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Chapter 3 examines Music While You Work (MWYW), created by the BBC in response to the production drives spurred by the retreat at Dunkirk in June 1940. The half-hour program united ideologies of music as a force for cultural uplift with research in industrial efficiency in service of the war effort. As the program developed, it reflected concerns with the new female workforce, for the apathetic and unruly bodies of conscripted women workers threatened to slow production, detract from the nation's war effort, and even undermine “the health of all democracy.” Prized for its tonic qualities, MWYW was a powerful tool for factory discipline. Producers harnessed popular and light music, not according to entertainment or artistic values but for their effect on production, audibility, and impact on worker morale. Nevertheless, the program also evoked practices of dancing and background listening, which had become mass leisure activities during the preceding decades.

When the Dutch Republic and Habsburg Spain went to war again in 1621, the Dutch were confronted by a well-run campaign against its trade and fisheries mainly operating out of Dunkirk. This chapter studies how the Dutch Republic responded to this threat. It argues that consistent efforts were made to outsource protection of trade and fisheries to those groups which profited from it. Rather than centralising decision-making and monopolise violence at sea, the Dutch state devolved responsibility to lower levels of government, corporations and chartered companies, and private firms. These ships were mainly uses for convoy duty. This chapter argues that this devolution was instrumental in protecting Dutch commerce and provided ships to the fleet in crises such as the Battle of the Downs as well. But from the middle of the seventeenth century this system would deteriorate and more tasks would be taken up by the admiralties themselves.

The introduction provides an overview of the British Second World War propaganda effort from the outbreak of war in September 1939 to the fall of France in June 1940, set alongside the military events. It introduces the concept of using propaganda as a means to continue the war after Dunkirk and some of the issues facing the organisation for propaganda set up by the British government to do so. It discusses the importance and nature of France as a target for British propaganda, and highlights, broadly, what British propaganda had to achieve. The introduction closes with a brief synopsis of the main chapters.

Finding and attacking submarines with aircraft posed a difficult task in 1917–1918, and the station at Dunkirk operated under the most extreme conditions. It was the only American base to endure continuous bombardment from land, sea, and air. Dunkirk also battled aggressive enemy air forces in significant numbers. The congested harbor offered treacherous conditions, while the base's limited size and extreme range of tide hampered launch and recovery of aircraft. The choice of machines also worked against completion of its mission. Obsolescent Donnet-Denhaut flying boats were severely underpowered as well as mechanically unreliable. Unfortunately, space restrictions precluded replacement with more capable flying boats.

Chapter 1 offers a theoretical account of how aerial violence solicits a temporality of dread, as a present upended by the fear of past trauma and the expectation of future trauma. It argues that Second World War writing is defined by a desire to manage anxieties about death, and, drawing from theories of autobiography, it examines why there was an outpouring of autobiographical narratives at this historical juncture. Comparing Henry Green’s self-portrait Pack My Bag (1940) to Arthur Gwynn-Browne’s Dunkirk memoir F. S. P. (1942), the chapter identifies a ‘wartime style’ that renders, while trying to assuage, the experience of dread experienced on both home front and war front. This focus on life-writing and dread is theorized through Sigmund Freud’s diagnosis of anxiety’s simultaneously injurious and inoculating effects.

This chapter focuses on the living conditions in German camps where British prisoners of war (POWs) were held captive during World War II, the way the POWs were treated by the Germans, and the measures taken by the British government to ensure their general welfare. In the aftermath of Dunkirk, Britain devoted all its energy on the struggle for survival at home and paid little attention to the fate of British troops captured by Nazi Germany. The chapter examines the health conditions of British POWs in German prison camps and the medical attention given to them, along with food and other services. It also looks at the creation of the Directorate of Prisoners of War within the British War Office and concludes by discussing the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Britain regarding British POWs in Germany.

The first chapter discusses Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, poets and novelists whose work in the 1790s can be understood to be shaped by the competing demands of literary and commercial ambition, and political conviction. Both women were liberal in their politics, and both became part of the social circle around Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and Joseph Johnson which supported so many progressive writers in the metropolis and beyond in this period. But those who participated in the sociable exchanges of this group were by no means homogenous in their political opinions, and their views changed across time and in response to changing events and environments. The chapter focuses on the poetry that Smith and Robinson published in 1793, the year in which France was finally provoked into declaring war on Britain. It traces their reflections on and responses to the changing nature of the revolution in France, and the onset of conflict with Britain, which were complicated by their concerns for their own entangled reputations and careers as women and writers. Texts discussed include Smith’s long poem, The Emigrants (1793), Robinson’s sonnet to Smith, and her three poems, Sight, The Cavern of Woe, and Solitude (1793).

This chapter takes an analytical approach to the question of first how civil war undermined the earlier achievements of French foreign policy, and then how armies and their destructiveness greatly worsened the impact of the harsh climate conditions of the years since 1648. It examines in particular the impact that a winter campaign fought across France had on the established means by which troops and their commanders replenished their resources during the winter quartering of troops in the provinces. The falls of Dunkirk, Casale-Monferrato, and Barcelona are each examined in terms of growing resource scarcity, demoralization, and the inability to organize adequate relief for the besieged garrisons. The impact of successive harsh winters and wet, poor summers is then considered, showing how even without civil war the French population would have suffered intensely under the impact of three successive poor harvests. However, the destructiveness of the troops, both to secure their own survival and as a deliberate military policy to deprive enemy forces of support, hugely worsened the situation. The chapter proposes that at least 25 per cent of the population died in the areas of intense or regular military activity, and that the impact of the destruction persisted well into the subsequent decade.

