Battle and culture: British imperial forces in Southeast Asia in the Second World War

This thesis concerns the social basis of the organization and use of violence in British imperial context in Southeast Asia during the Second World War. It focuses on the cultural aspects of the processes involved in constituting and employing ground combat forces recruited from colonized populations. Such forces raise fundamental questions regarding the relevant social and cultural contexts of the organization and use of force. Accounts of military group formation and the making of wartime violence based on national societies and their militaries can systematically obscure the elementary, transnational human capacities at work. Comparative study of non-national troops reveals the character and nature of the general categories of meaning involved in the organization and use of force.; Taking the perspective of the military organization of society, the thesis addresses the place of ethnicity in the constitution of British imperial forces; the role and nature of the disciplinary processes involved in producing soldiers from culturally diverse populations; the ritual evocation of the sentiment of group belonging in military life; and the contradictory political and ideological context within which British imperial, and particularly Indian, forces waged the Second World War. Through an analysis of the structure of battle in the Burma campaign, it outlines self-generating and intensified forms of battlefield violence that are not dependent on racist and ideological constructions of 'self' and 'other' derived from national societies.; The thesis has implications for understanding the character of force and war in world politics. It anatomizes the transnational dimensions of military group formation and soldiers' participation in wartime violence. In doing so, the 'ethnic imaginary' through which the social bases of the organization and use of force have been understood is called into question. Within its terms, military organization and wartime violence are domesticated; they are seen as arising from soldiers' identification with, and commitments to, homelands. War becomes a product of human differences. By contrast, the thesis argues that war is dependent for its making on what humans share in common: the capacity to be organized into armed forces willing to suffer and inflict casualties on one another.