Gertrude Bell Research Articles

Gertrude Bell and the Genesis of Sectarian Division in Modern Iraq

Sectarian jargon has become part and parcel of the Iraqi political scene after 2003. Sectarian phenomenon, however, has always been part of Iraqi political life at least since the creating of Iraqi state in 1921. This study, examines specifically the British role in creating the sectarian division in Iraq as viewed by Iraqi Shi’is. Iraqi Shi’is have always put forward their claim as the most affected by the political division resulted after 1921. The paper will present first a varied spectrum of reflections for Shi’a intellectuals and ‘ulama of enduring British role. I shall review then an historical evolution of Shi’a-British encounter to assess finally, how this experience has shaped the attitudes and mentality of present Shi’a personals and forces in Iraq.

Gertrude Bell in the Fin-de-Sie?cle Near East: Decadent Landscapes and Political Ecologies

This essay recovers travel writing by Gertrude Bell, a well-known British explorer and archaeologist whose work is seldom examined in literary studies. Building on recent efforts to contextualize Bell’s early texts within late-Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence, this article examines Bell’s meditations on three landscapes and historical sites across Persian Pictures (1894) and The Desert and the Sown (1907), teasing out their rich engagement with political ecologies. Suggesting that in these meditations on Near Eastern landscapes, Bell offers a Decadent political ecology that anticipates her later diplomatic endeavors, this essay offers new ways of understanding the politics of aesthetics at the fin de siècle.

Gertrude Belle Elion, Chemist and Pharmacologist, Discoverer of Highly Relevant Active Substances

Gertrude Belle Elion was a woman who had to overcome many difficulties to achieve her dream of studying to be able to cure illnesses, especially those of the heart. These difficulties were imposed both by the limited economic resources of herself and her family, which did not allow her to pay the academic fees of the university in which she wanted to enroll, as well as gender, since she also had to fight against inequalities of that type prevalent in the society of her time. However, and despite these obstacles, she managed to graduate in Chemistry, based on interest, effort and tenacity, and later began a research career full of successes, which led her to discover relevant active substances which allow her to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988. This article presents the most relevant features of her personal and professional life and completes previous biographies about her life. Its main objective is to reintroduce her to society and put her as a reference to other people. The methodology followed has been the search for those data about her life and work that would allow completing the previous existing biographies about her.

Winston Churchill’s Middle Eastern Strategy and the Idea of a Kurdish Buffer State, 1921–1922

This study investigates Churchill’s attitude towards the Kurdish question and explains how and why the idea of a Kurdish buffer state initially formed as part of Churchill's Middle Eastern strategy before ultimately being abandoned. It primarily focuses on the role of behind-the-scene officials in influencing and directing the policy decisions towards the future of Kurdistan. It argues that the contention between the Colonial Office and Baghdad did not reflect as much disagreement between Churchill and the High Commissioner of Baghdad Percy Cox, as previous works have suggested, as between their advisers, particularly Hubert Young, Assistant Secretary in the Middle East Department, and Gertrude Bell, Oriental Secretary at Baghdad. This study argues that behind the scenes, Young and Bell exerted great influence over the views of Churchill and Cox, respectively. Young’s standpoint in favour of Kurdish independence influenced Churchill’s initial advocacy of a Kurdish buffer state to protect British colonial interests in the Middle East. However, Bell was ultimately fundamental in determining the future of Kurdistan, contributing significantly to the absence of Kurdistan from the political map. She was at the core of British imperial policymaking for the Iraqi state through her significant influence over Cox regarding the political situation in Iraq. Facilitated by Churchill’s indecision, Bell was successful in obstructing the implementation of the ethnographic approach advocated by the Cairo Conference, and finally, in preventing the establishment of an independent Kurdistan, instigating the perpetual complexity of the Kurdish question.

Rinse Willet, The Geography of Urbanism in Roman Asia Minor

The contrast between the classical cities of South West Turkey and the inland areas of Asia Minor has long struck visitors to the region. In 1907, Gertrude Bell recorded her visits to several Roman cities in Western Asia Minor including: Ephesus, Priene, Miletus, Halicarnassus, Aphrodisias, Hierapolis and Sagalassos before she journeyed on to the Central Anatolian plateau to work at Binbirkilise, The Thousand and One Churches, on the Karadağ, one of several ancient volcanos dominating the central Anatolian plateau.

Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

Abstract According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

Between ‘the me that leaves and the me that returns’: Gertrude Bell’s Persian Gateways and Walls

Persian Pictures, Gertrude Bell’s first published collection, differs substantially from her later works; critics have accused it of sentimentality, lack of substance – a mere ‘folly’ incommensurable with Bell’s later writings. In the present article, I intend to advocate for Bell, though, proposing to see the supposed faults of Persian Pictures as the work’s greatest strengths which in fact reveal the author’s other, more lyrical and less ‘business-like’, side. With special emphasis placed on the concept of gateways and walls I will attempt to shed light on how, by traversing and/or transgressing borders of various types and putting herself to a series of identity-forming tests, Persian Pictures – to the contemporary reader – offer insight into the broader apparatus of British (and Western) colonialism.By linking each of the selected essays with one of John Frederick Lewis’s orientalist paintings, I hope to further strengthen my argument that aspects of Persian Pictures, originally seen as the work’s weaknesses, have the potential to actually enrich discussions of Western mis/representations of the Orient, without compromising its author, and should thus be approached as instances of powerful and vivid responses to the ‘shock of the new,’ as experienced by Gertrude Bell – and, in fact, many other travellers, male and female alike, who ventured into these realms.

Between ‘the me that leaves and the me that returns’: Gertrude Bell’s Persian Gateways and Walls

Persian Pictures, Gertrude Bell’s first published collection, differs substantially from her later works; critics have accused it of sentimentality, lack of substance – a mere ‘folly’ incommensurable with Bell’s later writings. In the present article, I intend to advocate for Bell, though, proposing to see the supposed faults of Persian Pictures as the work’s greatest strengths which in fact reveal the author’s other, more lyrical and less ‘business-like’, side. With special emphasis placed on the concept of gateways and walls I will attempt to shed light on how, by traversing and/or transgressing borders of various types and putting herself to a series of identity-forming tests, Persian Pictures – to the contemporary reader – offer insight into the broader apparatus of British (and Western) colonialism.By linking each of the selected essays with one of John Frederick Lewis’s orientalist paintings, I hope to further strengthen my argument that aspects of Persian Pictures, originally seen as the work’s weaknesses, have the potential to actually enrich discussions of Western mis/representations of the Orient, without compromising its author, and should thus be approached as instances of powerful and vivid responses to the ‘shock of the new,’ as experienced by Gertrude Bell – and, in fact, many other travellers, male and female alike, who ventured into these realms.

Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures and Fin-de-Siècle Decadence

ABSTRACT This article uncovers the first publication of Gertrude Bell, known in the early twentieth century for her exploration, archaeological work, and diplomacy in the Middle East. Examining her 1894 travel book, Persian Pictures, and contextualizing it within fin-de-siècle Aestheticism and Decadence, I argue that Bell shapes a unique version of Decadent aesthetics and experimental prose far from the European metropole. Suggesting connections between her early aesthetic work and her later diplomacy, I foreground how Decadence allows a young woman traveling at the perceived margins to engage with geopolitical, gendered, and imperial conflict, and thus expand the view of Decadence as inherently male and intrinsically European. Concluding with a brief examination of texts by twentieth-century Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, this essay proposes some ways that, for both Bell and Farrokhzad, both of whom were women at the margins, Decadent representations of Eastern landscapes facilitate revisionary ideas of gender and geopolitics.

Ellen Tanner’s Persia: A Museum Legacy Rediscovered

Ellen Georgiana Tanner (1847–1937) was among the first British women to travel solo in Persia and Mesopotamia. A published author elected to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1913, this article examines Tanner’s reputation in her day versus her subsequent lack of recognition. In 1894, aged forty-seven, Tanner began an intrepid journey on the caravan route through Persia on horseback, accompanied only by local guides, visiting bazaars and collecting Persian handicrafts. Tanner later donated the objects acquired during these travels to museums in the West Country, including a collection of eighty-five Persian objects to the Holburne Museum, Bath. This article examines the context of British activity in Persia in the late nineteenth century, discussing Tanner’s unpublished journal, ‘By Road and River’ (1895) in the context of a growing literature on Persia by British travellers including George Curzon and other women including Isabella Bird Bishop, Gertrude Bell, and Ella Sykes. It outlines the biographical details of Tanner’s life, exploring the factors that set Tanner apart from her contemporaries and her perspectives on Persia as a somewhat enigmatic observer. The article discusses the recognition of Tanner and other women by the RGS. It discusses the history of collecting Qajar art for Britain’s museums, particularly of Robert Murdoch Smith and his role in growing the V&amp;A’s holdings of Persian art. It outlines Tanner’s collecting of Persian handicrafts from Isfahan, Yezd, Shiraz, and other centres of production for the Holburne. It explores what we know of her impetus to collect, her particular interest in textiles, and the growth of interest in historic Persia, including Tanner’s part in the wholesale purchasing of historic Persian artefacts. The final section explores Tanner’s forgotten legacy at the Holburne Museum in the context of a renewed interest in rediscovering the stories of the women whose collections shaped late Victorian and early Edwardian museum collections. It argues that Tanner’s identity and the contents of her collections may account for her subsequent disappearance from institutional memory until a 2018 research project.<br>

