INFO:

At the hundredth anniversary of the British mandate, this talk explores the long future that British imperial planners mapped out for the mandate. It examines how British officials inscribed an imagined future imperial presence on Palestine as they mapped out partition plans and the contours of new independent states from the late-1920s to the late-1930s. Neither the imagined new states nor the British areas of control were in the end realized in the forms delineated on these maps, but they are important to recover because they remind us that the mandate’s end, and the particular form that end took, was not inevitable. Such planning also illuminates the deeply imperial roots of partition in Palestine and suggests that even at the moment of formal decolonization, imperial praxis was at work. This webinar is part of a series of events organised by the CBRL Kenyon Institute marking the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-1948). This event took place on Tuesday 29 November 2022 at 6:00 pm Jerusalem time, 4 pm in the UK. About the speaker: Dr Penny Sinanoglou is an associate professor of history at Wake Forest University and visiting associate professor at Pomona College. She is the author of  Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book award, and related articles and chapters in The Historical Journal and in edited volumes on twentieth-century partitions and the history of the British Empire in Palestine. Sinanoglou is broadly interested in the intersections between British imperial power and international systems of oversight and governance; the role of ethnicity, religion, gender and nationality in imperial politics; and the changing legal status of imperial subjects in the colonial and postcolonial eras. She is currently writing a legal history of marriage in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British empire.