Tag Archives: Lawrence of Arabia

Event: The Great War and the Middle East

Posted on by

National Army Museum, Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4HT
16 November 2018, 11.30am
FREE (Booking is recommended)

Dr Rob Johnson (Pembroke College, Oxford) addresses the First World War in the Middle East, looking with a fresh perspective at the thinking that lay behind the operations there.

The First World War in the Middle East brought to an end 500 years of Ottoman domination, stirred nationalist sentiments, and created new international borders. Amid this conflict, Colonel TE Lawrence – better known as Lawrence of Arabia – offered a new way of thinking about war and championed the Arab cause through a guerrilla campaign.

In this talk, Rob Johnson will re-examine Middle East operations looking at the connected strategic decision-making of the belligerents, and their imperial calculations.

To book, please see here

Book review: Lawrence of Arabia’s War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East in WW1, by Neil Faulkner.

Posted on by

The story of the young war hero has historically captivated Western readers for decades. However, in the recent past, there have been calls to engage more deeply with the lesser-known histories and broader participants in the First World War. In this context, Sneha Reddy argues that Faulkner’s book goes in the other direction and shifts the spotlight back to Lawrence by making him the central focus of his study. Nonetheless, she adds, for a book that is a result of a ten-year endeavour, ending in 2014, to study modern conflict archaeology as part of the Great Arab Revolt Project, it is uniquely placed.

Author: Sneha Reddy is a PhD student at the School of International Relations in the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on French North African and British Indian soldiers in the First World War in the Middle East.

Review on publisher’s site here
Author’s e-print link
Article DOI