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In the Global North, mass warfare created a huge demand for social protection, pushing governments to provide income for invalids, war victims, and the survivors of fallen soldiers. Most European colonial powers, including France and Great Britain, recruited soldiers and other security forces not only from their metropoles but also from their colonies during both World Wars. However, the question of how mass warfare influenced social reforms in former colonies has not been systematically addressed, particularly with respect to how these influences varied across colonial powers. To begin to address this gap, this paper explores the warfare–welfare nexus in the context of British and French colonies of West Africa around World War I (WWI). The paper finds that, while Britain and France had similar overarching imperial and military objectives in West Africa of securing their colonies, enforcing order within them, and promoting commerce to increase profit, they went about achieving them very differently, with direct and indirect implications for social reforms after WWI. While only a first step, research on the distinct nature of the warfare–welfare nexus in colonial contexts is critical in order to historicize and close research gaps by widening and deepening our understanding of social policy trajectories in countries of the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the challenge the First World War posed to imperial culture by looking at representations of colonial troops in British and French soldiers' wartime writings. The Great War posed significant challenges to empires and created new dynamics of exchange and dependence within them. Never before had so many civilians joined the army nor had so many non-European soldiers served in Europe. As the face of battle changed in so many significant ways, British and French soldiers took up pen and paper to distract and amuse themselves and each other. In the process, they created discourses which also reveal the ways in which the war provided a new context for evaluating empires and their peoples and questioned existing imperial culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the 1745–46 Jacobite rebellion in Scotland (the last major attempt to restore the Stuart dynasty – in exile since 1689 – to the throne of Britain), and its decades-long aftermath, as a transatlantic problem deeply embedded in the geopolitical and cultural entanglements of inter-imperial rivalry and warfare. Prevailing interpretations of the '45 consider it as primarily a culminating political event centred on dynastic rivalry and the relative security of the Hanoverian establishment, while overlooking more recent geographic insights from the fields Atlantic and New Imperial history. In exploring the long term imperial strategic repercussions of the '45 as understood through the dynamics of a rapidly expanding and interconnected British Atlantic press and public sphere, this paper demonstrates novel and lasting understandings of the connection between inter-imperial rivalry, warfare, and domestic fifth-column rebellions. Such understandings, continuing throughout the mid-eighteenth century wars between Britain and France, and the contemporary anxieties tied to them, disrupt linear narratives of post-'45 British political and cultural integration. The British polity and formations of Britishness and Scottishness were entangled with France to an unprecedented degree as a result of the inter-imperial problem of the '45. This ultimately draws attention to the overlooked historical novelties, continuities, and contingencies of the post-'45 period. This cultural context must be considered and periodized on its own historical terms, rather than as part of a straightforward eighteenth century process of nation-state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]