This chapter examines the intentions and strategic reasoning behind significant German offenses during the Second World War, with a general description of unit movements and outcomes. Emboldened by success in France, Hitler was confident in attacking Russia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus. The intent was to plunder oil and other resources and obtain access to ports, thereby providing support for his “new order.” Wehrmacht leaders were shocked by the Russian response, having vastly underestimated the enemy. The Wehrmacht’s once powerful U-boat fleet and air force were eclipsed by the Allies. Fortress Europe could not stand. With Churchill’s determination, the US entry into the war, and Operation Overlord, the anti-Hitler coalition inexorably gained ground. Ultimately, Müller notes, it was Allied air superiority that helped defeat the Wehrmacht on land, on water, and in the air. The last bonds between Hitler and his Wehrmacht dissolved with Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945. The actual dissolution of the Wehrmacht came soon after, with its leaders’ unconditional surrender.

In chapter 5 of The Overseas Trade of British America, American traders become adept at moving cargoes across porous international borders. But they did so in an increasingly unstable environment. British disregard for Spain’s rules governing trade on the Spanish Main led to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739 and unleashed a vicious privateer war in the Atlantic. The conflict widened with British participation in the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–1748). The wars of the mid-18th century — culminating in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) — severely disrupted trade but did not end illicit exchanges. Smuggling had long been a feature of Atlantic trade on both sides of the water. Large quantities of tobacco and rum entered Great Britain and Ireland via Dunkirk and Ostend, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. Tobacco smuggling in France reached huge proportions. And in British North America, markets were awash in smuggled Dutch tea and European manufactured goods. Most audacious, however, was British North America’s trade with the enemy during the Seven Years’ War, activity facilitated through neutral Spanish and Dutch ports in the Caribbean.

This chapter studies the commercial networks through which maritime traders on foreign soil connected with the global world of business. Using French and Flemish settlers in Seville in 1620, it deconstructs Seville’s status as a ‘proto-global economy’; examines the trade activity on the Dunkirk-Seville route; the textile trade; and case studies of prominent merchants in the region in attempt to determine the role of foreign merchants in the trade network between American and Europe. It concludes that despite laws preventing foreigners from participating in American trade, networks built from social, familial, political, and economic frameworks made such trade possible.

This section explores the Dutch Republic’s navy in the late 1500s through to 1652, which Bruijn classifies as the ‘Old’ navy period. It is divided into four sections: naval operations against Spain and the Dunkirk Privateers; the boards of the Admiralties at work; the development of a naval officers’ corps; and the international demographics of naval crews and the labour conditions they worked under. It concludes in 1652, asserting that the standard system of operations was on the cusp of becoming obsolete when face to face with developments in shipping technology and structures.

The purpose of writing this book was to explore aspects of human behaviour that have been, to varying extents, disregarded, overlooked, or ignored in terrestrial-dominated archaeology to date. Recognizing that the sea ‘is good to think’, it was envisaged that an exploration of North Sea archaeologies could launch something of a ‘maritime turn’. This final chapter considers the broad themes of the human past that have been enlightened through this study, and questions if and how these can be reproduced in land-based research. Five interrelated themes are presented here: the essence of nature–society interrelationships, the attribution of forms of agency to inanimate objects, deviant spaces, the essence of travelling long distances—including the skills and knowledge required for this—and finally, how the sea contributes to shaping social identities. The relationship that people had with their environment, or nature–society interrelationships, is fundamental to archaeological research on land and at sea. Explicitly or implicitly, terrestrial archaeology presents us with something of an irreversible progression towards ‘encultured’ landscapes—narratives wherein the land becomes increasingly less natural and more cultural (see chapter 2). In much of Europe, the ‘enculturation’ of the world started back in the Post-glacial. It continued throughout the Mesolithic, with the creation of paths through, and clearances within, otherwise natural landscapes. In the Neolithic, ‘enculturation’ took place through deforestation, and through the apportioning of symbolic significance to natural features and the construction of monuments relating to these. By the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, large tracts of land were being accommodated to the needs of humans through the creation of field systems and settlements, producing ‘cultural landscapes’. From the middle Bronze Age onwards, according to accepted land-based archaeological thinking, it would appear that nature played at best a minor role, limited to the impact of climate and weather on the crops being cultivated. The study of the North Sea has fundamentally challenged the nature–culture dichotomy. The concept of ‘enculturation’ places Homo sapiens centre stage in a changing world, but underestimates the role played by the sea and rivers, as well as animals, trees, and plants, as important co-constructors of landscape.

This chapter focuses on the different groups that arrived in Britain in 1940—mainly from the British Empire and the European continent. Journeys to Britain were often daring, improvised, and dangerous. In mid-1940, when an imminent invasion of Britain was widely expected, there was a climate of intense hostility to foreigners. The British government introduced a policy of mass internment of people of enemy nationality, but hostility was often directed at all foreigners in Britain, regardless of nationality, with suspicions that they were acting as spies and fifth columnists. In contrast, there was often a warm welcome for those arriving in military uniform and they featured prominently in British propaganda which emphasized a war fought by allies, not Britain standing alone. The chapter argues that by the end of 1940, the climate of intense hostility to foreigners had begun to change.