Article in Progress: World War I Conscription, Colonialism, and Race
overview
The article, which follows a presentation I gave at the Institute of Historical Research’s International History Seminar in London, follows the trial of a young man named Rupert Ruben. Ruben, the son of Baghdadi Jews who had lived in Bombay and Singapore, was sent to England for boarding school as a boy. The outbreak of World War I saw him conscripted for military service. When he failed to report, his case was the subject of a multi-year legal battle over whether he met two exceptions to Military Service Act 1916: being “ordinarily domiciled in His Majesty’s Dominions abroad,” or being “of unmixed Asiatic descent.” Numerous government agencies and the military took “evidence” of his racial heritage (parsing at whiles his descent, domicile, language skills, and physical fitness) and attempted to disentangle the empire’s complicated layers of citizenship and residency. Rupert Ruben’s case illuminates how matters of national security, seen most clearly in the act of conscripting citizens for military service, reified deeply nebulous ideas of race and Britain’s unwritten constitution, intensifying the state’s authority to categorize and compel colonial subjects.