Little Wars of Empire with Taylor Soja

Join NACBS to discuss Taylor Soja’s latest book, Little Wars of Empire: British veterans in a colonial world, c. 1885-1918. Antoinette Burton will join Soja in conversation.

September 11 at 12pm EST/ 11am CST/ 10am MST / 9am PST / 5pm BST

“Little Wars of Empire is a group biography of British veterans who experienced multiple wars across the British empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain was constantly at war in its colonies, defending against anti-colonial resistance or trying to expand its influence. The veterans of these wars did not disappear once they were over, and many of them went on to later experience World War I.

By using personal sources such as letters, diaries, and photograph albums, this book works to show how colonial violence and British military history depend upon one another, and argues that colonial war fundamentally shaped the British experience of empire. This was true for all kinds of British veterans, from British Army soldiers and officers to nurses and military families, whose experiences demonstrate the central place of colonial violence to British life."

Taylor Soja is an assistant professor of history and affiliate faculty member in WGSS at Illinois State University, where she studies the history of colonial war in the British empire to 1918. Her book, Little Wars of Empire: British Veterans in a Colonial World, c.1885-1918 was published in 2026 by Manchester University Press.

Antoinette Burton is professor of History, Swanlund Chair and director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A feminist historian of empire and archives, she’s also committed to anti-colonial methods and world histories from below. Her most recent publication is Gender History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2024). An edited collection, in collaboration with Renisa Mawani and Samantha Frost and entitled Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds, was published with Bloomsbury UK in 2025.