Colonial Veterans and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ in the Interwar World

• Department of History

Presentation of the ERC COLVET project by Prof Dónal Hasset (Maynooth University) and Dr Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth University and Università Roma Tre)

The mass mobilisation of colonial subjects in the conflicts of the Greater War left significant legacies that have been all too often elided in global histories of the period. Hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects and their families had to grapple with the consequences of their military service while also trying to wrest some form of compensation from an often disinterested colonial state. For colonial administrators, facilitating access to services and compensation for veterans without destabilising the precarious colonial order was a major challenge across imperial spaces throughout the interwar period.

Drawing on the extensive original archival research conducted by the research team on the ERC funded COLVET project, this presentation explores the extent to which veterans came to crystallise key ‘tensions of empire’ across different imperial polities in the 1920s and 30s. We consider how veterans’ claims-making represented a renegotiation of colonial rule that insisted on a form, however truncated and unbalanced, of a reciprocal relationship between the colonial state and those who had fought to defend it. We also explore how colonial administrators’ responses, while they typically failed to live up to the veterans’ expectations, did contribute to the emergence of a new form of colonial governmentality that came to define empire in the interwar period.