Measures that address racial and ethnic inequalities have been an important subject of legal and political discussion in many countries over the last decades. The legal questions include the meanings and purposes of equality, adequate methods of legal interpretation, and the possible role of constitutional courts in promoting social transformation. Participants in this debate also raise issues such as the role of the state in a democracy, the changing nature of racism, the social meanings of race and its correlation with national identity. This broad range of questions reveals the immense relevance of this topic for comparative analysis. An adequate understanding of this complex subject requires an examination of how law and race interact in different jurisdictions to produce and legitimate particular social arrangements. This is the case of Brazil, a country that implemented large scale affirmative action policies in the last fifteen years, a process that generated an intense debate about the social importance of race in a country that has historically represented itself as a racial democracy.

Chapter Six, ‘On the Wards’, shifts to hospitals. Hospitals were sites of colonial entanglement in the ‘in-between’ zones bestriding active combat and civilian life. Despite the apparent limitations of the space, where men were rendered immobile by the injury or illness, hospitals facilitated encounters, particularly between patients and nurses. For nurses in these spaces, new responsibilities were expected, as chaperones of racial, national and sexual boundaries. Using not only the men’s letters and diaries but those of the women who nursed them – from Britain and the dominions – the politics of caring for colonial troops, white and of colour, are examined. Complex responses to nursing by both the men and the women surpassed existing maternal motifs of caregiving. The threat of racial mixing placed new limits on ‘care’ but there were complicated individual reactions to the new and intimate contact between white women and men of colour: neglect, anxiety, apathy, curiosity and even desire.