Montrésor, John (1736-1799), British military engineer

Scotland generated four Jacobite risings from 1689 to 1745, plus Franco-Jacobite invasion threats in 1708 and 1744. British military mapping was the responsibility of the London-based Board of Ordnance. After the 1707 Act of Union the Scottish Ordnance Office came under London control and received additional staff. Road making was initiated, associated with Generals George Wade and William Roy. Originally fortress-oriented, the Drawing Room in the Tower of London shifted to producing topographical surveys, oriented after 1746 towards transportation, development and integration.

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‘Terrible things happen’: Peter Bowker's Occupation and the Representation of the Iraq War in British Television Drama

Journal of British Cinema and Television ◽

10.3366/jbctv.2013.0130 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 206-223 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Stephen Harper

Keyword(s):

Public Service ◽

Iraq War ◽

Television Drama ◽

Narrative Space ◽

Public Service Broadcasting ◽

Military Involvement ◽

British Military ◽

Discursive Strategy ◽

Historically Situated ◽

Invasion Of Iraq

Peter Bowker and Laurie Borg's three-part television drama Occupation (2009) chronicles the experiences of three British soldiers involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By means of an historically situated textual analysis, this article assesses how far the drama succeeds in presenting a progressive critique of the British military involvement in Iraq. It is argued that although Occupation devotes some narrative space to subaltern perspectives on Britain's military involvement in Iraq, the production – in contrast to some other British television dramas about the Iraq war – tends to privilege pro-war perspectives, elide Iraqi experiences of suffering, and, through the discursive strategy of ‘de-agentification’, obfuscate the extent of Western responsibility for the damage the war inflicted on Iraq and its population. Appearing six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, Occupation's political silences perhaps illustrate the BBC's difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting.

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