Time's Monster: History, conscience and the British Empire by Priya Satia

Reviewed by: Time's Monster: History, conscience and the British Empire by Priya Satia Angus Mitchell Time's Monster: History, conscience and the British Empire By Priya Satia. London: Allen Lane, 2020. The essential thesis of this illuminating and timely study unpacks the complicity between historians and empire. Priya Satia considers how history as a formation of knowledge is instrumentalised to both shape and defend the reputation and conscience of liberal progress and the violent excesses of colonial power. She sets out to challenge historical traditions and unearth motive forces of history sustaining imperialism and capitalist realism. In making this argument she exposes, often in deeply unsettling ways, the ethical confusion at the core of British imperial thought and the Enlightenment concepts of universal human experience. Since her first monograph, Spies in Arabia (2008), Satia has established herself as a historian of extraordinary insight and intellectual originality. In that book, she considered the rise of Britain's covert empire in the Middle East and the role of a group of scholar-spies "who thought with and through history" (9). In her second book, Empire of Guns (2018), about the Quaker gunmaker, Samuel Galton, she looked at how the pre-eminence of British industrial capitalism was built upon an arms industry that fuelled growth and expansion and placed the industrial-military complex at the epicentre of Britain's economy. In Time's Monster, Satia revisits some of her earlier arguments to interrogate the relationship between time, history and conscience. Who has the right to make and shape history? How can we think beyond the limits of history? How has the "Great Man" harnessed his sense of hubris and atonement to historical discourse to justify his motives, actions and crimes? The title also has echoes in Antonio Gramsci's axiom: "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." Beginning with analysis of the emergence of history from "the eschatological structures of religious belief" (27) and the Enlightenment view of history as the narrative of progress, the argument moves into the confrontation between imperialism and anticolonial nationalisms. Theories of history proliferated during the nineteenth century. Historians were both public moralists and soothsayers. In the twentieth century, as history and secrecy were increasingly entangled, so an "occultist" element was pioneered by Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence through the fusion of intelligence-gathering and archaeology. It is no coincidence that many of the principal architects of empire from the late nineteenth century lived parallel lives as historians. Historymaking and history-writing became inextricable. A comparative element to this study is achieved through analysis of those who stood up to empire: the antihistorical narratives of the subaltern sensibility. Poetry became an important conveyor of counter histories able to inspire people to act against the grain. The imagination of Urdu, Ghandar and Irish poets sought a new matrix of temporality. There is a recurring and sublime metaphor throughout this book of the moon glimpsed through prison bars, an image that crystalises that unending struggle of the downtrodden to break through the blockade of colonial time. Both coloniser and colonised were forced to come to terms with the violent elimination of certain categories of people in the name of evolutionary progress and the structural racism of the imperial imagination. In unpacking historical difference, Satia builds on the Subaltern Studies collective, notably the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Guha. If historians such as Thomas Macaulay, James Mill and J.R. Seeley are identified as early exemplars of historians who built the liberal illusion of progress, Satia reserves a different criticism for E.P. Thompson. He is upended for his narrow focus on the domestic struggle of the English working class and adopting an "ostrich position vis-á-vis the empire" (260). Thompson's father had made an important anticolonial intervention with The Other Side of the Medal (1925), exposing a "policy of terrorization" (247) underscoring British rule in India. His son, however, steered the British Left away from imperial engagement, thus draining precious energies away from the broader anticolonial struggle. This review was written as Britain's recent defence policy was announced—Global Britain in a Competitive...

The British Orientalism in the early twentieth century. Gertrude Bell’s traveling reportages

The British Orientalism in the early twentieth century. Gertrude Bell’s traveling reportages

Tartışmalı Bir Yazıt İçin Getrude Bell’in Çözümü

One inscribed tombstone was placed at Appa station on the Ottoman Railway line from İzmir to Dinar. The inscription was published by three different copyists in the course of eleven years. Each person who transcribed the inscription, Georg Weber, William Mitchell Ramsay and Georges Cousin, made no acknowledgement of each other. Moreover, each transcription and reconstruction differed from the other in more lines than the number of lines in which they were in agreement; the provenance for the stone was credited to different locations and the minimal description of the form of the stone left considerable doubt as to the tombstone’s design. No sketch or photograph was provided. The names on the epitaph have been harnessed by the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names to a site (Sanaos) to which none of the three published editions actually tied the inscription. The dispute may have been left unresolved, but for a photograph taken by Gertrude Bell in 1907. She never published it, but, for her, it was the fitting compensation for a failed visit to the site of Colossae. By careful enhancement of the photograph and close study of its contents, the three disputed elements — the form of the tombstone, its original location and the wording of the inscription — can be resolved to a high degree of probability. The restored inscription becomes particularly valuable for a name that may connect with one of the (in)famous features of Colossian religious life — the worship of angels.

Los problemas políticos de Irán desde el punto de vista de las mujeres viajeras en la era Nasseri

El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar los problemas políticos de Irán desde el punto de vista de las mujeres viajeras en la era Nasseri. Esta investigación se ha realizado mediante el método descriptivo y mediante el estudio de trabajos escritos e históricos. Los investigadores han extraído material examinando libros, artículos y escritos históricos. Asimismo, se recopila e soluciona los problemas de los pasajeros. Los resultados muestran que durante la Era Qajar, debido a la posición estratégica de Irán y el Golfo Pérsico, esta región fue de particular interés para las potencias internacionales superiores; por lo tanto, viajaban a Irán viajeros, estadistas, embajadores y comerciantes de muchos países europeos y no europeos. En estas delegaciones y grupos políticos extranjeros también hubo figuras femeninas, entre ellas Lady Sheil, Jane Dieulafoy, Gertrude Bell, Madame Wolfson, Isabella Bird Bishop y Carla Serena. Algunas de estas mujeres llegaron a Irán como miembros de delegaciones políticas y otras con fines turísticos o económicos. Con respecto a su estatus y posición, proporcionaron a los funcionarios de Qajar informes en los que abordaban los problemas políticos de Irán, como el fracaso del gobierno en la gestión de la salud pública y la justicia, el manejo de la inseguridad, la corrupción económica generalizada entre los estadistas y otras autoridades del gobierno de Qajar, opresiones, y similares. Según los resultados, se puede decir que la mayoría de estos problemas están relacionados con la estructura interna de Irán así como con la cultura iraní y algunas costumbres de esa época.

The Race for Hafiz: Scholarly and Popular Translations at the Fin de Siècle

The great Persian lyric poet Hafiz was first translated into English by Sir William Jones in the 1780s. In the course of the nineteenth century many further translations would appear, initially intended for the use of oriental scholars and students of the Persian language, but increasingly also for the general reading public. The paraphrasers or ‘popularizers’ who devised the latter category of translation competed with professional scholars to shape the dissemination and popular perception of Persian poetry. Owing to a variety of factors, the middle of the nineteenth century saw a marked decline in the number of new Hafiz translations, and it is not until 1891 that a complete edition of Hafiz's works finally appeared in English. This led to an unusual situation, particular to Britain, in which scholars (Edward H. Palmer, Henry Wilberforce-Clarke, Gertrude Bell), and popularizers (Richard Burton, Herman Bicknell, Justin McCarthy, Richard Le Gallienne, John Payne) all jostled to fill the vacuum created by the absence of a definitive version. Their competition created, in short order, a diversity of versions presented to consumers, which allowed Hafiz's influence to be felt in twentieth-century poetry untrammelled by the impress (as became the case with Omar Khayyam) of one dominant translator. While the refraction of Hafiz through the biases and predispositions of multiple translators has been regarded as hopelessly distorting by Julie Scott Meisami, I argue instead that it highlights lyric, in the richness and diversity characteristic of Hafiz, as the Persian poetic mode which has been more influential on English writing and yet the most difficult to categorize and integrate. Lastly, by paying heed to the popular transmission of Hafiz in English, we might better understand the reception of Persian poetry in its generic, rather than only its formal character.

Making the invisible visible: hyperlinked webcomics as alternative points of entry to the digitised Gertrude Bell Archive

ABSTRACTWeb environments can support non-specialist access to prestigious and complex scholarly archives. We report on the creation and evaluation of webcomics that incorporate hyperlinks, a technological innovation that makes digitised artefacts from the Gertrude Bell Archive visible to learners. This shows readers the need to examine the evidence on which interpretations are based: an issue fundamental to academic researchers and archivists, but that might otherwise be obscured in educational and entertainment media. Moving beyond the established use of digitised archives by academic researchers, we explore wider issues of access and use. Quantitative analytics suggest readers read all pages of the comic and accessed digitised sources. Qualitative feedback and consultation with young people found the hyperlinked webcomics to be credible comics in their own right as well as their value as situated points of entry to archive material. Observed reader behaviour identified opportunities to encourage more structured exploration of the digitised archive.

Destination Levant: T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell’s narrative voice as gender transgression

One of the best-known chroniclers of the Levant is undoubtedly T.E. Lawrence, whose Seven pillars of wisdom (1926) is an adventure tale, a war-time memoir and a travelogue all at once. It describes the region and its Arab inhabitants at moments admiringly and at others through an Orientalist lens. Lawrence’s narrative voice is mercurial: it’s often heroic and confident, yet sometimes full of self-doubt, rendering it curiously fragile. In opposition, Gertrude Bell’s narrative voice in The desert and the sown (1907) is assured, controlled and masculine, as Bell uses it to solidify a career as an archeologist and a regional expert. Both are calculated attempts at defying their assigned gender roles and both participate in a gender transgression, the convoluted nature of which can be explained with the theories of masochism. For Bell this means to use her narrative voice to place herself close to the seat of masculine power, while also maintaining her upper class femininity. Lawrence’s defiance erodes the conventionally masculine, heroic image the public held of him after the Arab Revolt.

A reconsidering chronos: Chronistic criticism and the first ‘Iraqi national calendar

ABSTRACTChronos is a traditionally marginalized term in rhetorical studies. Historically paired with kairos, chronos is commonly taken to refer to chronology, empty, homogenous, and external time. I argue for a reconsideration and redefinition of chronos that pairs the term with a critical materialist theory of time as change, immanent temporalities. Chronos understood as an entanglement of immanent temporalities informs chronistic criticism. Chronistic criticism is a conceptual criticism investigating the rhetorical arrangement, or synchronization, of multiple processes of change. Reconsidering chronos makes room for investigating time-related texts, like ‘Iraq's first national calendar. This calendar emerged after the establishment of the ‘Iraqi state under the League of Nation's Mandate System where British authorities were charged with building a modern nation state from territories of the former Ottoman Empire. I demonstrate chronistic criticism examining Gertrude Bell's digital archive for observations about successes, failures, and competitors with the national calendar. A vitalized chronos stands to make substantive contributions to the study of numerous rhetorical concepts. Specifically, for this investigation, chronos offers new insights into political myths, calendars, nation building, and the potential influences of nonhuman immanent temporalities.

Heteroglossic itineraries and silent spaces: the desert cartographies of Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence

This article advocates for the central importance of examining cartography for the understanding of literary travel narratives, focussing on accounts of travel in the deserts of the Middle East written by Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence, both explorers, archaeologists and authors who were implicated in British activities in the Middle East before, during and after the Arab Revolt, and who travelled through the region during the early 20th century. This article seeks to explore the connections between the authors’ textual depictions and the maps that they authored, using close readings of their travel narratives and their maps to arrive at a more profound understanding of how these processes of authorship resulted in the production and mediation of ‘Arabia’ as an imaginative geography. Drawing on archival research and a range of textual sources, the development of this literary geography is traced through the early research of TE Lawrence on crusader castles in Syria and Lebanon, Gertrude Bell’s descriptions of using maps in The Desert and the Sown, Lawrence’s account of collating a map of Sinai for the War Office and the relationship between local navigational knowledges with their cartographic activities.

The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian TragedyWe Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from SyriaSyria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee State

The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian TragedyWe Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from SyriaSyria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee State