In the struggle to sustain the nation’s economy and society accompanying World War One, the concept of ‘applied science’ was widely deployed and further enriched. It gained new traction through wartime and post-war administrative developments and the debates over research amongst the military services, civilian agencies, and private industry. Generic issues of the time were highlighted by the 1917 Sothern Holland enquiry into the organisation of naval research. Subsequently, new establishments, such as the DSIR and the Committee of Civil Research, shaped applied science. The chapter shows the interpretation of applied science by individual institutions and the press by exploring the details of specific research projects in the military, the radio industry and, above all, coal-oil manufacture. Thus it treats research on converting coal to oil at ICI, the Low Temperature Carbonisation Company, and Powell Duffryn. Through their thinking over funding priorities, new bodies often formulated and promoted their own conceptions of applied science. They both responded to public opinion and helped shape widely shared understanding.

This chapter examines the market for poetry during the First World War, discussing the various outlets for verse and the factors that drove its publication and consumption. While previous studies of wartime publishing tend to focus on specific national contexts, this chapter surveys the international dimensions of the poetic marketplace, with a particular focus on the publishing of poetry in Britain, France, Germany and the USA. Drawing on a range of primary sources – including contemporary periodicals and publishing records – it reveals why poems were published in a range of books, magazines, and newspapers. In doing so, it demonstrates that the profusion of wartime poetry was not only a literary phenomenon, but also one that was shaped by commercial and political forces.

Chapter 4 moves westward, to the French settlement in the Gulf of Tadjoura, recounting the career of the French merchant Henry de Monfreid, which spanned the early decades of the twentieth century. Henry de Monfreid is most widely recognised for his writing. He told the stories of some of the southern Red Sea’s most memorable and archetypal characters: the old men who manufactured pearls on remote uninhabited islands, where the poor and wretched fished sea snails, where blind Somali captains navigated treacherous reefs and rocky shores, and where pirates preyed on the unwitting. But as we see in this chapter, beneath the surface de Monfreid was a protagonist of the same destabilising geopolitical forces unleashed by colonial conquest we saw at work in earlier chapters. De Monfreid sought to further his own and France’s interests in the region by perpetrating violence at sea and adding parts of the Arabian Peninsula to the French empire. He helped transform international politics and diplomacy in the region into an anarchic scramble for influence and power. His example shows the extent to which the culture of international relations was transformed, with private individuals vying for influence and recognition in the colonial system of sovereignty.

In Chapter 3, the narrative moves eastwards, to the south-western Arabian Peninsula, as well as forwards in time, to the early twentieth century. In the midst of escalating imperial competition for control of the southern Red Sea coastline, the Ottomans and various Europeans vied for military clients along the coast. Through the careers of two militia leaders, Shaykh Nasr Ambari and his lieutenant and successor Ahmad Fatini, we see colonial chaos spurred the creation of entirely new socio-political groupings. Ambari and Fatini’s men – the Zaraniq – emerged as a band of mercenaries and sea raiders from the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula in the late nineteenth century. At the height of their power in the 1910s, they numbered some 10,000 men and their families. The Zaraniq began perpetrating acts of violence against shipping to enhance their value as proxies. In the process they brought local shipping to a standstill. But the strategic, realpolitik alliances that underpinned their rise were ephemeral; after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the group dissipated and by the late 1920s, their leadership was dislodged. Colonial chaos proved highly disruptive to the region’s stability.

This chapter analyses the survival of aristocratic elite families in European polities during the nineteenth century. I show that aristocracy and monarchy survived and even prospered by adapting to modern politics until the beginning of World War One. Certainly strong liberal, nationalist and socialist forces challenge hereditary power but they were only successful in Britain and France. The Central European, Ottoman and Russian monarchies and aristocracies were ousted only because of their defeat in World War One. The capacity of monarchies and aristocracies to survive even in the century of modernization means that the idea that kinship and political order are incompatible is weakened further. It is possible to have modern states ruled by elite families and legitimated by hereditary rule. However, it is not possible to build democracies on such foundations.

In Northern Ireland, the parliamentary system of divorce, replete with the shortcomings of Westminster’s practice, was introduced as a stopgap measure in 1925. Inherent conservatism and the long-lived reluctance to debate an issue with the potential to deepen the religious divide meant that this system survived in Northern Ireland until 1939. This chapter profiles those who divorced in the Northern Ireland parliament in terms of gender, class, region and religion. It also highlights the continued significance of the Westropp precedent which, with Westminster’s passage of the 1923 Matrimonial Causes Act equalising the grounds for divorce in court, allowed divorce bills in the Northern Ireland parliament to be brought by women solely on the previously male preserve of spousal adultery. This also allowed men to bring bills on the grounds of aggravated adultery such as adultery and desertion. Attitudes regarding the moral issues encircling divorce are also explored as a backdrop to the slow process of moving Northern Irish divorce from parliament to court.