Men on the Margins: Representations of Colonial Troops in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War

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.