When the British economic historian and pacifist Eileen Power travelled through Burma, China and India for her research in 1920–21, she wrote about her ascent to the Khyber Pass, the strategically hazardous mountain route separating what is now Afghanistan from the Indian subcontinent. In Power’s day, women were forbidden access to the Khyber Pass, so she donned a ‘hermaphroditic habit’ and pretended to be a man. Looking down from its heights onto the wide valley below, Power saw a landscape many men had invaded and conquered. It was a sight that exemplified the continuity and also the dislocations of history: the tangled interactions of nationalism, imperialism and militarism. ‘Otherness’ is a complex theme here, partly because it’s also a feeling. What Power felt when she returned from the Khyber Pass to a reprimand from British officials for her geographical and gender transgression, we do not know.

The story in this chapter is one about women being reprimanded by male politicians and governments for their iconoclastic ideas about the damages of the nation-state. It’s a story about the meanings of citizenship, not just in one place but in the world. Eileen Power is a woman at the tail end of our story chronologically, but she’s connected to it through her services to women’s history, to a new methodology of social history and to the story of the LSE, a key institution in the evolution of the British welfare state. In the first decades of the 20th century, the LSE housed a number of significant women reformers and intellectuals. Eileen Power went there in 1911 and, after an interlude in Cambridge, she died in post as a Professor of Economic History at the LSE in 1940. The 20th century’s most influential sociological text on citizenship was produced by a professor of sociology at the LSE, T. H. Marshall, in 1949. Marshall’s Citizenship and social class signally failed to take account of the perspective and interests of women, including those of his cousin Catherine Marshall and her colleagues, prime movers in the women’s peace movement. Citizenship, for most male thinkers, has always foregrounded men, pushing women to the side as adjuncts or disturbing deviants.

Themes about civic rights, entitlement, welfare and citizenship were embedded in much Settlement sociology and practice, and are obviously raised most urgently when it comes to questions of war and peace.