Originally published on January 3, 2022 (Episode 240)
Introduction
In 1914, as the Great War began, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire declared a “Great Jihad” against France, Russia, and Great Britain. It was the culmination of more than fifty years of conflict between European colonial powers and indigenous societies across the Middle East and North Africa. That conflict fused radical Islamic insurgency, the persistence of the slave trade, and colonial “coolie capitalism,” producing a tangled web of humanitarian rhetoric, exploitation, nationalism, and resistance.
Neil Faulkner tells this story in Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870–1920 (Yale University Press, 2021). Ranging from the Congo basin to the deserts of North Africa, he argues that Jihad was not a forward-looking revolution but a reactionary response to modern imperialism—an insurgency shaped as much by global capitalism as by religion.
About the Guest
Neil Faulkner (1958–2022) was an archaeologist and historian, a lecturer, writer, excavator, and broadcaster. He edited the magazine Military History Matters and authored fifteen books.
For Further Investigation
Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870–1920 (Yale University Press, 2021)
Neil Faulkner, Lawrence of Arabia’s War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2016)
Episode 148: Robert Harms on the exploitation of the Congo — a closely related conversation that pairs well with this episode
💬 Listen & Discuss
How should we understand the entanglement of jihad, empire, and insurgency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Does Faulkner’s framing of jihad as “reactionary” change the way we think about colonialism and its legacies? Share your reflections in the comments—and pass this episode along to a friend interested in the deep roots of today’s conflicts.
