Establishing a framework for this book, the introduction examines the themes of encounters, space and contact zones during the First World War. Arguing that colonial experience cannot be understood without attention to spaces beyond the battlefield, I introduce the reader to the contact zones expored in the chapters. I reflect on the conceptsand methodology adopted, including the importance of intimacy.

Chapter Three, ‘At Camp’, explores how military camps produced new tensions as the men began to observe and interact with troops from other part of the empire and among the Allied forces. Colourful descriptions of the ‘Empire united in arms’ elided the asymmetries of power and inter-colonial competition at stake in the militarised setting.  The struggle to achieve status within an envisioned hierarchy of colonial races manifested in how the men wrote about those they met and how they represented themselves – in their uniform, fitness and soldierly bearing – in these spaces. Military sports days and leisure activities afforded new opportunities away from the battlefield to prove martial manliness, creating physical spectacles captured in official photography of the pageantry of the British Empire at war. The chapter thinks, too, about how these camp spaces encouraged curiosity about the new people the men were meeting and how they recounted moments of intimate and human connection that ran parallel to more antagonistic constructions of identity.

This chapter presents a novel interpretation of the August General Uprising of 1945, often known as the "August Revolution," its precursors, and its immediate impacts. The dominant interpretation of this "revolution" emphasizes the leading role of the Indochinese Communist Party at the head of the Viet Minh and sees the northern "model" of uprising established in Hanoi as the template for the "revolution" as a whole. The South, and Saigon in particular, ill fit this model. The chapter discusses the precursor to the August Uprisings: the slow collapse of the economy, the Japanese overthrow of the French regime on March 9, 1945, the end of World War II, and the surrender of the Japanese in August 1945. At this point, Instead, multiple actors, including communists (both "Stalinists" and Trotskyists), nationalists, and religious groups like the Cao Dai and the Buddhist Hoa Hao, engaged in parallel but intersecting mobilizations to seize power, which ultimately occurred under the Viet Minh banner. The chapter discusses the rampant violence under no centralized control, the arrival of the British forces temporarily occupying the city under the Allies, the French arrival in September, and the Vietnamese declaration of Resistance War in September 1945.

If the struggle in the South began in order to expel the French, violence ended up transforming the countryside, and ripping Mekong Delta society apart. The delta went through two internal fractures at the beginning of the war. The first, dating from late 1945 and into 1946, split many (but not all) Khmer from Vietnamese. The catalyst of this fracture was France's drive into the delta from late 1945, when it recruited "partisans," and especially ethnic Khmer, to fight Viet Minh forces. The French worsened ethnic antagonisms, leading to extensive violence between these two communities. The second major fracture was catalyzed by the Viet Minh's attempt to subdue rivals for leadership of the "nationalist" movement. Primed during 1945 and 1946, this second fracture occurred in 1947. For the second fracture, the chapter looks at two key turning points: Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac's decision to tactically ally with the French, and the Viet Minh killing of Hoa Hao Prophet Huynh Phu So. The violence following these two acts reshaped the South and definitively set the course for the rest of the war.

Chapter Seven, Legacies, draws the stories of some of the central characters to a close and following them home. The Armistice could not reverse the disruption of the First World War; the webs of empire were further tangled by these encounters experienced by these colonial troops. Through mutiny, migration, war marriages and memorialisation, I explore the consequences of these interactions in the years after the war’s end to show how the networks of the First World War endured beyond the end of the conflict. The experience of encounters, much like the experience of combat and frontline labour, was newly acquired ‘cultural baggage’ and part of being a veteran in the interwar colonies and dominions.

Chapter Five, ‘Behind the Lines’, explores the men’s encounters with civilians. Focusing on spaces, like cafes, estaminets and domestic homes, in both Britain and France, the chapter begins with some of the youngest participants in colonial encounters - children. The chapter then explores how these more domestic contact zones were accessed, through entitlement or earning the right to connection with civilian women and the maternal, emotional, sexual and romantic support they might offer. In these spaces, we can see the beginnings of wartime encounter seeping beyond the boundaries of the conflict, especially through marriage. While camp and leave created memories of encounters that shaped veteran culture, civilian contact zones fostered in these liminal, overlapping spaces of living alongside the war had an impact on post-war life.

This chapter first examines a variety of approaches, including that of Frantz Fanon, to exploring violence and race in a colonial context. Rejecting binary approaches, like that of Fanon, this examines the political use and cultural understanding of the concepts like "race" and "ethnicity." Rather than see race in terms of a simple imperial deployment of racist practices and beliefs against the colonized, this chapter also argues for an "appropriation" model of ideas and practices of race and ethnicity to help explain the complexity of race-talk and race practices involving France, the Vietnamese, the Khmer, Africans, and Chinese. The chapter looks at France’s initial concern with white prestige in choosing the soldiers to fight on the side of France before turning to the Vietnamese. It examines pre-existing Vietnamese understandings of race, as articulated in Vietnamese, and their combination with Western discourses of race and racial hierarchies. The chapter digs into particularly troubling texts on race, racial extinction, and cannibalism, and the implication of such texts for understanding the war as a whole. Looks at arguments over purity, hybridity, and race.

Chapter One, ‘Contexts’, is the starting point for these colonial journeys from New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies. What it was like to be a young man in Wellington, Cape Town or Kingston in 1914? The chapter explores the cultural ‘baggage’ the newly enlisted men brought with them: their expectations for the conflict and what service to the empire meant, to think about how this would influence their representation of their encounters. This chapter acts as touchstone for the rest of the book in explaining how New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies got involved with the war, how they recruited and who they sent. The intricacies of racial restrictions on the service of men of colour are explored, from those demanded by the South African government, to later decisions made about the combatant status of the British West Indies Regiment which help to understand the structural framing of the encounters the men experienced.

In the Mekong Delta, in addition to directly fighting against the communist-led Resistance, the French also allied with semi-autonomous militias against the Resistance, particularly those associated with the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. A situational logic of alliance and opposition, understood by all participants, shaped the overarching "system." Within this system, both the French and the Resistance competed to co-opt smaller groups, from parastates to local militias, to their side, which in turn tried to establish their autonomy. This chapter looks at these allies, some of which were parastates, their funding, their economic bases, and their interactions. It gives particular attention to those affiliated with the Cao Dai (Pham Cong Tac, Trinh Minh The) and the Hoa Hao militias (Tran Van Soai, Ba Cut). It also examines the complexity of control at local levels, where in some villages, up to three different political actors, including the Vietnamese state, vied for dominance.