Britannia Rules the Wastes: Britain and the Arid World, 1900-1960

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This project explores the ways in which the histories of Britain, its empire and the world's desert environments became entwined in the twentieth-century. The British Empire is often seen as a quintessentially maritime power, with widespread recognition of the place of maritime geographies in British political identity. Historians have also tended to emphasise the scaling-down of Britain's global commitments in the twentieth-century, rather than a deepening interest in 'marginal' places and peoples. Across the Great Arid Zone of the Old World, however, and in many of the deserts of the New, Britain launched myriad attempts to promote settlement, control nomads, develop communications, transform landscapes, establish military bases, extract mineral resources, wage war and conduct nuclear tests. This project examines how Britain's imperial and transnational connections left their mark on the great belt of deserts that girdled the empire and the globe, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Manchurian steppe. Since the fall of the Mongols, few empires have dominated as much of the world's arid zone as did the British in the twentieth century. Yet the effect of this on how that empire functioned, and on British society and culture itself, has never been explored.In recent years, scholars have embarked on the development of 'a new historiography of large areas'. The revival of imperial, transnational and global history has drawn attention to the persistent dynamics of large-scale regional configurations, and nowhere has the potential of this methodology been better demonstrated than in our new histories of the sea. And yet, while the 'maritime turn' has recovered a number of Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds, many other environments - such as mountains, deserts and steppes - are only beginning to be explored in this way. This project fuses together the modern histories of imperialism, nomadic societies and the world's desert environments to reposition these 'marginal' zones as sites of history in themselves. It argues for the continued relevance of the Eurasian Arid Zone to the modern history of the states around it, and reveals how specific environmental configurations could disrupt the political and economic frameworks of empire. This project is designed to engage with the emerging agenda of recovering world regions and to lead it in new directions. Its findings will be disseminated through two new research articles prepared during the award period and submitted to The Journal of Global History and Twentieth-Century British History: these form the foundation of a future monograph on Britain and the Arid World. The research will be discussed with the public at public lectures at the Natural History Museum and the Royal Geographical Society, and an exhibition at the latter; with academics from a variety of disciplines at an accompanying research workshop; and with scholars, government and non-governmental organisations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Central Asia through an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners engaging with the shared histories and futures of the world's desert environments. This project offers a fresh understanding of the geography, chronology and ideologies shaping British imperialism by examining Britain's relationship with the arid world in all its dimensions: political, economic, environmental and cultural. It builds on my existing work on British imperialism in the interwar Syrian Desert, but enables me to undertake a substantially more ambitious interrogation of the relationship between the 'British World' and the Arid World in the twentieth-century. In the process, it aims to advance a new research agenda, demonstrating by example how some of the insights of the 'maritime turn' can be applied to other environments, and urging a new appreciation of deserts and 'wastes' as enduring political, social and cultural arenas.