The two world wars undoubtedly created significant difficulties in terms of the regulation of sexual relationships, especially given the perennial stereotypical fears on the part of the authorities that sexuality might release a dangerous volatility subversive of discipline and, conceivably, a threat to white female sanctity and the 'racial codes fundamental to the colonial order'. While the focus of Killingray and Parsons is upon African soldiers, including, in the case of Parsons, the question of sanctioned brothels, Peers examines the question of British troops in cantonments and the particular challenges to the authorities represented by venereal disease and drink. Providing inter alia a useful survey of the differing kinds of cantonments and a discussion of the changing policy towards lock hospitals, Peers suggests the authorities were more concerned to target supply than demand. This rested on the belief that Indian society itself represented an extraordinary threat to moral health in a situation in which it seemed all but impossible to reform the character of the British soldier. Greater regulation of cantonments as represented by Act XXII of 1864 was a product of the Indian Mutiny.
Peers also alludes to the greater efforts to encourage temperance in the late Victorian army.
It would perhaps have been useful, therefore, if either Peers, or Killingray in his introduction, had drawn greater parallels with the regulation of prostitution and drink in the Victorian army at home with particular reference to the Contagious Diseases Acts. In terms of the influence of colonial armed forces over colonial policy, Zirkel shows how a very small colonial military establishment, which was never part of the regular army and which relied largely upon reserve officers, came to exercise influence far in excess of its numerical strength in the German African colonies. By contrast, there was a more haphazard emergence of the same policy of extermination against the Maji-Maji rising in German East Africa. As in so many other areas of colonial policy, the actions of those on the spot determined events. Similarly, Thomas's study of the French army's military operations in Algeria in the closing years of the Fourth Republic demonstrates how assumptions on the part of the French military about the nature of the FLN and its military wing, the ALN, drove the government's response to the war.