Australia’s Great Depression: How a Nation Shattered by the Great War Survived the Worst Economic Crisis It Has Ever Faced

Abstract

made her the standout exception. How the Red Cross Societies were forced to engage with a wider section of the community is a recurring motif in this book. Margaret Tennant’s wideranging chapter on the New Zealand Red Cross particularly engages with this issue in a postcolonial context. The impact of modern marketing is yet another common thread. The key example is the American Red Cross (ARC). Branden Little argues that the American public initially rejected the ARC because it was perceived – presumably with good reason – as incompetent and corrupt. He concludes that the later success of the ARC was due to the new art of professional marketing in time for the USA’s entry into World War I in 1917. Little’s statistics, even with a healthy margin for exaggeration, are amazing. During 1917–18, the ARC’s membership increased from 22,000 to 32 million, while at the same time it distributed $US400 million in relief. An explicit challenge to orthodoxy comes from Davide Rodogno’s highly philosophical argument that humanitarianism involves cultural arrogance. Eldrid Mageli offers an empirical example. Her chapter is a confronting analysis of the Norwegian Red Cross’s role in the Biafran famine. Mageli’s conclusion is that ‘short-term alleviation...may have longerterm, harmful consequences’ (175) – and in Biafra’s case, almost certainly did. Mageli shows how leaders can ruthlessly exploit goodwill. Similarly, Rebecca Gill’s study of the ICRC conference in 1938 reveals how expertly the Nazis exploited the Red Cross’s internationalist ideals to promote British proappeasement policies. Caroline Reeves argues that efforts in the late nineteenth century to establish a Red Cross Society in China were because the Red Cross was recognised as a marker of civilisation. Despite the Chinese regime’s lack of interest in humanitarianism, it tried to establish a Red Cross Society to help assert national sovereignty. In this case, government efforts to exploit Red Cross idealism failed, largely due to the Boxer rebellion. This volume offers a scholarly smorgasbord on the impact of the Red Cross. While its small font and almost complete lack of photographs is not reader-friendly, all should find something to add to or challenge their understanding of not just the Red Cross, but the broader history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.