What does the end of a war bring? This volume, edited by Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava, and Michael Walsh seeks to answer this question about the end of the First World War across the British Empire. The editors and contributors adopt a purposefully narrow chronological framework, seeking to understand the “1918–20 moment,” or the sortie de guerre, across the empire. The end of the First World War signaled both imperial expansion and political and logistical challenges for the British Empire, and the essays in this volume reveal that this moment was an exercise in contingency, adaptability, and instability for Britain's global power. After a conflict so shaped by emergent nationalisms, empire is shown to have been both persistent and malleable.

Scholars of both the global First World War and the British Empire will find much to interest them in the contributing chapters. Together, the contributions extend the work of the many scholars who have investigated the global dimensions and colonial experiences of the First World War into the postwar context. In their introduction, the editors borrow the French sortie de guerre framework as the volume’s guiding principle and posit using 1918–20 as a “lens of investigation and a methodological tool” (3). In the strongest of the chapters, this focused chronology allows the authors to understand the end of the war as an ongoing process of negotiation, rather than as a discrete moment.

The most intriguing contributions come in the middle section of the book, titled “Controlling and exporting a military tradition.” In “British colonial reaffirmation at the 1918–20 moment: appropriation, dehumanization and the rule of colonial difference,” Samraghni Bonnerjee uses the writings of two white British soldiers living in the empire after the end of the First World War to investigate how colonial subjugation was affirmed in the post-war context. Her close readings of these personal writings demonstrate the slippage between wartime and peacetime in the empire—details such as British soldiers using Gurkha troops as targets in training exercises show that “tropes of orientalism, othering and violent colonialism” were features both of the war itself and of the 1918–20 moment. Similarly, Kate Imy’s chapter, “Beyond Amritsar: The Indian Army and the fight for empire, 1918–20,” shows how Indian Army soldiers used their religious identities to shape the nature of their colonial military service even after the end of the war, especially in South Asian and Middle Eastern contexts where the fighting did not end with the 1918 Armistice. British officials made accommodations for both Sikh and Muslim soldiers in an attempt to secure their loyalty to the empire. Here too, peacetime did not bring an end to wartime considerations about the loyalty of colonial troops.

The adaptability of imperial officials and policy is a theme that runs through multiple other chapters in the book. Clothilde Hout convincingly argues that post-war British policy in the Middle East was one of “expedient imperialism” (165) and was largely reactive as it dealt with administering former Ottoman Arab provinces, negotiating with other European powers who had claimed territory in the region, and reacting to local political contexts and movements. Similarly, Panikos Panayi shows how British policy toward German nationals living in both Britain and the empire developed over time. Wartime policies of internment gave way to post-war policies of deportation and removal. Panayi shows that British nationalism shaped anti-German policies across the empire, but other nationalisms also challenged British imperial identity in the post-war moment.

Of the handful of chapters that considers nationalisms in the Commonwealth; the strongest is Hannah Mawdsley’s on “Australia, empire, and the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic.” This is a chapter that makes a convincing argument even outside the volume’s focus on the 1918–20 moment, serving both as an illustration of the complex memory politics of the 1918–1919 flu and of how emergent Commonwealth nationalisms were shaped by this unexpected aspect of the First World War. Mawdsley shows how Australia’s initially successful influenza quarantine was folded into an emergent national identity that had long been associated with race, health, and exclusion. The other chapters that address the Dominions also examine ascendent nationalisms. Charles-Phillipe Courtois argues that the existing historiography has not acknowledged that Québecois nationalism had its roots in the 1918–20 moment, when the downfall of empires seemed to be a distinct political possibility across the globe. Trevor Harris tracks the repatriation of Commonwealth soldiers back to their homes after the end of the war and argues that British insistence that Commonwealth countries manage their own repatriation schemes helped to foment nationalist feeling.

Not yet mentioned is Andrekos Varnava’s compelling chapter on the Enosis question (whether Cyprus should be ceded to Greece in the post-war moment). Varnava focuses on the failed campaigning of Sir Arthur Crosfield in favor of secession, and ultimately argues that Liberal politics lost out to Britain’s appetite for empire and Tory insistence on “old techniques of rule” (158). Like other chapters in the volume, the focus here is on a sense of what could be, or could have been. In the 1918–20 moment, the empire worked to reassert itself, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully. One wonders if similar arguments could be made about almost any moment in British Empire history. But in all, this volume succeeds at making the case that the British Empire as it exited the First World War was an empire in flux, and goes a long way toward dispelling the idea that the 1918–20 moment was the empire's high point.