The Great War: mobilising colonial knowledge and connections

Abstract

This chapter examines the role played by settler universities and scholars in the First World War. It argues that the war solidified the previously more porous borders of the British academic world, curtailing relations with Germany, and intensifying those with the settler empire. Focusing on mobilization and recruitment, war related research and schemes for soldier education, this chapter shows that – although missing from current accounts – colonial knowledge and connections were inscribed deep within British wartime science. Indeed, by drawing settler scholars into Britain and fostering their connections, the conflict helped extend into the interwar period the intimate scholarly networks that, since the end of the nineteenth century, had tied the British and settler universities to each other.