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Battles of Conscience: British Pacifists and the Second World War by Tobias Kelly (Hardback)
£22.00
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781784743949
Published:
05 May 2022
Format:
Hardback
Dimensions:
352 pages - 240mm x 156mm x 30mmmm
Weight:
0.350kgs
Author:
A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments. These are people who have gone on to leave an important but often hidden trace in the moral and cultural life of Britain and beyond.
Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against the Nazi threat. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war with five of these individuals: Roy Ridgway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way -- people both determined and torn -- and travel from Finland to Syria, India to rural England, Edinburgh to Trinidad.
Figures from Winston Churchill to the Archbishop of Canterbury supported their stance, at least in principle, even suggesting that the uniquely British right to conscientious objection was one of the freedoms the nation was fighting for. And their rich cultural and moral legacy -- of humanitarianism and human rights, from Amnesty International and Oxfam to the US civil rights movement -- can still be felt all around us.
The personal and political struggles carefully and vividly collected in this book tell us a great deal about personal and collective freedom, conviction and faith, war and peace, and pose questions just as relevant today: Does conscience make us free? Where does it take us? And what are the costs of going there?
About the Author: Tobias Kelly is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses on the cultural history of war and violence. He has a PhD from the London School of Economics and has held visiting positions at New York University and the University of Oxford. He was recently the recipient of a European Research Council award given to 'ground-breaking' researchers. He lives in in Edinburgh with his family.
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