The study of war and conflict across the humanities and social sciences will be forever connected with Charles Tilly’s famous dictum on early modern Europe that “War made the state, and the state made war”.1 Since Tilly’s seminal work in the 1970s, scholars analysed political-systemic contexts of war and state-making, and administrators established policy-oriented degree programmes. However, few scholars touched upon war’s reciprocal relationship with forces and processes on the fringes or outside of the framework of the European nation state. The global prevalence of wars and their participants under formations like empires had been ignored for long, while alternative forces such as households and individuals have been seldom amplified as constitutive of conflict. It is no coincidence that our understanding of 20th-century wars as global conflicts is of fairly recent origin.2 The First World War centenary underlined global aspects of this conflict representing zenith and beginning of the end of European imperialism and colonialism. Moving forward, scholars must prioritize analysing globalization of conflicts and diversification of participants over military strategies and administrative procedures. This applies especially to historians, who can write about large topics in novel and creative ways. At the same time, formal demands and opaque archives make this an extremely ambitious and difficult task.

Radhika Singha’s The Coolie’s Great War achieves all of this, and much more, like few other accounts have done before. Straddling military, labour and broader social history, the book recounts the participation of Indian labour during the global conflict of the First World War from its inception in 1914 unto demobilization in 1921. The book’s protagonists, coolie (derogatory, external term) workers, came from different strata of India’s labour market and were nominally non-combatant followers in the Indian army that helped maintain the military establishment. Contemporary accounts and later historiography alike glossed over the crucial role of followers in various campaigns of the First World War where they worked in capacities such as cooks, stretcher-bearers or latrine-sweepers. Singha’s task is therefore to trace a little-known figure in a largely unexplored social setting, demanding a lot of detail and succinct analysis. In six chapters, of which four had earlier incarnations as articles, Singha relies on a large corpus of historical materials (drawn from no less than 19 different repositories) and multiple themes as entry points for recounting a complex story in a straightforward, novel and nuanced manner. Chapter 1 flashes out the relationship between labour regimes and ecologies of work sustaining colonial military infrastructure, while chapter 2 zooms in on the follower ranks of the Indian army as main protagonists. These chapters pay attention to the significant overlaps in recruitment grounds for combatants and non-combatant labour, as well as ramifications for the differentiation between soldiers, followers and their respective social worlds. Chapters 3 and 5 focus on follower deployment in Iraq and France, while chapter 4 focuses on the home front of recruitment among tribal populations. These chapters point out various processes in which followers became part of specific campaigns and how elements of force, discipline, agency and negotiation impacted these. Chapter 6 focuses on interdependencies between followers’ mobilization, demobilization and homecoming, painting the picture of a social world in flux where actors constantly negotiated and renegotiated their varied identities. A valuable afterword contextualizes the findings, reminding us that during the war labour discipline and effectiveness were topics for debate in the army as well as in industry.

The novel focus and wide-ranging content of The Coolie’s Great War compares favourably with other publications on the First World War and global history. In comparison, many recent works rarely look beyond European actors and battlefields and so continue to cover existing ground. Even as regions or actors outside of Europe come into the picture, often laterally, many accounts focus on the well-established bounds of soldiers or the army as a whole3, or on intellectual and cultural implications of war.4 However, the most innovative work till date comes from social histories of war and specific groups of military personnel and civilians whose identities yield new insights on the larger ramifications of war.5 Singha’s book is definitely written with that angle in mind, but the account is unique in its combination of global history as heuristic device and social and economic history as analytical mode. This solidifies in a double approach: the book views multiple sites, processes and motivations for mobilization and war engagement through the prism of one historical figure and its social environment, while relating the First World War to a range of actors and processes in India and in the empire underlines the conflict’s global relevance. Here, Singha’s account is very novel and unsurpassed, as it portrays a follower’s social world moving between modern technological warfare, hard manual labour, army discipline and heightened notions of identity, tradition and race among and between different groups. In such a world, soldiers could end up being followers and vice versa. More generally, the account addresses long-established tropes of historical enquiry (e.g. mobilization, colonialism), and important contemporary debates on the abolition of indentured labour and scientific penology. The account benefits from a vast number of materials that Singha identified in various archives, including the rich National Archives of India and state and local archives, and from a close reading of contemporary accounts of British officers in command. One question that remains after reading the text is why a tour de force of all major schools of importance to historians in India and in the world does not engage more forcefully with modes and arguments of the subaltern school of historiography that are entirely within the ambit of this book.

In sum, The Coolie’s Great War offers new insights into the social history of a crucial actor in the military campaigns of the First World War and a new reading of the constellation of global conflict. The account is exemplary of and already holds a special place in war and conflict studies and in global history. Through careful historical scholarship that combines very broad narrative strokes with micro-detailed and nuanced analysis, Singha shows that the figure of the follower was central to war and state-making and was the “object” of a range of social and cultural debates at the time. We are left wanting to know more about followers and the social history of war. Hopefully, this book inspires new generations of historians just as Charles Tilly’s work did, so that we may uncover many more aspects of what the state and war made.

Notes:
1 Charles Tilly (Ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton 1975, p. 42.
2 Jay Murray Winter, The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. 1, Global War, Cambridge, 2016.
3 David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War. Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18, Basingstoke 1999; Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars. Between Self and Sepoy, London 2015; George Morton-Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front. India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War, Cambridge 2014; Ashutosh Kumar / Claude Markovits, Indian Soldiers in the First World War. Re-visiting a Global Conflict, New York 2021.
4 Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture. Writings, Images, and Songs, Cambridge 2018; Rakhshanda Jalil, The Great War. Indian Writings on the First World War, New Delhi 2019; Sharmishtha R. Chowdhury, The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British India, 1914–1924, New York 2019.
5 Franziska Roy / Heike Liebau / Ravi Ahuja (Ed.), "When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings". South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany, Delhi, 2011.