Colonial Ideas, Modern Warfare: How British Perceptions Affected Their Campaign Against the Ottomans, 1914-1916
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
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.