Publications

Next special issue (2027)

Title: ‘Medical welfare and care of military communities: a collection of historical studies’

JMVFH, special issue, September 2027

Co-edited by Dr Paul Huddie (MWHN Co-ordinator) and Dr Michael Robinson (MWHN Member) this selection of articles will come both from the papers presneted as part of the 2025-26 Wellcome-funded symposia series (hosted at the University of Birmingham and online) and from an open Call for Submissions. Entitled ‘Medical welfare and care of military communities: a collection of historical studies’, the special issue will seek high-quality articles that explore the historical healthcare provisions for military personnel and their families.

Watch this space for more details as the editorial process progresses in 2026-27.

First edited volume (2026)

Title: Military Welfare History since the Eighteenth Century: War and Welfare

The second MWHN publication is currently in production and will be an edited volume published in 2026 by Palgrave Macmillan as part of his ‘New Directions in Welfare History’ series. This volume is co-edited by Dr Paul Huddie, Dr Amy J. Rutenberg, Dr Emma Huddlestone and Dr Anndal Narayanan and comprises an introduction and fourteen chapters; the latter of which comprises case studies that focus on several countries, across several centuries, and engage with a variety of topics and themes.

Contents

  1. Introduction

Part I: Mixed economies of public and private in military welfare provisions

  1. ‘Widowed Wretches and Pitiable Orphans’: philanthropy and military families in the long eighteenth century
  2. Assisters in Conflict: the charities helping soldiers’ families during the Crimean War
  3. Employing the British Army Wife in Clothing Manufacture from the Crimean War to the First World War
  4. When Charities Unite: the cooperative activities of the United Services Fund and SSAFA on behalf of ex-servicemen’s families, 1919-23
  5. The ‘Super-cultural USO’: the intersection between identity and morale at the National Gallery of Art, 1942-1946

Part II: Citizenship, status, and reward in military welfare

  1.   ‘The Disquieting of the Inhabitants of this Continent’: struggles over soldiers’ accommodations during the American War of Independence
  2. A Higher Personal Cost: New Zealand army nurses in the First World War
  3. Putting a Price on Military Service: the army pension acts of the Irish Civil War, 1922-23
  4. Be ‘a Good Neighbor’: the veterans’ information program and the associational veterans’ welfare state in 1940s America

Part III: Empire, decolonization, nationalism, and military welfare

  1. The Legacy of ‘Shell Shock’ in Post-War Australia
  2. ‘We Were Not Sell Outs’: Second World War African ex-servicemen and the Rhodesian Bush War, c.1964-1979
  3. Demobilization in the ‘Time of Contempt’: the battle for Algerian War veterans’ recognition in France, 1957-1974
  4. ‘Bad Paper’: Vietnam veterans and the discharge upgrading project
  5. From Outsiders to Heroes: the relations between war veterans, the Russian state, and society

The first MWHN publication was published in the Autumn/Fall of 2023 and was a special issue of the journal War & Society. The issue comprised a selection of papers presented at the Networks’ inaugural conference, hosted online by the UCD Humanities Institute in 2021. The special issue was entitled ‘Military welfare history: what is it and why should it be considered?‘ and was the first publication to endeavour to define ‘military welfare history’.

First special issue (2023)

Title: ‘Military welfare history: what is it and why should it be considered?’

War & Society, volume 42, issue 4, October 2023

Co-edited by Dr Paul Huddie (MWHN Co-ordinator) and Dr Amy Carney (MWHN Member) the selection of articles were contributed by one of the keynotes: Prof Laura McEnaney, and four of the conference presenters: Dr Brian Hughes, Dr Eleanor O’Keeffe, Dr Silvia Correia, and Dr Colin Moore.

‘As a scholarly project, military welfare history is both well-developed and still evolving. Social scientists and humanists have been writing about military welfare for several decades, although their scholarship has not always been tagged historiographically as military welfare history, per se. There now exists a substantive community of scholars who have produced a robust body of literature. Military welfare scholars ask ‘war and’ questions, finding common cause and productive overlap with scholars who investigate the environment, labour, sexuality, popular culture, disability, state policy, law, race, ethnicity, and gender’.

The full list of articles: