Pensions, Posts, and Petitions

Abstract

This chapters shifts focus away from the collective toward the individual, considering how indigenous veterans, war widows, and orphans evoked participation in the war to ensure access to state provision. It examines how actors often considered marginal in the colonial order set about claiming their legal entitlements from the state. Using the correspondence between individual claimants and the colonial administration, this chapter explores the complexity of the daily negotiation between the colonized, their intermediaries, and the apparatus of the colonial state. It considers the extent to which the colonial state’s conception of its duties to indigenous rights-holders and its attempts to meet these duties overlapped and/or contrasted with claimants’ understanding of their own rights. In doing so, it exposes the variety of forms of contact between the colonial state and its subjects that emerged as a result of the Great War and that heretofore have largely gone unstudied.