Download developing iraq: britain, india and the redemption

DEVELOPING IRAQ: BRITAIN, INDIA
AND THE REDEMPTION OF EMPIRE
AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIRST
WORLD WAR*
The Great War campaign in Mesopotamia began as a small,
Government of India operation for the defence of Indian frontiers
and British interests in the Persian Gulf.1 However, once at the
Gulf, Indian Army Force D began to advance rapidly north along
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a characteristic effort to shore
up what it already held. Baghdad quickly became its object, not
least because its fabled past ensured that everyone at home had
heard of it: ‘It was the Arabian nights’.2 To Britons the campaign
might have remained a picturesque subplot of the war’s grand
narrative, but for a monumental failure in the midst of its surge
upriver: a reverse at Ctesiphon forced the troops under General
Charles Townshend to retreat to Kut, where they were besieged
through the winter of 1915–16. After more than 20,000 troops
were lost in botched rescue attempts, 9,000 soldiers and thousands of non-combatants surrendered to the Turks in April 1916
— ‘the British Army’s greatest humiliation in the First World
War’,3 and that too in ‘the one theatre of the war where we
* I would like to thank Sean Hanretta, Thomas Laqueur, Aprajit Mahajan, Rebecca
Manley, Thomas Metcalf, C. P. Sujaya and James Vernon for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1
On the early decisions about the scope of the campaign, see John S. Galbraith, ‘No
Man’s Child: The Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1916’, Internat. Hist. Rev., vi
(1984); S. A. Cohen, ‘The Genesis of the British Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914’,
Middle Eastern Studies, xii (1976); Paul K. Davis, Ends and Means: The British
Mesopotamian Campaign and Commission (London, 1994); Briton Cooper Busch,
Britain, India, and the Arabs, 1914–1921 (Berkeley, 1977), ch. 1; Mesopotamia
Commission Report (hereafter MCR), Parliamentary Papers (hereafter P.P.), 1917–18
(Cd. 8610), xvi, pp. 20–8.
2
Lieutenant Colonel L. A. Lynden-Bell, interview with Peter Liddle, TS, Oct.
1977: Liddle Collection, Leeds University Library (hereafter Liddle), GS 0993
(Lynden-Bell Papers). See also Captain H. Birch Reynardson, Mesopotamia, 1914–15:
Extracts from a Regimental Officer’s Diary (London, 1919), 240–2; Edmund Candler,
The Long Road to Baghdad, 2 vols. (New York, 1919), ii, 104; Sir George Buchanan,
The Tragedy of Mesopotamia (London, 1938), 239; MCR, 20.
3
Richard Popplewell, ‘British Intelligence in Mesopotamia: 1914–1916’, Intelligence and National Security, v (1990), 139. No other British army had surrendered
(cont. on p. 212)
Past and Present, no. 197 (Nov. 2007)
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm008
ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007
212
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could least afford a fluctuating standard’.4 The London War
Office took control of the campaign, and parliament launched
an inquiry into the disaster. In its report of June 1917, the Mesopotamia Commission ultimately censured the Indian army and
the Government of India for their rash and ill-advised decision to
advance on Baghdad and their inadequate provisioning of the
force — particularly in the area of transport and medical facilities.
The public exposure of these blunders triggered something of a
regime change in India, bringing to power Edwin Montagu as
secretary of state for India and Lord Chelmsford as viceroy.5
Meanwhile the force, now directly under the chief of the Imperial
General Staff, supplied by a reformed Indian government, and led
by a new commander, successfully captured Baghdad in March
1917, making it ‘the first big place we’ve taken in this war’, an
event hailed as ‘the most triumphant piece of strategy. . . since war
started’.6 The troops continued north until they routed the Turks
near Mosul in October 1918. By war’s end, at least three-quarters
of a million Indian and British combatants and non-combatants
had fought in Mesopotamia.
At the outset, the Indian force, equipped only for frontier warfare, had run the rapidly mobile campaign the only way it could —
on a shoestring.7 However, the campaign’s ultimate success after
(n. 3 cont.)
with its colours since the battle of Yorktown in 1781, and none would again until
Singapore fell in 1942.
4
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 212.
5
On the genesis and work of the commission, see Davis, Ends and Means, chs. 8 and
9. Austen Chamberlain resigned as secretary of state for India, but was soon back in the
government as a minister in the war cabinet. Hardinge ceased to serve as viceroy from
April 1916 but was returned to his position as permanent under-secretary of state for
foreign affairs. Arthur Balfour, the new foreign secretary, refused to accept Hardinge’s
repeated attempts to resign. Beauchamp Duff, the Indian commander-in-chief,
left India to testify but never returned to his post. He died in 1919. Charles Munro
replaced him. Surgeon-General H. G. Hathaway was compelled to resign. Most others
charged were excused or exonerated.
6
Captain L. W. Jardine to Colin [brother?], 18 Mar. 1917: Liddle, MES 053
(Jardine Papers); J. T. Parfit, Serbia to Kût: An Account of the War in the Bible Lands
(London, 1917), 45. See also Edward J. Thompson, The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad
(London, 1919), 7; Edmund Dane, British Campaigns in the Nearer East, 1914–1918:
From the Outbreak of War with Turkey to the Armistice, ii, The Tide of Victory (London,
1919), 226–7.
