Rethinking the Colonial in the Greater War

Abstract

The Centenary of the First World War saw unprecedent prominence given to the ‘colonial contribution’ in commemorative discourse. While this newfound public recognition sometimes relied on simplistic and sanitised narratives of the war, scholarship produced in the period has greatly enriched understandings of how conflict was experienced by colonised peoples. In this article, I explore the utility of one of the key conceptual innovations of the Centenary, the Greater War, for the analysis of colonial experiences of the conflict. I do this by considering three key questions: Can the Greater War framework facilitate new comparative histories of violence in the war? How do its expanded chronologies account for colonial contexts? Can we adapt its conceptual frameworks to better integrate colonial histories? Exploring the potential answers to these questions will point to new avenues of research that can ensure the colonial is effectively incorporated into our narratives of the global conflict.