Markers of Modernity or Agents of Terror? Air Policing and Colonial Revolt after World War I

Abstract

In the expanded European colonial empires that took shape after World War I, new apparatus of imperial coercion made the open skies — the very air — a new type of political, military, and cultural space. Over the skies of the North African Maghreb and the western arc of the Middle East, the regions surveyed here, the airplane became a tool of French and British colonial government in several, mutually constitutive ways. Politically, coercive bombardment transcended the temporal divide between initial, sometimes nominal imposition of imperial authority through the threat, or use, of indiscriminate violence and the subsequent maintenance of colonial control through more selective violence targeted against dissident populations.¹ Militarily, the airplane offered new possibilities of force projection, destructive power, and consequent strategic advantage. Culturally, mastery of the air — and of the air-waves — conferred still greater advantages, making once impenetrable and seemingly incomprehensible desert spaces less forbidding whilst, at the same time, emphasising the technological superiority of western industrial modernism and thus underscoring the primacy of imperial nations. By shrinking space and rendering the once unknown and limitless both visible and bounded, it changed the cultural environment in which imperial power was projected.