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Leading from the Front: The ‘Service Members’ in Parliament, the Armed Forces, and British Politics during the Great War

Johnson, Matthew

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Abstract

The Great War was widely seen in Britain as a struggle for civilian and constitutional standards of government against the evils of ‘Prussian militarism’. Yet the British political class itself was by no means a purely ‘civilian’ caste. During the war 264 MPs—some 40 per cent of the membership of the House of Commons—volunteered to serve in the armed forces. These men occupied a unique and controversial position both within Parliament and in the forces. A shared experience of military service could provide a common identity, and even a basis for common action, for MPs from rival parties, and many of these men came to support an apparently ‘military’ agenda at Westminster. At the same time, fighting MPs could act as agents of parliamentary oversight and control over the military establishment. Yet the importance of these ‘Service Members’ was not only evident in the realm of civil–military relations, and this article explores the significance and consequences of attempts by Service Members to claim a special political authority as the ‘representatives’ of the armed forces in the House of Commons, to offer an important new perspective on wartime British debates about the workings of representative politics, the nature of political citizenship, and the authority of Parliament as an institution.

Citation

Johnson, M. (2015). Leading from the Front: The ‘Service Members’ in Parliament, the Armed Forces, and British Politics during the Great War. The English Historical Review, 130(544), 613-645. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev118

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 23, 2015
Online Publication Date May 23, 2015
Publication Date May 23, 2015
Deposit Date May 27, 2015
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal English Historical Review
Print ISSN 0013-8266
Electronic ISSN 1477-4534
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 130
Issue 544
Pages 613-645
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev118

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Copyright Statement
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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