Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War(Heritage)

Around the world and for hundreds of years, men and women have refused to be drafted into bearing arms for their nations' wars. These conscientious objectors to the draft are the subject of Peter Brock's latest collection, Against the Draft. Brock, the world's leading historian on pacifism, has assembled twenty-five of his essays on conscientious objection to the draft from the beginning of the Radical Reformation in 1525 to the end of the Second World War. Included in the collection are essays on little known facets of the anti-draft movement including the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition of military exemption that started with the outset of the Radical Reformation in 1525 and has continued, with variations, until the present. Further articles deal with the Quakers in a number of countries, Civil-war America, Leo Tolstoy (who became a convinced pacifist in the later part of his life), British conscientious objectors in the Non-Combatant Corps, the emergence of conscientious objection in Japan, and the fate of conscientious objectors in the psychiatric clinics of Germany and in interwar Poland. Essays on the Central European Nazerenes and on Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany highlight the exceptionally harsh treatment meted out to conscientious objectors belonging to these two sects, and their steadfast resistance to the state's demand to bear arms. Against the Draft makes an important contribution to the growing study of pacifism and conscientious objection, and represents a key work in the career of the field's foremost scholar.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Foreword by Martin Ceadel Acknowledgments Introduction Conscientious Objection among the Polish Antitrinitarians A Polish Antitrinitarian in Defence of Conscientious Objection to Military Service (1575) Conscientious Objection among the Doopsgezinden Experiences of Quakers Pressed into the Royal Navy Conscientious Objectors in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France The Peace Sects of Upper Canada and the Military Question Militia Objectors in the Channel Islands When Seventh-day Adventists First Faced the Draft: Civil-War America Quaker Conscientious Objectors in Norway, 1814–1902 Nazarenes Confront Conscription in Dualist Hungary Tolstoy and the Imprisonment of Conscientious Objectors in Imperial Russia The Škarvan Case: The Trial and Imprisonment of a Slovak Tolstoyan The Emergence of Conscientious Objection in Japan ‘Boy Conscription’ in Australia and New Zealand: The Experiences of the Conscientious Resisters Prison Samizdat of British Conscientious Objectors in Two World Wars Weaponless in the British Armed Forces: The Non-Combatant Corps in the First World War Hobhouse and Brockway: Conscientious Objectors as Pioneer Convict Criminologists The Confinement of Conscientious Objectors as Psychiatric Patients in First-World-War Germany Imperial Russia at War and the Conscientious Objector, August 1914 – February 1917 Vladimir Chertkov and the Tolstoyan Antimilitarist Movement in the Soviet Union Experiences of Conscientious Objectors in the Soviet Union to 1945 Conscientious Objectors in Interwar Poland Six Weeks at Hawkspur Green: A Pacifist Episode during the Battle of Britain British Conscientious Objectors as Medical Paratroopers in the Second World War Jehovah’s Witnesses as Conscientious Objectors in Nazi Germany Index

About the Author :
Peter Brock is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Review :
"'Peter Brock is a historian's historian; that is, his is concerned with the historiography of his approach as well as his findings. He has long been, and now clearly remains, the premier historian of conscientious objection not only in his main areas of concentration, which are impressive in their number (E. Europe, Holland, Britain, the US) but, by extension, for the whole field of war resistance.' - Michael Nagler, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California at Berkeley"