Imagination was an essential component in the maintenance of morale. It was a coping mechanism, which drew men away from their present, and allowed them to access memories that helped them to feel connected to home and to England - its landscapes, peoples, and places. As subject, not citizen, soldiers their perceptions of England formed around parochial and meaningful visions, rather than abstract ideas like the state. Yet, regulars had a very particular impression of ‘home’, which drew on their military service and soldierly identities. On the other hand, reservists, volunteers, and later conscripts continued to feel embedded in their home communities, albeit mainly in their minds. These specific and personal relationships with the homeland were also nurtured by regimental culture, which, at least in infantry regiments, often preserved and celebrated attachments to a particular county or counties. The distance between men and their loved ones could leave them despondent, but the letters, parcels, and postcards that they received gave them joy and were often the substance of the imaginary worlds they created and fought for. Whilst soldiers did become increasingly embittered by perceived injustices, inefficiencies, and peace talk on the Home Front, it was their more parochial (and positive) visions of home that mattered most to them. Their imaginative realms were not just a source of motivation, they were also a cocoon to which they retreated when dreaming and daydreaming in trenches or behind the lines. They aided their endurance whilst also providing the greatest justification for their continued suffering.

This chapter traces some of the lines of descent that race has followed since Darwin’s Origin of Species. Far from his work putting an end to the Species Question (whether human races constituted separate and unchanging species), race flourished not only in “social Darwinism” and eugenics, but also in various academic disciplines, law, social policy, and everyday life. The chapter discusses how race served as an organizing concept within natural history and remained such in the emerging sciences of life: in biology and sociology; in critical race theory’s uncritical use of scientific evidence that challenges racial categories; and in the way Darwin’s intervention into “the truth of race” remains central to notions of diaspora, homeland, identity, and the structural racialism of everyday life, even as his work is invoked to naturalize stereotyped racial phenotypes and to support racialized technologies, especially in robotics and applications of artificial intelligence.

This chapter explores how one particular group of people defined as disabled, Deaf people, experienced and articulated that identity. Whilst deaf people were labelled ‘foreigners in their native land’, in this chapter I argue that deaf people came to inhabit distinct cultural identities, positively identifying with what they called the ‘deaf World’, or sometimes the ‘deaf nation’. Working from the twenty-first century backwards, there is good reason to focus on deafness as a particular case study here: contemporary theorists have argued that deaf identity is so strong that it operates as a form of ‘ethnicity’. Whilst, as I discuss, there continues to be disagreement about the utility of framing deaf people as an ethnic group, I use the idea of deafness as an ethnicity as a starting point to think about deaf community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I explore what deaf belonging means for the intersection of identities based around nationhood with those constructed around disability. The Chapter therefore explores, deaf communities in Britain (through the deaf press, deaf intermarriage etc), deaf plans for a separatist deaf state or colony, and deaf internationalism.

In December 1932, in the throes of a deep recession, South Africa left the gold standard. Britain had abandoned it the previous year – and a political battle within South Africa’s government had ensured a delay that severely hurt the economy. The decision to leave had an immediate effect; instead of having the currency backed by gold, the South African pound depreciated, making South African exports more attractive to foreign buyers. It proved a huge boon to gold-mining companies. Gold prices rose rapidly and mining output expanded, increasing the demand for inputs and workers, and as a consequence government revenues increased significantly. In 1936, only three years later, the Johannesburg municipality could begin construction of the South-Western Townships, or Soweto, on the back of windfalls from the mining industry.

These mining windfalls – profits for shareholders and taxes for government – depended on one important factor: paying cheap wages.

Millions of Germans helped to transform much of North America during the 19th century, and smaller numbers did similar things across Latin America, in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe and especially Imperial Russia.As they did that, they also built and moved across networks of communication, trade, and transportation that expanded over generations. The nodal points in these extra-European networks wereoften transcultural places filled with varieties of Germans who were frequently being or becoming German plus other things.At the same time, across polycentric German-speaking Europe there were many centers, places of belonging, that often tied together people across vast regions.Many of these centers had a global reach; even when they remained modest in size and can be difficult to find on political maps, they frequently held great significance for people’s mental maps.Often discounted today, it was the notion of a German cultural community, or Kulturgemeinshaft, which recognized commonalities across the many differences that tied these disparate people and their orientations together and provided many with considerable cultural capital as they went abroad.