Dr. Warren Dockter: „Winston Churchill, the Royal Air Force and Air Control in the Middle East“

Einladung zu einem Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Dieser Vortrag musste leider ausfallen und wird nachgeholt.

Mittwoch, 17. Juni 2015, 19:00 Uhr

RüKONTOR (5. Etage), Rüttenscheider Str. 144, 45131 Essen

This lecture will reassess Winston Churchill’s role in the creation and implementation of the Royal Air Force’s policy of Air Control in the Middle East. This matter has been extensively documented, but Churchill’s role as Minister of War and Air is often marginalized. Churchill’s influence is generally explained by his desire to make savings while maintaining order in the Middle East. But this is not enough fully to explain Churchill’s attitude and polices regarding the strategy of colonial air policing in the Middle East. Moreover, there are some misconceptions concerning Churchill’s role, such as T.E. Lawrence’s claim that he was the real author of the scheme, and that Churchill’s aggressive imperialism led him to use air power indiscriminately to destroy villages. This paper will address such misconceptions by examining Churchill’s thinking and policies regarding the genesis of the scheme, his overall strategy for the Middle East, and the tactics which were employed, and will demonstrate a more complex of Churchill’s designs for the Middle East.

Dr. Warren Dockter is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. He graduated from the University of Tennessee and gained his PhD at the University of Nottingham in July 2012. He has taught at the University of Exeter and the University of Worcester and was an Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College. His research interest lies in British Imperalism in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and twentieth century, encapsulating orientalism and trans-national historical approaches. His first monograph, Winston Churchill and the Islamic World: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East, places Churchill in the context of colonial discourse and reveals the extent to which orientalism influenced his opinions and policies regarding the Islamic world. At Clare Hall he investigates the diplomatic, political, and cultural influence of the Arabist, counter-orientalist poet and political radical, Wilfrid S. Blunt on the British policy makers and Arab protonationalist thinkers in the Middle East during the Edwardian and interwar eras.

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