Dr Benjamin Thomas White

  • Senior Lecturer (History)

telephone: 01413302437
email: BenjaminThomas.White@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns: He/him/his

Room 403, School of Humanities (History), 2 University Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8QQ

Import to contacts

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0833-784X

Research interests

I’m a historian of the modern Middle East by background, now teaching and researching on the history of refugees and statelessness in the world at large—with an increasing interest in the roles animals play in situations of human displacement, and the relationship between displacement and environment.

My doctoral research and first book were about Syria in the period of the French mandate (1920–46). They used the emergence of the concept of ‘minority’ in political discourse in and about Syria to trace processes of modern state formation in the country: across the territory, as borders were drawn around it and the institutions of the state made their presence felt even in rural areas, and institutionally, as uniform legal institutions gradually developed within the country and it began to fit into an emerging international system of nation-states. As a Goodreads review put it, ‘Little or no nudity’.

From there I became interested in refugees and statelessness, first of all in the interwar Middle East and then more generally. I’ve done research on refugees in French mandate Syria and Lebanon and British mandate Iraq, some of which can be accessed via the publications list below. What started out as a side-project within that research has ballooned to become my main ongoing project: a global history of the refugee camp. The Glasgow Refugee, Asylum, and Migration Network (GRAMNet) has become the institutional home for this.

Research for one of my initial case studies, the refugee camp run by the British military at Baquba in what is now Iraq in 1918–21, made me realize what an important role animals played in the camp. Nearly 50,000 people lived at Baquba when the camp was at its largest, but they also brought thousands of large animals (horses, cattle) and thousands more smaller animals (sheeps, goat). These animals shaped the camp itself as well as the lives of the people in it and their relationship with both the British military and the population of the surrounding area. That first case study prompted me to set up a larger interdisciplinary project with a more contemporary focus, on humans and animals in refugee camps, which I’m currently running with funding from the Wellcome Trust. This has also encouraged me to think about camps’ place in their natural environment, and the relationship between the environment and displacement more generally, in my future work.

I blog (occasionally) at singularthings.wordpress.com, where you can find quite a few pieces about refugee history, as well as posts about other things ranging from humanitarian statistics to abandoned Australian quarantine stations.

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007
Number of items: 33.

2024

Moss, E., Houghton, F., John, K., Kalayil, S., Pooley, W., Sanders, M. and White, B. T. (2024) Social History Book Club: Zadie Smith, The Fraud. Social History, 49(2), pp. 225-239. (doi: 10.1080/03071022.2024.2311588)

2023

Mackinnon, K. and White, B. T. (2023) What becomes a refugee camp? Making camps for European refugees in North Africa and the Middle East, 1943–1946. Journal of Refugee Studies, (doi: 10.1093/jrs/fead042) (Early Online Publication)

White, B. T. (2023) The global origins of the modern refugee camp: military humanitarianism and colonial occupation at Baquba, Iraq, 1918–1920. In: Knudsen, A. J. and Berg, K. G. (eds.) Continental Encampment: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe. Berghahn, pp. 43-67. ISBN 9781800738447

2022

White, B. T. (2022) Utopian thinking, dystopian consequences: reflecting on ‘Refugia’. Singular Things, 2022(Aug 19), [Book Review]

Rahal, M. and White, B. T. (2022) UNHCR and the Algerian war of independence: postcolonial sovereignty and the globalization of the international refugee regime, 1954–63. Journal of Global History, 17(2), pp. 331-352. (doi: 10.1017/S1740022821000449)

2020

White, B. T. (2020) Animals, people and places in displacement. In: Adey, P., Bowstead, J., Brickell, K., Desai, V., Dolton, M., Pinkerton, A. and Siddiqi, A. (eds.) The Handbook of Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland, pp. 549-568. ISBN 9783030471774 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-47178-1_38)

White, B. T. (2020) Psychogeography of a camp: Rivesaltes. Fiction and Film for Scholars of France: A Cultural Bulletin, 10(4),

White, B. T. (2020) Protection or isolation? Humanitarian evacuees in Australian quarantine stations. In: Scott-Smith, T. and Breeze, M. E. (eds.) Structures of Protection: Rethinking Refugee Shelter. Berghahn Books: Oxford, UK, pp. 187-198. ISBN 9781789207125

White, B. T. (2020) МЕНЬШИНСТВО, БОЛЬШИНСТВО И НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВО = Minorities, majorities, and the nation-state. Ab Imperio, 2019(4), pp. 17-47. (doi: 10.1353/imp.2019.0111)

2019

White, B. T. (2019) ‘Refuge’ and history: a critical reading of a polemic. Migration and Society: Advances in Research, 2(1), pp. 107-118. (doi: 10.3167/arms.2019.020111)

White, B. T. (2019) A grudging rescue: France, the Armenians of Cilicia, and the history of humanitarian evacuations. Humanity, 10(1), pp. 1-27.

2018

White, B. T. (2018) An infinite present: Annie Ernaux’s The Years and modern French history. Fiction and Film for Scholars of France: A Cultural Bulletin, 9(1),

White, B. T. (2018) Calais Writers, Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp. London: Pluto Press, 2017. vi + 266 pp. Figures and index. £75.00 U.K./$99.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-7453-9970-6; £14.99 U.K./$21.00 U.S. (pb). ISBN: 978-0-7453-9968-3. H-France Review, 18(199), [Book Review]

White, B. T. (2018) Humans and animals in a refugee camp: Baquba, Iraq, 1918-20. Journal of Refugee Studies, 32(2), pp. 216-236. (doi: 10.1093/jrs/fey024)

White, B. T. (2018) Humans and animals in refugee camps. Forced Migration Review, 58,

2017

White, B. T. (2017) Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920–1939. Past and Present, 235(1), pp. 141-178. (doi: 10.1093/pastj/gtw048)

2016

White, B. T. and Tejel Gorgas, J. (2016) The fragments imagine the nation? Minorities in the modern Middle East and North Africa [Guest editors]. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43(2), pp. 135-139. (doi: 10.1080/13530194.2016.1138646)

White, B. T. (2016) Minderheiten in beiden Ländern. In: Lemke, B. (ed.) Irak und Syrien. Series: Wegweiser zur Geschichte. Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn, pp. 135-149. ISBN 9783506786623

2015

White, B. T. (2015) Review of James Grehan, Twilight of the saints: everyday religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). American Historical Review, 120(5), pp. 1996-1997. (doi: 10.1093/ahr/120.5.1996a)[Book Review]

2014

White, B. T. (2014) Review of Isa Blumi, Ottoman refugees, 1878-1939: migration in a post-imperial world (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Reviews in History, (doi: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1690)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2014) Mikhail, Alan; Nature and empire in Ottoman Egypt: an environmental history. Archives of Natural History, 41(2), pp. 378-379. (doi: 10.3366/anh.2014.0271)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2014) Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation, 1808–1918, Vols. 1 and 2 by Stefan Weber. Arab Studies Journal, 22(1), pp. 279-284. [Book Review]

2013

White, B. T. , Haysom, S. and Davey, E. (2013) Refugees, host states and displacement in the Middle East: an enduring challenge. Humanitarian Exchange(59), pp. 20-22.

2012

White, B. T. (2012) The Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908 by Gokhan Cetinsaya. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39(1), pp. 139-141. (doi: 10.1080/13530194.2012.660003)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2012) Transforming Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City by Leila Hudson. Arab Studies Journal, 20(1), pp. 199-203. [Book Review]

2011

White, B. T. (2011) The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9780748641871

2010

White, B. T. (2010) Rifa'at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the modern state: the Ottoman Empire, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, 2nd edition. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 37(3), pp. 457-459. (doi: 10.1080/13530194.2010.524444)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2010) The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s: development of a politics of ethnicity. Middle Eastern Studies, 46(6), pp. 901-917.

White, B. T. (2010) Addressing the state: the Syrian Ulama protest personal status law reform, 1939. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(01), pp. 10-12. (doi: 10.1017/S0020743809990572)

2009

Altug, S. and White, B. T. (2009) Frontières et pouvoir d'Etat. Vingtième Siècle, 2009(103), pp. 91-104. (doi: 10.3917/ving.103.0091)

White, B. T. (2009) Jeremy Salt, The unmaking of the Middle East: a history of Western disorder in Arab lands. Review of Middle East Studies, 43(1), pp. 128-129. [Book Review]

2008

White, B. T. (2008) Rhetorical hierarchies in France and Syria during the mandate. Chronos: Revue d’Histoire de l’Université de Balamand(17), pp. 105-123.

2007

White, B. T. (2007) The nation-state form and the emergence of 'minorities' in Syria. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 7(1), pp. 64-85. (doi: 10.1111/j.1754-9469.2007.tb00108.x)

This list was generated on Fri Oct 11 16:36:16 2024 BST.
Number of items: 33.

