Transnational Outrage ― The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell

On 12 October 1915 German occupying forces in Belgium executed 49-year-old British matron Edith Cavell for 'escorting troops to the enemy'. Her death was portrayed by the Allied cause as a major atrocity, stories of her fate flashed around the world and Cavell became a famous heroine of the Great War. Transnational Outrage reinterprets versions of Cavell's arrest, trial and execution through the twentieth century. Was Cavell innocent or guilty? Were the Germans wrong to kill a woman? And what was the significance of her death more generally for women's place in war and society?

Along with traditional memorials, extensive forms of worldwide commemoration for Cavell included a mountain, a bridge, nurses' residences, poetry, films and music. Streets, people and animals were named after her. Transnational Outrage maps memorials in the landscape to reveal the imposition of Britishness and how a former 'British world' was constructed across the across the metropolitan and colonial divides. It argues that the importance of Allied commemoration (in Europe and the United States) challenges insular understandings of a British imperial past.

Katie Pickles is Professor of History at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand and is the current President of the New Zealand Historical Association. She is the author of Female Imperialism and National Identity ( 2002, 2009) and Christchurch Ruptures (2015) and a variety of journal articles. She has edited five books, the most recent being with Catharine Coleborne, New Zealand's Empire (2015), and with David Monger and Sarah Murray, Endurance and the First World War (2014).