The Mesopotamian campaign during World War I was a critical moment in Britain's position in the Middle East. With British and British Indian troops fighting in places which have become well-known in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, such as Basra, the campaign led to the establishment of the British Mandate in Iraq in 1921. Nadia Atia believes that in order to fully understand Britain's policies in creating the nascent state of Iraq, we must first look at how the war shaped Britons' conceptions of the region. Atia does this through a cultural and military history of the changing British perceptions of Mesopotamia since the period before World War I when it was under Ottoman rule. Drawing on a wide variety of historical and literary sources, including the writing of key figures such as Gertrude Bell, Mark Sykes and Arnold Wilson, but focusing mainly on the views and experiences of ordinary men and women whose stories and experiences of the war have less frequently been told, Atia examines the cultural and social legacy of World War I in the Middle East and how this affected British attempts to exert influence in the region.

Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over??550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service. The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials. The Coolie's Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labor, constructing a distinct geography of the war--from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.