Introduction

1This chapter examines selected examples from collections of First World War posters from across British India and French Algeria. Current historiographies of colonial participation in the First World War provide an important cultural context for understanding why poster artists used stereotypes as a form of public mediation.1 The following analysis of aesthetic form and political function will use examples of propaganda posters that provide both a comparative and critical approach to the study of Empire, although remaining aware that the impact of propaganda can only be estimated because there are no known sources of precise measurement including recruitment figures themselves. Colonial troops and their representation in posters designed for the First World War are just one aspect of the effort introduced by wartime propagandists to secure recruits from distant shores as well as to maintain local morale in the face of conflict.

2Britain and France entered the First World War as allies under the 1904 Entente Cordiale. In the face of the large-scale loss of life, voluntary recruitment numbers in Britain had fallen by December 1915 and comparatively low population in France limited the rates of conscription. Consequently, each Empire turned to its colonial possessions to provide additional troops as a potential solution to recruitment problems. The use of colonial troops signified the power and control of Empire, and this was exemplified by their representation in posters of the First World War.2 However, the use of colonial troops had a range of implications for the future relationship of each Empire with its colonial dominions. Recruitment from colonial territories produced issues that were far-reaching and, including logistical, moral and ethical implications of colonial participation. The troops from British India, for example, served on the Western Front only in 1914-1915 (with some cavalry remaining until 1918), as there were concerns about pitting non-whites against white troops in battle.3 The deployment of mixed units in the French Army that included battalions of troupes indigènes saw the increased presence of French African troops in Europe.4 The physical presence of non-white troops in Europe prompted European public debate about race and the legitimacy of their deployment.5

3Although there have been many publications featuring First World War poster propaganda, few have looked in depth at Harold Lasswell’s definition of propaganda, that it reflected the ‘communization of warfare [and] necessitated the mobilization of the civilian mind’.6 Poster artists were in a unique position to use aesthetic means to contribute political messages. Recent scholarly work by David Monger on the history of the National War Aims Committee in Britain and the role of propaganda – which Monger identifies as having focused on the ‘sensationalist’ elements of wartime propaganda – has meant that ‘patriotic messages... are largely overlooked’.7 Through an analysis of selected recruitment posters, this chapter explains how the political environment helped secure an aesthetic that relied on the use of stereotypes in the depiction of colonial troops by artists of the British and French Empires. This analysis of the representation of colonial troops in First World War poster propaganda will enhance our understanding of the way in which Empire was constructed, a significant part of a mass and far reaching campaign of wartime communication.

The construction of empire

4One approach to understanding the stereotypes in colonial representation in the cultural, political and aesthetic historiography of the First World War and beyond is through the construction of imperialism itself. Britain and France were the largest colonial empires in the world in 1914. The rapid growth of imperialism in the nineteenth century meant that comparisons between colonial powers were inevitable and ‘key differences existed between French and British colonial practices and ideologies which… were often positioned in opposition to each other discursively’.8 These differences are relevant here because they influenced the artistic representations of colonial troops of the two empires during the First World War.

5In total, North Africa contributed over a quarter of a million men to the French war effort, largely facilitated by the recruitment and training of Algerian troupes indigènes and colonial settlers who comprised a militarised civilian presence in Algeria following the French conquest in 1830.9 In the British Empire, the Indian Army, made up of largely indigenous troops and white British officers, had been established in the mid-eighteenth century with the East India Company raising ‘native infantry regiments’ in Bombay, Madras and Bengal.10 By 1914, the Indian Army comprised a large proportion of disenfranchised farm workers who were trained in modern weaponry and tactics and formed a ‘reservoir of cheap military labour’ for the British.11 Over the course of the First World War almost one and a half million recruits represented British India. David Omissi and Santanu Das have identified that the majority of these soldiers were from the Punjab, Nepal or the North West Frontier regions where heavy recruitment took place, as they were considered exemplars of the ‘martial races’.12

6In a situation where conscription was neither feasible nor desirable, the recruitment drive in India was justified in Britain by means of propaganda that sought to craft an ideological legitimacy. The representation of India’s voluntary support for Britain entailed the simplistic representation of Indian powerlessness and a British sense of purpose rather than the events of British-Indian colonial history, such as the Indian Uprising in 1857.13 India was presented as the exotic success story of the British Empire. Similarly, because ‘Algeria was France’, North Africa held the greatest significance for the French Empire.14 The colonial imagination, as Frith identifies, was never simply a binary between the coloniser and the colonised ‘other’, but was shaped by national colonial rivalries.15 The French focus on assimilation compared with the British emphasis on establishing trade and exploitation made the difference between the models of construction of Empire evident.16 Although the context of recruitment of troops in Britain and France was shaped by their differing approaches to colonisation, they found commonality in patriotism and the practice of ‘martial race’ theory.

