What impact did Lawrence of Arabia have on history?

Question

I really need this info. for my project I'm stuck I don't know what to do

Answer 1

Next to nothing. He was a minor celebrity in britain following WW1.

Answer 2

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO (August 16, 1888 – May 19, 1935), known professionally as T.E. Lawrence and, later, T.E. Shaw, but most famously as "Lawrence of Arabia," gained international renown for his role as a British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18.

Lawrence's public image was due in part to U.S. traveller and journalist Lowell Thomas' sensationalised reportage of the Revolt, as well as to Lawrence's autobiographical account, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

T. E. Lawrence was the second of five illegitimate sons of Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, Bt., an Anglo-Irish landowner. Lawrence's mother had originally been hired to care for Chapman's four daughters by his ex-wife, whom he left because she had a "religious madness" and made his life impossible. T.E.Lawrence was born in 1888 at his parents' modest home in Tremadog, North Wales.

Arab Revolt

Main article: Arab Revolt

Emir Faisal's camel-mounted irregulars, Palestine, 1918.
Emir Faisal's camel-mounted irregulars, Palestine, 1918.

Once enlisted he was posted to Cairo, where he worked for British Military Intelligence. Lawrence's intimate knowledge of the Arab people made him the ideal liaison between British and Arab forces and in October 1916 he was sent into the desert to report on the Arab nationalist movements.

During the war, he fought with Arab irregular troops under the command of Emir Faisal, a son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca, in extended guerrilla operations against the armed forces of the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence's major contribution to World War I was convincing Arab leaders to co-ordinate their revolt to aid British interests. He persuaded the Arabs not to drive the Ottomans out of Medina, thus forcing the Turks to tie up troops in the city garrison. The Arabs were then able to direct most of their attention to the Hejaz railway that supplied the garrison. This tied up more Ottoman troops, who were forced to protect the railway and repair the constant damage. In 1917 Lawrence arranged a joint action with the Arab irregulars and forces under Auda Abu Tayi (until then in the employ of the Ottomans) against the strategically located port city of Aqaba. He was promoted to major in the same year. On July 6, after a daring overland attack, Aqaba fell to Arab forces. Some 12 months later, Lawrence was involved in the capture of Damascus in the final weeks of the war, and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1918.

As he did before the war, during the time he spent with the Arab irregulars, Lawrence adopted many local customs and traditions as his own, and soon became a close friend of Prince Faisal. He became especially known for wearing white Arabian garb (given to him by Prince Faisal, originally wedding robes given to Faisal as a hint) and riding camels in the desert. Lawrence gained extraordinary respect from the Arab populace.

During the closing years of the war he sought to convince his superiors in the British government that Arab independence was in their interests, with mixed success.

In 1918 he co-operated with war-correspondent Lowell Thomas for a short period. During this time Thomas and his cameraman Harry Chase shot much film and many photographs, which Thomas used in a highly lucrative show that toured the world after the war.

Lawrence was made a Companion in the Order of the Bath and awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the French Legion of Honour, though in October 1918 he refused to be made a Knight Commander. In the words of King George V, "He left me there with the box in my hand."

Post-war years
Emir Faisal's party at Versailles, during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Left to right: Rustum Haidar, Nuri as-Said, Prince Faisal, Captain Pisani (behind Faisal), T.E. Lawrence, Faisal's slave (name unknown), Captain Hassan Khadri.
Emir Faisal's party at Versailles, during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Left to right: Rustum Haidar, Nuri as-Said, Prince Faisal, Captain Pisani (behind Faisal), T.E. Lawrence, Faisal's slave (name unknown), Captain Hassan Khadri.

Lawrence worked for the Foreign Office immediately after the war, attending the Paris Peace Conference between January and May as a member of Faisal's delegation.

Lowell Thomas' show was seen by four million people in the post-war years, giving Lawrence great publicity. Until then, Lawrence had little influence, but soon newspapers began to report his opinions. Consequently he served for much of 1921 as an advisor to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office.

Lawrence was ambivalent about Thomas' publicity, calling him a "vulgar man," though he saw Thomas' show several times. Starting in 1922, Lawrence attempted to join the Royal Air Force under the name "Ross." His cover was soon blown, however, and he was forced out of the RAF. He changed his name to Shaw and joined the Royal Tank Corps in 1923. He was unhappy there and repeatedly petitioned to rejoin the RAF, which finally admitted him in August 1925. A fresh burst of publicity after the publication of Revolt in the Desert (see below) resulted in his assignment to a remote base in British India in late 1926, where he remained until the end of 1928. At that time he was forced to return to the UK after rumours began to circulate that he was involved in espionage activities.

He purchased several small plots of land in Chingford, built a hut and swimming pool there, and visited frequently. This was demolished in 1930 when the Corporation of London acquired the land.

He continued serving in the RAF, specialising in high-speed boats and professing happiness, and it was with considerable regret that he left the service at the end of his enlistment in March 1935.

Lawrence was a keen motorcyclist, and, at different times, had owned seven Brough Superior motorcycles.


Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Lawrence's masterpiece is Seven Pillars of Wisdom, subtitled, ironically, "A Triumph." In 1919 he had been elected to a seven year research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, providing him with support while he worked on the book. It is a memoir of his experiences during the war, but parts also serve as essays on military strategy, Arabian culture and geography, and other topics. Seven Pillars is an immense work, extremely dense, with complicated syntax, but Lawrence communicates clearly through his prose and the book is stunningly beautiful, poignant, at times comic.

Lawrence re-wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom three times; once "blind," after he lost the manuscript while changing trains. As to the truth of the book's narrative, with Lawrence it is always difficult to untangle reality from mythology; the man himself seemed to enjoy mingling fact and fiction. His complex relation with himself results in passages which alternately belittle his accomplishments and influence, and expand on his role in the revolt. Seven Pillars is a fascinating work as autobiography, as study of history, as psychology.

The accusation that Lawrence repeatedly exaggerated his feats has been a persistent theme among commentators. The list of his alleged "embellishments" in Seven Pillars is long, though many such allegations have been disproved with time, most definitively in Jeremy Wilson's authorized biography, Lawrence of Arabia, based solely on contemporaneous documentation of Lawrence's life and deeds. However, some exaggerations by him are certain: for example, his supposed crossing of the Sinai in two days, which actually took him three days, and his alleged number of battle wounds, which in reality were few. Other exaggerations by him are therefore also possible.

It is not disputed that Lawrence was present during the Arab Revolt. However, the claim that he was one of the leading lights, and indeed the inspiration, has been questioned — particularly as the main basis for this belief is his own book. The Germans commissioned a 12-volume report covering all aspects of the Arab Revolt. Lawrence is not mentioned at all. Still, the Arabs themselves evidently believe that he was influential.

Lawrence acknowledged having been helped in the editing of the book by George Bernard Shaw. In the preface to Seven Pillars, Lawrence (evidently with tongue in cheek) offered his "thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw for countless suggestions of great value and diversity: and for all the present semicolons." (Lawrence himself favoured colons, as in the foregoing quotation.)

The first edition was to be published in 1926 as a high priced private subscription edition. But Lawrence was afraid that the public would think that he would make a substantial income from the book, and he stated that it was written as a result of his war service. He vowed not to take any money from it, and indeed he did not, as the sale price was one third of the production costs! This left a substantial debt, which Lawrence needed to address immediately.

Revolt in the Desert

Revolt in the Desert was an abridged version of Seven Pillars, also published in 1926. He undertook a needed but reluctant publicity exercise, which resulted in a best seller. Again, he vowed not to take any fees from the publication, partly to appease the subscribers to Seven Pillars who had paid dearly for their editions. By the fourth reprint in 1927, the debt from Seven Pillars was paid off. As Lawrence left for military service in India at the end of 1926, he set up the "Seven Pillars Trust" with his friend DG Hogarth as a trustee, in which he made over the copyright and any surplus income of Revolt in the Desert. He later told Hogarth that he had "made the Trust final, to save myself the temptation of reviewing it, if 'Revolt' turned out a best seller."

The resultant trust paid off the debt, and Lawrence then invoked a clause in his publishing contract to halt publication of the abridgement in the UK. However, he allowed both American editions and translations, which resulted in a substantial flow of income. The trust paid income either into a quietly run educational fund for children of RAF officers who lost their lives or were invalided as a result of service, or more substantially into the RAF Benevolent Fund set up by Air-Marshal Trenchard, founder of the RAF, in 1919.

After his death

He also authored The Mint, a memoir of his experiences as an enlisted man in the Royal Air Force. Lawrence worked from a notebook that he kept while enlisted, writing of the daily lives of enlisted men and his desire to be a part of something larger than himself: the Royal Air Force. The book, with its sparse and sharp prose, is stylistically very different from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was published posthumously, edited by his brother, Prof. A.W. Lawrence.

After Lawrence's death, his brother inherited all Lawrence's estate and his copyrights as his sole beneficiary. To pay death duties, he sold the US copyright of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (subscribers' text) outright to Doubleday Doran in 1935. Doubleday still controls publication rights of this version of the text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the USA. He then in 1936 split the remaining assets of the estate, giving "Clouds Hill" and many copies of less substantial or historical letters to the nation via the National Trust, and then set up two trusts to control interests in Lawrence's residual copyrights. To the original Seven Pillars Trust he assigned the copyright in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as a result of which it was given its first general publication. To the Letters and Symposium Trust, he assigned the copyright in The Mint and all Lawrence's letters, which were subsequently edited and published in the book T. E. Lawrence by his Friends (edited by A.W. Lawrence, London, Jonathan Cape, 1937).

A substantial amount of income went directly to the RAF Benevolent Fund, or for archaeological, environmental, or academic projects. The two trusts were amalgamated in 1986, and, on the death of Prof. A.W. Lawrence, also acquired all the remaining rights to Lawrence's works that it had not owned, plus rights to all of Prof A.W. Lawrence's works.