In August of 2021, both the US and UK militaries abandoned many Afghan translators and other service workers who had played key roles in operations during the two decades of occupation in Afghanistan. In the chaos of evacuation, their labor was forgotten. More generally, recent political, military, and public health crises have reignited debates about whose work the state values, rewards, or forgets.

This is hardly new. In the military conflicts that shaped the first half of the twentieth century, the recruitment, provision, and compensation of ordinary laborers emerged as central problems for the British and American empires. Understandably, analyses of state expansion have focused on the politicians, philanthropists, soldiers, and volunteers who played prominent roles during the conflicts of the twentieth century.

But what of those who worked for the British and American governments in the service of soldiers and senators? The men and women organizing elections, scrubbing government steps, baking army bread, or building barracks also played a vital role in the expansion of imperial power. These understudied laborers experienced first-hand the cultural hierarchies structuring their paid and unpaid service to the state.

This panel purposefully inverts the logic of the state by centering laborers who have, in the past, been undervalued and unrecognized. Highlighting the role of war in shaping service to the state, the presentations focus on the interplay of race, class, and gender in shaping ideas about work. The panel brings together the experiences of men and women serving at home and abroad in the service of the British and American empires. By combining different forms of service labor from a broad geographic space, this panel offers new insights into the impact of war on society; the growth of state and empire; ruptures and continuities between war and peace; and the role of gender, race, class in shaping the meaning of labor.

Thomas Stephens and Holger Droessler focus on the experiences of enlisted and civilian workers laboring for imperial armies, respectively, during the First and Second World Wars. They illustrate how Britons and Solomon Islanders navigated and challenged the hegemonic gendered, classed, and racial ideas structuring military work for the British and the United States military. They provide an opportunity to reflect on the role of race, gender, and empire in shaping the treatment of workers in Western Europe and the Pacific.

Melissa E. Blair and Hannah Alms examine the role of women’s work in the operations of the U.S. federal government. They argue that two key aspects of the early twentieth century state – the growing federal bureaucracy and the 1944 presidential election – relied on women’s efforts. The contrast between professional political organizing, in one paper, and office cleaning, in another, presents a fruitful opportunity for considering the role of race and class in shaping women’s work and their treatment by the state.

Together, all four presentations attend to the experiences of workers to offer new insight into war and state-building across the globe, through the lens of gender, race, class, and empire.