7‘Martial race’ theory typically championed the natural qualities of the Gurkha, Sikh and Pathan soldier whose peculiar combination of natural physique and temperament, believed to be a production of his environment, saw preferential military recruitment by the British Empire during the First World War.17 Nineteenth-century ways of thinking about race and social hierarchy popularised martial race theory. In France, military leaders considered that troupes indigènes were not suitable for military service because they believed that racial identity predetermined their unsuitability to contemporary European warfare.18 Although Algerian troops gained renown for their ‘warlike spirit’, they lacked the ‘cold stoicism’ of the native French, and were described as savage and aggressive warriors who fought valiantly but lacked the French patriotic sense of ‘calm self-sacrifice’.19 In this way, martial race theory contributed to the ‘racial’ selection of troops to serve the French and British Empires during the First World War.

8As a result of these stereotyped views, the representation of colonial troops in the posters of the First World War reflected a limited understanding of cultural difference. Underpinning the stereotypes in the presentation of colonial troops are complex histories of race. Wartime posters contained images of Indian and North African soldiers fighting a war that reinforced the imperial superiority that subordinated them. Furthermore, through their participation, colonial soldiers appeared to support imperial ideology.20 Ideological structures facilitated colonial participation and martial race theory ensured that this was not merely explained, but set up a viable construct of colonial control as colonial fighting forces were integrated into existing troop formations on the Western Front and beyond.21 Ultimately, their representation was defined by a collection of stereotypes that created the illusion of cohesion and colonial understanding in the French and British metropole and beyond to the colonies themselves. Many of these stereotypical representations of colonial troops found their way into the recruiting posters of the First World War.

The use of posters as recruitment propaganda

9During the First World War, French and British artists created propaganda posters that were part of the mass communication of political messages, providing a vital communication link between the government and the community. Not only did the display of posters provide a visual interruption on the street, they attempted to boost civilian morale, linking aesthetic form with political function. On the home fronts and in the Empires more broadly, they communicated what Monger calls ‘supranational patriotic propaganda’, in which posters ‘proclaimed ties of culture, language or ideals and could use comparisons to reflect credit upon imperial nations in the war’.22 In their representation of colonial troops, British and French artists highlighted the large numbers of imperial troops who participated. This helped to define the First World War as a truly global conflict. This new context brought about a new image of empire and its peoples in the metropole as well as the colonies and dominions.

10Many of the poster artists worked internationally during the conflict and this helped to create transnational sensibilities in themes and aesthetic trends. Clearly, the artists were adept at producing strong images that communicated on many different levels to the metropole and to colonial audiences. Importantly for an audience in which levels of illiteracy might be high, posters were visual as well as textual, and both were integral to the immediacy of the viewing experience. Vying for attention in a public space, they could be experienced in a momentary glance or at length, and it was the artists’ responsibility to ensure that a broad audience would understand the visual cues. As an artistic medium, they were uniquely accessible, not confined to gallery hours, and they were a highly popular and collectable form of propaganda. These are some of the reasons that the poster medium was harnessed in wartime by governments, organisations and private individuals around the world for communication to the metropole and beyond.23

11This being said, it is difficult to estimate the success of poster propaganda during the First World War because there are relatively few records of reception and we cannot be sure that people volunteered because of the posters themselves.24 However, there are some references to posters in correspondence that suggest that relevant authorities took a keen interest in how the posters were received: such analysis of public opinion was considered to be very important and can give us some insight into the production of posters. For example, in a letter to the Mayor of Cher, the French Minister of Agriculture requested to be notified when the war loan posters were displayed, and that any positive or negative responses to them should be noted and the Minister informed.25

12Direct correspondence between central Government officials and provincial ones on the home front is of assistance in the interpretation of the reception of posters, which were of vital importance in gauging public morale. The interest that French and British Governments developed in the control of the production of posters and their content reflected their broader interest in controlling and monitoring public opinion during the war.

