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This article reconsiders important aspects of African participation in the First World War, both in Europe and in Africa itself, as part of the British and French empires. More specifically, it explores demobilization at the end of the war in comparison with that process in Europe, paying close attention to the particularities of the colonial context. The article argues that, although French and British Africa were integrated significantly into their metropole’s war efforts between 1914 and 1918, the experience of demobilization in these colonies does not conform to George Mosse’s ‘brutalization’ thesis, which has been so influential in understanding postwar events in parts of Europe. Africans who participated in the British and French war efforts did not emerge from their experiences to roil the political landscape with discontent and violence, even if the effects of the war were still important in many areas of the continent. Further, the story of demobilization in Africa demonstrates the importance of attending to the specific context of the colonial ‘peripheries’, even as we recognize the important links that connect them to the metropolitan ‘centres’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In interwar France the Lyonnais physician Marius Piéry undertook an ambitious Neo-Hippocratic research program to study how atmospheric and terrestrial environments influenced health. Lyon had a number of institutions linked to the colonies and was a center for the training of military physicians. Colonial physicians had a long tradition of contending with the diseases of tropical environments, and their ideas and many returned colonials circulated in Lyon and its region. Piéry was a physician during World War I and published on military medical topics. He also included colonial and military health concerns in his more mature works from the 1930s. An advocate of the close study of the physical sciences, he investigated the radioactive gases of health spas and the effects of altitude on pulmonary tuberculosis, and he directed a meteorological observatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]