Articles

Moss, E., Houghton, F., John, K., Kalayil, S., Pooley, W., Sanders, M. and White, B. T. (2024) Social History Book Club: Zadie Smith, The Fraud. Social History, 49(2), pp. 225-239. (doi: 10.1080/03071022.2024.2311588)

Mackinnon, K. and White, B. T. (2023) What becomes a refugee camp? Making camps for European refugees in North Africa and the Middle East, 1943–1946. Journal of Refugee Studies, (doi: 10.1093/jrs/fead042) (Early Online Publication)

Rahal, M. and White, B. T. (2022) UNHCR and the Algerian war of independence: postcolonial sovereignty and the globalization of the international refugee regime, 1954–63. Journal of Global History, 17(2), pp. 331-352. (doi: 10.1017/S1740022821000449)

White, B. T. (2020) Psychogeography of a camp: Rivesaltes. Fiction and Film for Scholars of France: A Cultural Bulletin, 10(4),

White, B. T. (2020) МЕНЬШИНСТВО, БОЛЬШИНСТВО И НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВО = Minorities, majorities, and the nation-state. Ab Imperio, 2019(4), pp. 17-47. (doi: 10.1353/imp.2019.0111)

White, B. T. (2019) ‘Refuge’ and history: a critical reading of a polemic. Migration and Society: Advances in Research, 2(1), pp. 107-118. (doi: 10.3167/arms.2019.020111)

White, B. T. (2019) A grudging rescue: France, the Armenians of Cilicia, and the history of humanitarian evacuations. Humanity, 10(1), pp. 1-27.

White, B. T. (2018) An infinite present: Annie Ernaux’s The Years and modern French history. Fiction and Film for Scholars of France: A Cultural Bulletin, 9(1),

White, B. T. (2018) Humans and animals in a refugee camp: Baquba, Iraq, 1918-20. Journal of Refugee Studies, 32(2), pp. 216-236. (doi: 10.1093/jrs/fey024)

White, B. T. (2018) Humans and animals in refugee camps. Forced Migration Review, 58,

White, B. T. (2017) Refugees and the definition of Syria, 1920–1939. Past and Present, 235(1), pp. 141-178. (doi: 10.1093/pastj/gtw048)

White, B. T. and Tejel Gorgas, J. (2016) The fragments imagine the nation? Minorities in the modern Middle East and North Africa [Guest editors]. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43(2), pp. 135-139. (doi: 10.1080/13530194.2016.1138646)

White, B. T. , Haysom, S. and Davey, E. (2013) Refugees, host states and displacement in the Middle East: an enduring challenge. Humanitarian Exchange(59), pp. 20-22.

White, B. T. (2010) The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s: development of a politics of ethnicity. Middle Eastern Studies, 46(6), pp. 901-917.

White, B. T. (2010) Addressing the state: the Syrian Ulama protest personal status law reform, 1939. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(01), pp. 10-12. (doi: 10.1017/S0020743809990572)

Altug, S. and White, B. T. (2009) Frontières et pouvoir d'Etat. Vingtième Siècle, 2009(103), pp. 91-104. (doi: 10.3917/ving.103.0091)

White, B. T. (2008) Rhetorical hierarchies in France and Syria during the mandate. Chronos: Revue d’Histoire de l’Université de Balamand(17), pp. 105-123.

White, B. T. (2007) The nation-state form and the emergence of 'minorities' in Syria. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 7(1), pp. 64-85. (doi: 10.1111/j.1754-9469.2007.tb00108.x)

Books

White, B. T. (2011) The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN 9780748641871

Book Sections

White, B. T. (2023) The global origins of the modern refugee camp: military humanitarianism and colonial occupation at Baquba, Iraq, 1918–1920. In: Knudsen, A. J. and Berg, K. G. (eds.) Continental Encampment: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe. Berghahn, pp. 43-67. ISBN 9781800738447

White, B. T. (2020) Animals, people and places in displacement. In: Adey, P., Bowstead, J., Brickell, K., Desai, V., Dolton, M., Pinkerton, A. and Siddiqi, A. (eds.) The Handbook of Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland, pp. 549-568. ISBN 9783030471774 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-47178-1_38)

White, B. T. (2020) Protection or isolation? Humanitarian evacuees in Australian quarantine stations. In: Scott-Smith, T. and Breeze, M. E. (eds.) Structures of Protection: Rethinking Refugee Shelter. Berghahn Books: Oxford, UK, pp. 187-198. ISBN 9781789207125

White, B. T. (2016) Minderheiten in beiden Ländern. In: Lemke, B. (ed.) Irak und Syrien. Series: Wegweiser zur Geschichte. Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn, pp. 135-149. ISBN 9783506786623

Book Reviews

White, B. T. (2022) Utopian thinking, dystopian consequences: reflecting on ‘Refugia’. Singular Things, 2022(Aug 19), [Book Review]

White, B. T. (2018) Calais Writers, Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp. London: Pluto Press, 2017. vi + 266 pp. Figures and index. £75.00 U.K./$99.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-7453-9970-6; £14.99 U.K./$21.00 U.S. (pb). ISBN: 978-0-7453-9968-3. H-France Review, 18(199), [Book Review]

White, B. T. (2015) Review of James Grehan, Twilight of the saints: everyday religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). American Historical Review, 120(5), pp. 1996-1997. (doi: 10.1093/ahr/120.5.1996a)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2014) Review of Isa Blumi, Ottoman refugees, 1878-1939: migration in a post-imperial world (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Reviews in History, (doi: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1690)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2014) Mikhail, Alan; Nature and empire in Ottoman Egypt: an environmental history. Archives of Natural History, 41(2), pp. 378-379. (doi: 10.3366/anh.2014.0271)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2014) Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation, 1808–1918, Vols. 1 and 2 by Stefan Weber. Arab Studies Journal, 22(1), pp. 279-284. [Book Review]

White, B. T. (2012) The Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908 by Gokhan Cetinsaya. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39(1), pp. 139-141. (doi: 10.1080/13530194.2012.660003)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2012) Transforming Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City by Leila Hudson. Arab Studies Journal, 20(1), pp. 199-203. [Book Review]

White, B. T. (2010) Rifa'at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the modern state: the Ottoman Empire, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, 2nd edition. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 37(3), pp. 457-459. (doi: 10.1080/13530194.2010.524444)[Book Review]

White, B. T. (2009) Jeremy Salt, The unmaking of the Middle East: a history of Western disorder in Arab lands. Review of Middle East Studies, 43(1), pp. 128-129. [Book Review]

This list was generated on Fri Oct 11 16:36:16 2024 BST.

Grants

The history of humanitarian evacuations, Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith doctoral studentship 2017–21, £57,000 maintenance grant, £12,000 research allocation, plus full fee waiver (2016)

Humans and animals in refugee camps, Wellcome Trust seed award in humanities and social science, £47,349, award reference 205708/Z/16/Z (2016)

In 2016 I also supported Jennifer Carr’s Wellcome Trust doctoral studentship application for a project on the history of medical humanitarianism in refugee camps (£83,593, award reference 203381/Z/16/Z) and mentored Dr Hannah-Louise Clark’s successful Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship application at Glasgow (award reference ECF-2016-568)

The medical history of the refugee camp, Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith doctoral studentship 2016–20, £57,000 maintenance grant, £12,000 research allocation, plus full fee waiver (2015)

British Academy Sponsored Institutes and Societies strategic development programme, £15,000 for an academic/humanitarian knowledge-exchange series at the Council for British Research in the Levant (2015)

Iraqi archives in the USA, Leverhulme Trust doctoral studentship 2016–19, £70,000, funded as part of Glasgow’s successful bid for Leverhulme doctoral studentships (2014)

Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland small research grant, The Baquba refugee camp in Iraq, 1918-21, £911 (2014)

Supervision

I would be happy to supervise doctoral students wanting to work on the history of refugees and statelessness, anywhere in the world, especially on aspects of the history of the refugee camp and on the relationship between forced displacement and the environment. Other subjects would include the history of humanitarianism, the League of Nations mandates, and French and British imperialism in the Middle East.

  • Finlayson, Eilidh
    Gendering Scottish-Atlantic Slavery: property rights, kinship, and the female beneficiaries of transatlantic wealth, 1770-1838
  • Hoppermann, Judith
    Theorising the International Politics of Refugee Returns – Actors, Diplomacy, and the State in Lebanon

Teaching

My postgraduate courses are ‘Century of the refugee’: refugees and statelessness in comparative perspective, 1900–2000 and The Ottomans in history, 1300–1922. I have also convened the full-year core module for all postgraduate taught courses in history, Research resources and skills for historians, and co-taught the module Approaches to history.

At honours level I teach a full-year special subject, ‘Century of the refugee’: refugees and statelessness in the long twentieth century, c.1900–present and a one-semester honours module, Middle Eastern cities 1800–1960: cosmopolitanism, empire, and nationalism. In years when I am only available for one semester I also run a shorter version of the special subject as a one-semester honours module covering the first half of the twentieth century, ‘The scum of the earth’:
refugees and statelessness in world history, c.1900–1951.

I previously convened the sub-honours undergraduate course History 1C: War, revolution, and empire: Europe from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and contributed lectures and seminars to it. In future I will be contributing to level 2 courses, including the new survey course in global history.