13In France each poster was registered and stamped with an authorised visa number and there was a required fee determined by the size of the image. Meanwhile, in Britain, the process of control changed according to requirement. By May 1916, the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee publications sub-department estimated that it had printed ‘nearly 12.5 million copies of 164 posters of various shapes and sizes’.26 The production of poster propaganda was continued by various government departments until 1917 when the National War Aims Committee (NWAC) was established to ensure that the public were reminded of the sacrifices that came with total war.27 Censorship in both Britain and France functioned to monitor the content of negative propaganda that was unpopular with governments and the public in Britain and France.28 This allowed for the strict control over what was produced, where posters were distributed and how the information contained on them was represented.

British stereotypes

14From the 1890s and into the 1900s British poster artists favoured and popularised simple designs.29 John Hassell and Eric Kennington were artists who deliberately chose a pared-down aesthetic in their recruitment poster designs, partly due to the popularity of the simplicity of the image and also because it was in keeping with each artists’ chosen style. The late 1890s was the height of the Art Nouveau movement in Britain (championed by Aubrey Beardsley, and poster artists John Hassell and Dudley Hardy). With the popular age of the French poster in decline, British poster design began to take off and indeed ‘supplanted the French in public esteem’.30 The art poster now gave way to the modern poster and was expressed in avant-garde Britain through the homogeneous representation of masculinity as a way to depict national identity more broadly.31

15The images of masculinity that frequently appeared in British recruitment posters of 1914 feature the ‘ideal soldier’ as a rosy-cheeked youth. The image of the soldier as ‘ready to do his duty’ was derived from depictions of soldiers that related back to the Napoleonic era. The representation of the soldier as an ideal masculine type was again manifest in the late nineteenth-century in children’s dress, literature, and games that saw the reinforcement of military culture in younger generations who would later be of military age.32 Importantly, in pictorial posters of the First World War, the single soldier figure stands as an emblem of British imperial power.

16Furthermore, single figure generic soldier images were copied in recruitment posters throughout the British Dominions and in India. Printed by The Bombay Times c.1914, the untitled soldier in Figure 1 is superimposed onto a red map of British India, one region being targeted by Britain for voluntary recruits during the First World War. The map as a ‘background’ is a genre of poster that artists used to delineate territory and draw attention to its significance. British recruitment posters were frequently constructed to draw the war closer to distant shores. Distance from Britain was a prohibitive factor in recruitment from the colonies. While some considered military service as an opportunity for adventure, there were reasons why physical distance was a disincentive to volunteering. In addition, there were also social, intellectual, political and cultural differences between India and Europe that were important factors in considering whether to enlist and some of them are evident in Figure 1. The single soldier in Figure 1 can be identified from his uniform as a Sikh wearing a khaki turban and shorts and carrying a rifle with the bayonet extended. He is standing ‘at the ready’ to do his duty or izzat.33 The physical posture is one of responsibility rather than aggression. Underneath the image in a separate box is the Urdu text that appealed to Sikhs to enlist to fight for Britain, ‘This soldier is defending India. He is protecting his home and family. The best way to help your family is to join the army’.34 The poster copies the genre of the ‘ideal’ soldier used widely in Britain and its dominions, including India.

17The poster (Figure 1) attempts to offer evidence that Indian culture had not been subsumed by the British military. The artist addressed the civilian concerns for money, uniform and social status and elevated them to national concerns. The message for India (as with Algeria in the French context), entertained the possibility of the enhancement of status as a result of coming to Britain’s aid at a time of crisis. Through the use of the soldier stereotype, the poster expressed a shared intellectual and cultural ideology with Britain. This was in direct contrast to the reality of soldiers’ experience that Santanu Das summarises as ‘frustration and resentment at the racist ideology of the British army’.35

18Especially alienating to colonial audiences was the way that Britain tried to address physical distance by promoting group depictions of the soldiers who represented the British Empire. One of the better-known recruitment posters that directly aimed to attract recruits by promoting allegiance to Empire was the 1915 poster by Arthur Wardle, The Empire needs men Wardle depicted an anthropomorphic representation of Britain as the male Lion on a rock flanked by a pride of ‘colonial cubs’ which included Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand. The secondary text on Wardle’s 1915 poster encourages the view to ‘Answer the call. Helped by the Young Lions the Old Lion defies his foes. Enlist now’. Rather than a view of equality, this poster fostered the view that the colonies existed to serve the British Empire.

