The premise of Susan Kingsley Kent's book is that the traumatic psychological and psychiatric reactions to the First World War reverberated from the individual to society, dramatically shaping the 1920s political context. The condition of shell shock experienced by Ford Madox Ford and a host of soldiers, artists, and writers of the period was understood at the time as having widespread effects that signaled a breakdown in the social fabric. Writers with an interest in psychology surmised the neurosis of the nation (Caroline Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations [London, 1925]); others with frontline experience like Philip Gibbs described Britain as “a nation of neurotics” (2). Powerful concepts of shell shock, psychological disturbance, and neurosis became useful in helping to evoke the war. While the psychological turn made a significant impact within some circles after the First World War, the assumption that enough of these writers, artists, and society at large were traumatized appears to be a more problematic argument. Can we say that the abstract “nation” was traumatized? How can a nation be diagnosed with a psychological illness attributed to individuals? If the nation is traumatized in war, what actually is trauma?

Aftershocks argues that among historians (although not literary critics or anthropologists), scholarship on trauma and cultural memory is often disconnected. While bringing them together is the useful aim, a long bow is drawn in the process. Shell shock is transformed from social agent and cultural metaphor into “a new model of the mind” and, from there, “a felt condition, an experience for millions of individual Britons.” One person's “trauma” is consciously and unconsciously collectivized, especially through politics. Britons new understanding of their “political selves”—developed from the enormous suffering and grief of the war—was “played out on a national level.” In this book, traumatic stress has a structural effect on the “political history of Great Britain,” where healing the rupture meant perpetrating violence on others, as in Nazi Germany (3).

While much in this book is the result of stimulating, original primary research into race and politics, the overarching argument is less convincing. Trauma is a psychiatric diagnosis with a diverse and deeply complex medical history, and yet when seen through the prism of shell shock, it can easily provide simplistic scripts for historical explanation and cultural analysis. That trauma has become a discourse within cultural theory and literary criticism issues a caution to historians of war and conflict. Trauma speaks to us now. While artists and writers found a metaphor in shell shock—the world “going mad” and becoming “neurotic” through the internalizing self-destruction of mass industrial warfare—it is unwise to lump these things together as real. Historians cannot prove that everyone was traumatized.

Contemporary accounts certainly demonstrate that deeply anguishing experiences were real, and some people (although not all) suffered long after the events of the war. Yet people also recovered, rehabilitated, and remarried, and many joined up again in the next war because medical and social institutions, as well as political discourses, supported mourning and transformation as a process of overcoming the war. This book introduces many important new lines of inquiry, but to attach political climate to trauma is precarious, for trauma is as intimate and psychically individualized as experience and defies any effort to collectivize it as an overarching historical reality.

The strengths of this book are its research into class conflicts, strikes, racial hatred, and riots in British metropolises, especially the important chapter on the colonial periphery of Nigeria. Some studies into the workers’ strikes are not cited (Lucy Bland, Gender and History [2005]; Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930 [2007]). While these chapters work well on their own, they do not really enhance the overarching trauma argument. Workers rioting against immigrant labor (from the empire) framed job protectionism in terms of deserving white soldiers and sailors, but was this racism a traumatic reaction to the war? Racist labor ideals were linked to spurious notions of “Britishness,” amnesic of the imperial citizenry. Trauma seems more doubtful, as does its wholesale impact on voting.

Nevertheless, it is excellent to have the discussion of the “Nigerian Women's War,” a series of riots by over 10,000 indigenous women against the colonial authorities. The women's actions can be compared and contrasted with domestic riots of white against black men, wherein class and race—and sexuality (as Bland shows)—were also key tensions at play in the fracas and its subsequent investigations. The chapter on the Igbo women pulls this powerful moment of resistance against the British imposition of monetary systems and taxation (a common strategy resisted in French colonies too) into mainstream British history, despite the fact that it never made the pages of the British press at the time. The story brings together gender, race, economics, and colonial power, when thousands of women converged upon a British garrison of armed white men, an event ending in violent overreaction and scores of deaths. Was this a war? The women were organized and drew on cultural practices of song and dance protest (“sitting on a man”). It might have been useful to define concepts such as war, conflict, and riot. In conflict studies, war is conducted between armed nations or states; in other fields this incident was termed “social drama” turned into “rampage” (Judith Lynne Hanna, “Dance, Protest, and Women's ‘Wars,'” in Women and Social Protest, ed. Guida West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg [Oxford, 1990]). Some have argued for the term “revolt” (John N. Oriji, “Igbo Women from 1929–1960,” West Africa Review 2, no. 1 [August 2000]). Students of British history will find this an important moment to reflect on, and Aftershocks makes the case for its relevance. Alternative evidence, however, suggests that trauma cannot fully account for a complex understanding of either postwar society or domestic and imperial politics.