The First World War resulted in radically new encounters between colonial subjects and the imperial sphere which have only recently become the focus of historical research. Yet one key aspect of this wartime interaction has remained overlooked: how First World War captivity led to new exchanges between African and Asian colonial troops and Europeans. This chapter explores captivity as a site of cultural interaction between African and Asian colonial subjects and white Europeans by juxtaposing two imperial case studies, Wilhelmine Germany and Ottoman Turkey, to see how captivity influenced ideas of ‘race’ and identity and disrupted existing power hierarchies.

An enormous range of diverse imperial–colonial encounters (that is, interactions between colonial subjects and the imperial sphere) occurred in these two environments. In Germany, this chapter will explore how African and Asian colonial prisoners, captured on the Western Front, encountered German captors, German civilians, and representatives of Germany's Turkish ally, who visited their prison camps, as well as numerous prisoners of war from different ethnicities and nationalities, both non-European and European. In Ottoman-controlled Mesopotamia, this study will show how British and Indian soldiers shared a common captivity during the initial phase of capture following the fall of Kut-el-Amara in 1916, which led them to view each other in new ways as they responded to Turkish captors, as well as Arab and Kurdish guards, and the myriad different civilian ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire.