Speaker
Description
Recent scholarship has challenged previous interpretations on Franco-British rivalry and cooperation in the Middle East by way of suggesting notions such as “frenemies”, “competitive collaboration” or inquiring about the shared production of an “imperial cloud”; that is, a sort of material and immaterial reservoir of imperial knowledge that came to be reflected in schemes and practices such as the enactment of the international mandates in the interwar Middle East, the enforcement of global border and mobility regimes. By combining the study of infrastructural (e.g. customs buildings, airports and aerodromes), material as well as discursive plans and devices displayed by imperial airline companies –Imperial Airways (1924-1939) and Air Orient/Air France (1927/1933-)– operating in and across the Middle East, the paper will probe how cooperation and transfers among imperial powers were mediated and ultimately institutionalized, thereby affecting the ways in which mobility regimes –including air spaces– were implemented during the interwar era. In the second section, the paper will show how these imperial plans faced diverse political, environmental and technical obstacles –i.e. multiple technical halts–, which led Great Britain and France together with their (national/imperial) respective airline companies– to strengthen cooperation and, ultimately, their interdependency. Finally, the paper will demonstrate that the
development of imperial intercontinental routes triggered the creation of domestic and regional ones, while relying on already existing infrastructure systems (railroads, sea-ports and land routes). In that regard, stops and overnight halts in Middle Eastern airports and aerodromes were not merely “technical” pauses of otherwise longer imperial services and journeys; rather, the interplay between imperial and domestic routes, between aerial and maritime as well as overland systems fed one another, making both the imperial and the regional possible.
Biography
Jordi Tejel is Research Professor at the University of Neuchâtel. Presently, he is leading a research project titled “Sea-Borders and Air-Space Formation in the Interwar Middle East: A Trans-Imperial Perspective”. He has notably authored Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East: Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi Borderlands (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and co-edited Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). He has also published in journals such as British Journal of Middle East Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Iranian Studies, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Migration History, and Middle Eastern Studies.
