This groundbreaking study explores the dynamics of race and masculinity to provide fresh historical insight into the First World War and its imperial dimensions, by examining the experiences of Jamaicans who served in British regiments. Despite their exclusion from the battlefield, the author shows that the experience of war was invaluable in allowing veterans to appropriate codes of heroism, sacrifice and citizenship in order to wage their own battles for independence on their return home, culminating in the nationalist upsurge of the late 1930s.