Join us online or in person for our first seminar of 2026 with Stephen Pascoe
Shock Troops of Empire, or Aspirational Imperialists? Revisiting Australia’s Middle Eastern Military Occupations
The ANZAC myth – that the Australian nation was “baptised” in the bloodshed and sacrifice of the Gallipoli campaign during WWI – has long been a contested terrain of Australian national identity, with a rich historiography. By comparison, very little has been written about the Australian army’s involvement in the Battle of Syria (1941), in which Commonwealth and Free French troops defeated the (Vichy-sympathising) French Mandate forces. Based on archival research in the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial, and larger research on interwar Syria and Lebanon, this paper explores the contribution of Australian militarism to the British Empire and its consequences, both on the societies of the Middle East and on the construction of Australian nationalism.
4 March 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
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Stephen Pascoe is a historian of cities, infrastructure, population and imperialism who works primarily on the modern Middle East and the global French Empire. His forthcoming monograph Contested Concessions: The Struggle for Infrastructural Sovereignty in Syria, examines the paths by which foreign-capitalized infrastructure companies in French Mandate Syria became the targets of popular discontent, critique and boycott. A second book project, an intellectual history of population in the Middle East and North Africa, charts the history of population as an object of state-formation, policy and debate in the Middle East and North Africa since the late eighteenth century while interrogating in turn how the region has figured in global discourses about population. He co-edited Making Modernity from the Mashriq to the Maghreb (2015), a collection of essays on the contested meanings of modernity in the Middle East, and has published in Radical History Review, Arena, Al Jazeera, Jadaliyya, and The Conversation.
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