19In an untitled poster from the Imperial War Museum collection (Art. IWM. PST. 0354) three Indian Army soldiers are depicted; a Gurkha flanked by two Sikhs, stand in front of a British flag and bring the imperial context into sharp focus. The evolution of the single soldier stereotype to a collective soldier image communicated greater symbolic meaning. It illustrated the artist’s appeal at the individual local level as well as the global efforts made toward the participation in war. The individual was attracted by promises in the text below the image which encouraged the potential recruit with ‘The Profession of the soldier, enough comfort, enough respect, less danger, good wages, look at these three people.’36 However, Indian participation was also seen as part of a global response by the British Empire to the First World War. The Sikh and Gurkha uniforms worn by the soldiers drew attention to participation by particular regions. In France, this was symbolised by the unique uniforms worn by soldiers who were affiliated with specific African regions. Uniforms became key identifiers of specific ethnic groups in wartime. A further example of the specificity of ethnic representation is found in an Urdu text-based poster produced by an unknown Indian artist (c. 1918) that contained a specific appeal to the Brahmins and Rajputs of Awadh. This poster details the injustice of German aggression and explains to the Indian audience ‘if you refrain from participating in such a war for the cause of truth you will be failing to do your duty and earn a good name for yourself.’37

20A challenge to both British and French governments in requesting imperial troops was the potential threat of colonial uprisings.38 The French rationalised that the benefits in having colonial troops participate far outweighed the possibility of an uprising and ‘they could be dealt with later if they could not be avoided completely’.39 Algerian commitment to loyalty in fighting for France was tied more to the ‘hope of reward or a desire to retain privileges than to a genuine French patriotism’.40 While not everyone embraced these sentiments, we will never know how many volunteers were truly voluntary. In Algeria recruiting agents were paid a bonus for each ‘volunteer’ who was enlisted.41 The British, who had learned some difficult lessons as a result of the Indian Uprising of 1857-1859, were more gently persuasive in calling for volunteers. The cautious approach by the British was reflected in the depiction of Indian forces (including those of present day Pakistan and Nepal) and those of the increasingly independent Dominion forces in recruitment posters. These posters were subdued rather than grandiose in scale or gesture, and colonial forces were depicted in a supportive role to the dominant British Empire. There is minimal differentiation of Indian ethnic groups represented; namely Sikhs, Gurkhas and Punjabis. Later in the war, when British recruitment became more urgent, Britain, contrary to the ‘Martial Races’ theory, accepted an increasingly diverse ethnic contingent of Indian soldiers. The poster designs from this period became more dynamic and changed to reflect the need for new recruits.

21Overall, British propaganda posters sought to elevate the viewer from the politics of war and to engage them in ideals of civilisation. The soldiers they depicted were fighting to better their world and their personal situation or that of their family, and by extension this would benefit Britain and its allies who sought liberty, honour, democracy and justice.42 The propaganda war was fought on grounds of personal emotional investment. Twentieth-century Britain was relying on individuals to maintain the value of the imperial goals of the past in order to win the war in a ‘modern’ present and future.

French stereotypes

22These dynamics operated in French North Africa too. In referencing its military past, French artists ensured the aspirations of ‘greatness, glory and prestige’ would continue in the face of modern warfare.43 French poster artists, the majority of whom trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, were formally educated in the academic style, a proportion of which was history painting. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries France had a history of large military paintings seen by a privileged few. Throughout the twentieth century the advance of Modernist styles meant that formal academic history painting lost a popular audience. Consequently, many of the artists were exploring a variety of ways to gain artistic employment and experience especially during wartime, when painting commissions were scarce.

23Poster design, therefore, offered artists a way to represent multiple narratives within one striking image, a condensed version of a large-scale history painting. Success was dependent on the resolution of a clearly articulated visual language, a clear message during the chaos of the First World War. Posters were a way of communicating with impact on a mass scale and, such was their popularity, they were sold to collectors and an interested public in France, to raise money for the war effort. Two prominent poster designers, Victor Prouvé (1858-1943) and Maurice Romberg de Vaucorbeil (1861-1943), both spent time in Africa developing their artistic skills, Prouvé in Tunisia and Romberg in Morocco during the latter part of the nineteenth century.44 It was a world that these two artists were privileged to know, and the experience lent them insight into colonial life in Africa. Despite their experiences, however, they depicted stereotyped views of North African soldiers that were both persistent and typical in French propaganda during the First World War.

