monarchy, an institution inherently opposed to democracy, can only survive if it clearly fulfills its function: serving as a unifying force for the people, fostering national unity and solidarity. The book cites the success of the British monarchy in integrating its institutional existence with national stability through its role as a unifying force for the people during World War I against the Central Powers. The monarch, previously seen as a historical relic within the constitutionalist regime, was able to absorb the sacredness of the state spirit and represent political unity, thus coexisting with a mass-based democratic system. In this sense, war is a condition for the survival of monarchies in the modern world. While in the past, monarchs were the instigators of war, in the modern world, this relationship is reversed; it is war that creates (and ensures the security of) the monarch.