This paper is part of a new project considering itinerant camp followers or non-combatant labour in the later 20th and early 21st centuries and their connections to British militarism and British military bases. This paper will consider the transnational circulation of South Asian labourers and their involvement with British military bases across disparate sites including Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Maldives and Malaysia. This history of warfare transcends years of formal ‘empire’ and ‘decolonization’ and covers territories where formal imperial control was never established. One of the arguments is that warfare and the associated idea of ‘militarism’ might be a more productive way of thinking about modern British global history than using the optic of ‘imperialism.’

Yasmin Khan is a Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Fellow of Kellogg College.