24John MacKenzie and Richard Fogarty have identified the use of stereotypes in the depiction of North African soldiers in the First World War.45 The posters, created for the French public, demonstrated a limited understanding of the North African experience during the First World War. Fogarty argues that use of stereotyping of colonial images in First World War posters reflected an ambiguity in the political position of French colonial participation in the First World War created by the presence of colonial troops.46 Since colonization in 1830, the Algerians who were governed by French colonial administration, had been promised assimilation with metropolitan France. With Algerian troops fighting in France, the debt owed to colonial soldiers became startlingly apparent. In an analysis of posters depicting French North African soldiers, Fogarty argues that the exotic stereotypes reveal attempts to use the posters to boost morale in France, and also to remind the French metropole of France’s promises to Algeria.47

25The poster Ce que nous devons à nos colonies [What we owe to our colonies], a single colour lithograph by prominent art nouveau artist Victor Prouvé (see Figure 2) was printed in 1918 by Berger-Levrault. From the small scale design it is possible to see the influence of the printer, Berger-Levrault on the structure of the composition, which was influenced by philatelic printing.48 Two palm trees frame the text and the figure, with some fruit along the lower centre. The central figure is a North African cavalryman, a spahi, depicted in a moment where the halter and bit inside the mouth of the horse is pulled tightly and the head of the horse remonstrates in protest towards the viewer. In his analysis of the image, Fogarty suggests that the representation of the North African framed by palm trees and cacti are derivative of ‘wild territories brought under French control’.49 The text on the poster refers to the contribution made by the colonies to France and the resulting debt France owed to the colonies. Prouvé articulated in the poster text that the pre-war ambivalence of many in France towards the colonies presented an ideological conundrum for many of the troupes indigènes who volunteered to fight for France in the First World War. The text in translation begins:

Before the war, not everyone understood France’s need for colonies or protectorates. We all know now what we owe to the thousands of indigenous volunteers who fought for beloved France...50

26The poster reinforced the duty France had to colonial nations to meet their needs in terms of education and civilisation and in doing this to justify its continued presence in colonial territories.51

27The design of Prouvé’s poster contains a small image with a proportionately equal or slightly larger amount of text. The overall scale of the lithograph in single colour brown ink meant that the monochrome poster lacked visual interest. It was not eye-catching and its small size (65cm x 50 cm) meant that it did not rely on colour, size or a heavily designed image to attract attention. This poster was one of a series printed by Berger-Levrault (Paris-Nancy) in 1918 for the education of the populace. This series of posters embraced a diverse range of topics including the limitation of the consumption of alcohol and bread, and the orphans of war. These smaller posters were perhaps more likely to be displayed in schools for the purposes of community education in France. For large public spaces, such as railway stations and streets, there needed to be a flourish of colour to grab the viewer’s attention.

28One of the most striking posters of the First World War was Maurice Romberg’s Compagnie Algérienne-Emprunt de la Libération of 1918. In the centre of the poster against a bright yellow background, a North African man stands on horseback in his stirrups as he raises his right arm with the hand extended and the palm facing the viewer. The single palm raised in the air was a symbol that communicated openness and the willingness to sacrifice. The billowing robes reinforced the stereotype of Algerians as wild fighters and asserted difference between the French metropole and its colonial people.52

29The strength of the soldier’s stance is indicative of the uncontrollable side of human nature often popularised in the Romantic imagery of the late nineteenth century. The image is reminiscent of images of French military leaders, including Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) as well as the Republican image of Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830). The fear of violence as expressed in the relationship between the horse and rider is a familiar trope in which the tension of unleashed energy was constructed for the imagination of the French public who would have seen the poster.53

30The horse can be read as an emblem of the struggle for power through the violence in war and indeed in the imperial relationship between France and its colonial nations. The text in the upper right in Arabic calligraphy reads ‘In the name of God… Subscribe’.54 It is a poster that seeks to proclaim that the North African on horseback represents the dominant presence of Algerians fighting in the name of Allah for the liberty of France. The power relationship brings a new focus to the promise of victory through unity between Muslim and Christian, with the objective being the preservation and advancement of France and Algeria through participation in the War. In the posters that have been analysed so far we see aspects of the nineteenth^-century Romantic tradition that carry with them a message of nationalism in the French Republican tradition which was used to unite people, including those from distant lands. During the First World War, Charles Fouqueray (1869-1956) created a number of posters including one in the series Journée de l’Armée d’Afrique et des troupes coloniales [African Army and Colonial Troops Day] in 1917 (Art. IWM. PST.11182). The poster features a trio of African infantry soldiers in the foreground preparing to charge, while a rearing white horse carrying a North African Arab with his distinctive turban and flowing white robes dominates the mid-ground. A tricoleur occupies the right of the composition and in the left, a tear drop contains the portrait of a generic French officer from the Foreign Legion. The Arabic text along the top of the poster in translation reads ‘For the sake of truth and justice with France’ as it calls for money to support the colonial troops. The depiction of the dominant presence of colonial soldiers in the midst of conflict reinforces their unique racial identity as well as underlining that all colonial troops, including North Africans, fought for France.

