The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

On the outbreak of war, men from the Dominions were scattered across the British Empire. As each Dominion began recruiting their expeditionary forces at home, the issue arose whether these expatriates, especially those resident in the United Kingdom, should join the British Army or be able to enlist in their Dominion's force. Canada and New Zealand allowed recruiting for the CEF and NZEF in the UK. Many Anglophone White South Africans joined a “colonial” battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The Australian Government refused to allow Australians in the UK to join the AIF, despite the repeated requests of the Australian expatriate community. This paper examines the questions of British and sub-Imperial Dominion identities as well as the practical policy considerations raised by this issue. It argues that there is some evidence of nascent Dominion nationalism—the Canadian High Commission in London issued what became known as “a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship” to expatriates— but that Dominion Governments generally based their decisions on this issue based on cost and domestic political considerations.

In 1914, most New Zealanders welcomed the opportunity to stand together with the British Empire. Historians have long recognised that for a small country the contribution to the war effort of pakeha New Zealanders was substantial. Much less well recognised is the contribution of Māoris who served at Gallipoli and on the western front. In the face of opposition from within the Māori community and from British High Command, a determined group of Māori leaders argued forcefully for sending Māoris into action. Many young Māori men responded with enthusiasm to the recruitment drive and the First Māori Battalion sailed to Egypt in February 1915. This paper explores the tensions that resonated within the Māori community around the recruitment of Māori men and argues that the debates were shaped by different understandings of nationhood. Māoris who opposed recruitment believed that volunteering to fight in a foreign war distracted Māoris from dealing with the difficulties in their own communities. Conversely those who argued for participation in the war believed that their contribution to the war would lead to utu (justice), and that only by including Māoris as soldiers in fighting units could all New Zealanders claim to belong to an authentic nation.

In the summer of 1916, the British Salonica Army and the Cyprus colonial government established the Cypriot Mule Corps (officially called the Macedonian Mule Corps), composed of mostly of Christian (Eastern Orthodox, and smaller numbers of Catholics, Armenians, and Maronites) and Muslim Cypriot muleteers and interpreters. These men served mostly in Salonica during the war and in Istanbul after the armistice. Although given the title of “Macedonian” Mule Corps, it was almost exclusively Cypriot in composition, with a staggering enlistment of about 12,000 Cypriots from every religious group in Cyprus. This article explores the formation of the corps, muleteer numbers, and recruitment strategies. It argues that there were both push and pull factors in understanding the striking enlistment of between 20 and 25 per cent of peasant and labouring men aged between 18 and 39.

In Latin America, where British imperial expansion had left little administrative trace, Argentina was nonetheless profoundly affected by British investment and imported British technical expertise. Among the more modest examples of British expansionism in Argentina was the arrival, from 1865 onwards, of Welsh immigrants eager to establish a colony in Patagonia isolated from the seemingly unstoppable progress of Anglicisation by an overwhelmingly hegemonic Victorian England. By the time of the First World War, however, the Celtic character of the colony could no longer be taken for granted: Argentine government pressures had already meant that the Welsh-speaking colony was now more firmly integrated into the nation-building process. Friction which then developed between the Welsh community and the Argentine government acted as one of the push factors which sent Welsh Patagonians back to Wales and on to Australia, for example…To this process of integration the Great War added new pressures in the form of the question of loyalty to Britain during the conflict. Those who stayed in Patagonia during the war often expressed views which were pro-British and the Argentine province became a source of recruitment for the British armed services…Using a range of sources, this paper attempts to show that the Welshness of the Patagonian colonists had not destroyed their British patriotism: the latter survived and even came to the fore during the conflict of 1914-18.

The Allied expedition to Salonika was a controversial campaign of the First World War that diverted French and British resources away from the Western Front. To sustain this expedition without depleting existing forces, the Colonial Office approached the High Commissioners of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and requested that each dominion consider raising a Serbian military contingent for service in Salonika. In the decades preceding the outbreak of war, South Slavs had settled in each of the dominions and the War Office hoped to exploit nationalist aspirations for a pan-Slavic state and mobilise South Slavs in the dominions. In raising these contingents, dominion governments weighed between fulfilling a demand of the Imperial war effort and jeopardising domestic stability by empowering a culturally-distinct minority that was the object of public paranoia. This article will examine how the legal status of South Slavs changed in the three dominions as a result of these recruiting efforts along with the conditions under which South Slavs were able to volunteer for service in Salonika. A comparative approach reveals how Southern Slavs were defined and how they defined themselves as they navigated the categories of enemy aliens, friendly allies, and subjects of the British Empire.