Date and time: pm 5:00-pm 6:00, Thursday, June 11th, 2019

Venue: Lobby, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo

Lecturer: Dr. Robert Fletcher (Warwick University)

Title: Recruitment, Romanticism and Military Dress: Britain and the Bedouin in the interwar Middle East

Abstract:
This paper explores British attempts to recruit and manage Bedouin groups in the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on the Arab Legion of Trans-Jordan, it will show how matters of dress, deployment and military discipline became a touchstone for wider debates about Britain’s responsibilities in the desert, and about the future of the Bedouin themselves.

lecturer profilest:
Dr Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor of Britain and Empire at the University of Warwick in the UK. He has worked at the Universities of Oxford and Exeter, and is the author of British Imperialism and ‘The Tribal Question’: desert administration and nomadic societies in the Middle East, 1919-1936 (Oxford University Press, 2015), and The Ghost of Namamugi: Charles Lenox Richardson and the Anglo-Satsuma War (Renaissance, 2019).

Organizers: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas: Relational Studies on Global Crises, Establishing a New Paradigm of Social/ Human Sciences based on Relational Studies (Project Leader, Keiko Sakai, Chiba University) Group B01: Norms & Identity
Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (IASA) , Network for Education and Study on Asia (ASNET), The University of Tokyo

Co-organizer: Grants-in-aid for Research/Basic Research A: Towards the construction of ‘Islam & Gender Studies’: Building foundations for comprehensive discussion on gender justice and Islam (Project Leader, Eiji Nagasawa, the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

Contact: asnet[at]asnet.u-tokyo.ac.jp