ABSTRACT
In some regions, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Second World War has long been well integrated into the thinking of historians and anthropologists concerned with the recent colonial past. But all over the world, for contemporaries, the British Empire was a sine qua non of the age, quite simply the context of the British war in the 1940s. The imperial war was an integral part of the British and indeed of the Allied war effort. Therefore, the experience of people living in territories across the British Empire is critical for comprehending the total nature of the war, as is the engagement of these peoples with the Japanese powers and the shifting sands of conquest and occupation in the East. The book retains the perspective of contemporaries, who lived in an interconnected imperial world and saw the war as linked to the preservation the British Empire.
