Colonial Ideas, Modern Warfare: How British Perceptions Affected Their Campaign Against the Ottomans, 1914-1916

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Date

2017-05-04

Authors

Winter, Cameron

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Publisher

University of Guelph

Abstract

This thesis is an investigation of British campaign against the Ottoman Sultanate during the first two years of WWI. Despite Britain’s purported superiority in all things military and technological, the Ottomans dealt the British several stinging reverses at the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia, culminating in the capture of a British division at Kut. It is the argument of this thesis that these failures on the part of the British were the direct result of Britain’s colonialist attitudes towards Muslims, and that a reading of both the secondary literature and available primary materials demonstrates this thoroughly. By examining memoirs, diaries, cabinet documents and minutes of War Council meetings, it becomes clear that Lord Kitchener, Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, and other British leaders suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of Islam and of the Ottoman Army, and that this misunderstanding underwrote all of their subsequent failures over the 1914-1916 period.

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Keywords

Ottoman Empire, Otto Liman von Sanders, Britain, Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, Lord Kitchener, David Lloyd George, Military operations, Military strategy, Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, Kut, Winston Churchill, World War I

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