Forging a Modern Empire of the Air: Race and Gender in Early British Aeronautics, 1908-1933

This dissertation examines how gendered and raced conceptions of imperial power shaped British aeronautics in the first three decades of the twentieth century, fundamentally revising our understanding of the relationships among empire, technology, and cultural values. The chapters that follow employ government ministry papers, political speeches, military reports, periodicals, memoirs, and other published and unpublished documents to demonstrate that the British Empire in the early twentieth century developed a highly modern conception of global governance, even as violent encounters between indigenous populations and Britain's airborne colonial military subverted imperial racial and gender hierarchies. Recruited and trained by a network of British administrators on the assumptions that flying officers should embody national-imperial strength and that airplanes would offer a panoptic advantage over their opponents, aviators who served in the British air forces often suffered physical and psychological traumas and faced substantial resistance in their abortive efforts to police colonies, resulting in disagreement among air power theorists and policymakers regarding masculine identity and conceptions of racial difference. These disputes, taking place during the rise of the British warfare state and in tandem with developments in civil aeronautics, would have long-term effects on the restructuring of British colonial administration and on the commemoration of male airplane pilots as imperial soldier-heroes.