Race, sex and nation in imperial Europe: historiographical perspectives of colonial troops and workers in Europe's World War I (1914-1919)

Over the last few years, there has emerged a vibrant historical literature on the imperial and "racial" dimensions of the formation of national identities in Europe during the "long nineteenth century". This bibliographical essay provides a synthetic analysis of one its chief thematic and methodological veins. The thematic vein concerns the experiences of tens of thousands of "non-white" colonial soldiers and workers in Europe during World War I -their presence was without precedent in the ranks of the British imperial army as well as that of the French- and the methodological vein discusses the connections between "race" and nation -the imperial nation as well as the anti-colonial nation-. This literature concerns the unusual relationships -sexual and non-sexual- that thousands of "coloured" colonial men established with European women on metropolitan soil during the war.