Colonial Ideas & Modern Warfare: Britain, Ottomans, WWI - Cameron Winter MA Thesis Defence

On Monday, February 13 at 1pm, Cameron Winter will defend his MA Thesis:

Colonial Ideas, Modern Warfare; How British Perceptions Affected Their Campaign Against the Ottomans, 1914-1915

The defence takes place in 132 MacKinnon. All Welcome!!

abstract:
Between March of 1915 and April of 1916, the British Empire suffered a succession of embarrassing defeats at the hands of the Ottoman Sultanate. Over a period of thirteen months, Great Britain, widely regarded as the world’s preeminent power, saw its fleet humiliated at the Dardanelles, its Mediterranean Expeditionary Force stalemated at Gallipoli, and its 6th Indian Division besieged and starved into surrender at Kut-al-Amara. These tactical, operational, and strategic reverses, widely regarded as impossible by the British ruling establishment, were the direct result of British colonial views regarding Muslims. Heavily influenced by their wars in Afghanistan, India, and the Sudan, the British military authorities and the civilians that they answered to believed that Muslims like the Ottomans were incapable of forming a professional, modern army. At the same time, however, encounters with Afghan tribesmen and Sudanese dervishes alike had convinced Britain’s rulers that the threat of revolt by Muslim fanatics was to be taken seriously and could, in fact, only be stymied through battlefield victories. These entrenched notions ensured that the British War Council approached the conflict with the Ottomans believing that British forces must swiftly defeat the supposedly incompetent Ottoman Army, lest they be faced with Islamic revolution in their Indian and Egyptian colonies. These assumptions, which are always acknowledged in the secondary literature, but rarely given pride of place, ensured that the British would not only make serious errors in their haste to defeat the Ottomans, but would refuse to learn from their mistakes, doubling down on bad strategy in an effort to achieve cheap victories and ward off the threat of an Islamic uprising.