How are soldiers made? Why do they fight? Military sociology and history consider these questions Eurocentrically, with the armies of Western nation-states. Soldiers of Empire rethinks relations between armed forces and society with Indian, British and African troops in World War II. Soldiers of empire in a total war of nations, they scuttle conventional accounts. This book sees the army as a group formation machine articulated with colonial society. It reconceives discipline as ritual and battle as structure. Combat can self-generate; it produces as well as consumes the will to sacrifice. Group formation and sacrifice, totems and blood, position the soldier anthropologically, as a human rather than a national or civilizational type. There is a gap between the experience of military service and battle and the modern and national categories we bring to understanding and representing that experience. In this book, soldiers reappear as ancient and cosmopolitan, the meaning of their combats irreducible to the national histories that monopolize them.