31The stereotypical representation of the soldier was not unique to colonial soldiers, but was present in the history of French military portraiture. Military portraiture has a long tradition that stems from the Napoleonic period in which wood block prints were made featuring soldiers in uniform. The iconography of the soldier in print known as imagerie d’Epinal, was largely popularised as a self-conscious and naïve style.55 Imagerie d’Epinal prints functioned to celebrate the living and remember the dead.56

32During the Third Republic schools promoted texts that included tales of military prowess from the Napoleonic era as a way of reinforcing confidence in the French history of conflict.57 Although the images and texts that represented the ‘ideal soldier’ prevailed throughout Europe and were not particular to France, they served as cultural precedents to the iconography of the soldier in the First World War.58

33In the 1918 poster Compagnie Algerienne by Lucien Jonas, the returning Algerian soldier embraced what is presumed to be his family in the market place with his son looking up at his resplendent uniform. It is a reified image of domestic life in North Africa. As Richard Fogarty points out, the reality was ‘that as more than half of Algerians who served were conscripted, many would no doubt have preferred not to have left in the first place.’59 The little boy holds a string that pulls a toy cannon which ostensibly makes a link between the French Napoleonic imagery and North Africa. This image is aimed at reminding the French metropole of the service of North Africans by appealing for money through subscription to the national war loan and, in doing so, hasten the North African soldiers’ return with Victory.

34The posters of the First World War combine this element of fresh naivety and simplicity from the popular lithographic prints of the late nineteenth-century with contemporary messages. The ideal of French colonialism was presented to the French people allowing them to take such a journey of cultural understanding as the stereotypes allowed. It was, according to Martin Evans, a form of cultural tourism that imported a seamless understanding of expansionism and civilisation.60 However, this view is very different from experience of the African soldiers themselves. During the war, ‘Army officials noted that propaganda in the press, designed to fill the Algerians with pride, actually frightened them and discouraged enlistment’.61

Conclusion

35This chapter has shown how the political environments in Britain and France helped create an aesthetic that relied on the use of stereotypes in the depiction of colonial troops by artists of the British and French Empires. Posters played a vital role in the cultural understanding of the war, as material traces of those former cultures of Empire, and they continue to shape how we understand the conflict today. While the French and British artists used different aesthetic approaches to the depiction of their colonial troops, what they shared was a sense of the importance that colonial troops played in the progress of the First World War. Both nations relied heavily on the participation of colonial troops to support the numbers of soldiers deployed, but also to boost morale on the home front.

36Yet despite this commonality, there are significantly different ideological and historical underpinnings between France and Britain. These differences make the comparison of artistic representation by Britain and France complex. The duality of audience meant that posters frequently engaged with both a metropolitan audience in appeals for finance and to the colonial audience for recruitment purposes. However, an understanding of the history of the depiction of the ‘ideal soldier’ helps to explain how the differences and similarities of the historical depiction of colonial troops can be explained within a larger context of the images of soldiers at war.

37It is within this complexity and juxtaposition of images that we see changes in the way race came to be depicted in the twentieth-century. David Olusoga asserts that there were differences in the behaviour of the allied nations towards non-white peoples as a consequence of the war itself.62 There is evidence of this transition in the artistic representations of colonial troops in the poster propaganda. The First World War brought about new contexts for colonial people in the public imagination and this is reflected in the imagery later in the conflict.

38British artists, while sensitive to the cultural differences of their colonial peoples, favoured simple designs with bold outlining and generic ‘ideal soldier images’ which sought to show that Britain was a united and modern nation at war. On the other hand, French artists used lithography to invoke a sense of history: each poster image functioning as a compressed history painting that embodied the past, the present and the future. Aesthetic differences reflected political change, and both empires found it necessary to use stereotyping in their poster propaganda to stimulate recruitment, public morale and to suppress political difference for the purposes of homogenising public opinion. Colonial soldiers were celebrated in the poster propaganda for their military prowess and they were thus incorporated into the aesthetic past and military present of the French and British nations through the posters of the First World War.