Dr Sue Onslow, Deputy Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Reader in Commonwealth History introduces a series of contributions by Senior Research Fellows at the Institute about the huge contribution made by Commonwealth volunteers to the war effort during the First World War
Over the past four years, in particular, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London has mounted a series of exhibitions underlining the extraordinary contribution by men (and women) from across the Empire to the global British war effort in World War I. As the IWM points out, ‘a total of nearly 8,586,000 men were raised for military and naval service. 20% of volunteers were from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, with the vast majority coming from India.’ (This was replicated, of course, in World War II, belying Churchill’s famous, but misleading phrase of ‘Britain standing alone in 1940’, a myth which continues to find echoes in contemporary popular discourse and the tabloid press.) These contributions by Senior Research Fellows at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies reflect on the place and memorialization of the Great War in specific areas of the modern Commonwealth, by those volunteers
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