The Effects of War on the Home Front

Abstract

As has been demonstrated, the colonial home front was deeply affected by the Second World War, and many of the widely remembered images of the British home front can be applied to the scattered dependencies in which Britain’s 60 million colonial subjects lived.1 A summary of the war’s main impact on the home front is important for the balance of this study. The main areas are: wartime political developments; the economic effects of war; the food situation; development policy; the experience of the Franco-Mauritian community; and the story of the 1600 Central European Jews detained on Mauritius from 1940–1945.