7
Some in the Indian government protested that India’s resources had already been
drained by the supplies and troops sent to France and East Africa. See Buchanan,
Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 114; MCR, 11. Others protested that India had not been
prepared as European countries had before 1914. See, for instance, ‘Lessons from
(cont. on p. 213)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
213
Kut rested on the Indian government’s transformation of Mesopotamian transportation facilities, through the provision of technical experts, labour and material for the construction of ships,
wharves, railways, dams, canals, harbours and so on, in what was
conceived of as a developmental effort, an effort to stake out the
land of two rivers as a material object. By ‘development’ I mean a
statist effort to use public investment for the avowed purpose of
raising a colony into a modern nation state (as opposed to the
more general Victorian notion of empire as a means of upliftment). By examining the British Indian development of Iraq,
this article argues that the modern notion of colonial development was a highly contingent product of the expansion of the
British empire into the Middle East — via India — during the
First World War, before it became what historians have generally
described it as: a response, played out largely in sub-Saharan
Africa, to the crisis of empire in the Second World War.8 The
idea of developing Iraq fulfilled certain military and cultural
needs generated by the Great War: in a country famous for its
former glory as the cradle of civilization, and against the backdrop
of the technological undoing of civilization on the Western front,
it offered proof of the constructive powers of modern technology
and the British empire. That it was the Indian colony that performed much of the task was a matter of pride for Indian nationalists as much as British imperialists, for whom it offered yet more
proof that their empire was not the malevolent, grasping force or
anachronistic geopolitical extravagance its critics made it out to
be, but a benign and effective mechanism of global improvement
(n. 7 cont.)
Mesopotamia’, Times, 11 July 1917, 5. In fact, the Home and Indian governments had
agreed that there was no need to equip India beyond the usual levels necessary for
coping with frontier and internal security. See MCR, 81; F. J. Moberly, The Campaign
in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918, 4 vols. (London, 1923–7), iv, 31; Buchanan, Tragedy of
Mesopotamia, 221.
8
Only then, it is argued, did older ideas finally receive the necessary financial backing to become material realities. See Frederick Cooper, ‘Modernizing Bureaucrats,
Backward Africans, and the Development Concept’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall
Packard (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History
and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, 1997),70; Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard,
‘Introduction’, ibid., 7; Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial
Development Policy, 1914–1940 (London, 1984), 303–4; Paul B. Rich, Race and
Empire in British Politics (Cambridge, 1986), 145; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts:
Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002), 82–3. Mitchell has recently turned
the development literature towards Egypt.
214
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and nation-building. My purpose in arguing for the relevance of
this Great War episode is less to revise the date of the emergence of
the notion of colonial development than to highlight its militaryindustrial roots and its uses, in the cultural moment of the Great
War, in underwriting fresh imperial conquest and in propagating
the imperial principle so thoroughly that it impinged even on the
aspirations of anti-imperial nationalism. My focus here is on the
British construction of wartime colonial development as a process of national transformation; I shall only open up the question
of how that process might have affected the actual development of
India and Iraq.
On the Western front, ‘No Man’s Land’, the war’s most evocative spatial symbol, represented technology’s desolation of nature
into the ‘heart of darkness’; post-war Britons’ faith in technocratic
development of land and society, both at home and abroad, was
born elsewhere — in a colonial theatre already configured as an
archetypal heart of darkness.9 Military failure paradoxically produced faith in the fundamentally progressive and disciplinable
nature of technology when the Indian government seized on technological development as a means of making Mesopotamia fit for
modern warfare and of redeeming itself from disgrace after Kut.
To be sure, the very existence of Indian technical expertise in
9
On post-war faith in technocratic development, see David Matless, Landscape
and Englishness (London, 1998), 29–30; Constantine, Making of British Colonial
Development Policy, 25. On the myth of an anti-technocratic England, see David
Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation
(London, 1991); David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge,
2006). The post-war expansion of empire and encouragement of industrialism in
the colonies tend to undermine the classic thesis of the total cultural rupture created
by the Great War: see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London,
1975); Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I
(Cambridge, 1979). On the limits of this rupture, see also Jay Winter, Sites of
Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge,
1995), 2–5; Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture,
1850–2000 (London, 2000), 151–85; Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars:
Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004). Samuel
Hynes claims that other fronts have simply not entered the ‘myth’ of the war: Samuel
Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York, 1997), 116; see
also Eitan Bar-Yosef, ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine
Campaign, 1917–18’, Jl Contemporary Hist., xxxvi (2001), 108. But this singularity
of myth is more ours than post-war Britons’. Witness, for instance, the entwining of the
Lawrence and Western front myths in that totemic war-book, Robert Graves, GoodBye to All That: An Autobiography (London, 1929), and the centrality of the myth of
the air and desert wars in the prosecution of the Second World War, as described by
Hynes himself.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
215
transforming nature was predicated on past exercises in imperial
development, such as the river projects in India and Egypt.10
Indeed, like Egypt, Mesopotamia was constituted as a geographical and political object centred on the basic developmental ‘problem’ of an ancient river system ringed by desert and a backward
population.11 But the development of Iraq differed from these
antecedents — and from, say, state management of poverty in
Britain — in the totality of its ambition, in its positing of an
entire proto-nation state as its object.12 It also differed from
notions of colonial development articulated by Joseph Chamberlain, colonial secretary from 1895 to 1903, whose idea of investing
state funds had fallen victim to the paramount principle of colonial financial self-sufficiency. It was in wartime Mesopotamia that
the ‘techno-science’ Timothy Mitchell has described first evolved
on a national scale to ‘improve the defects of nature, to transform
peasant agriculture, to repair the ills of society, and to fix the
economy’.13
It is no accident that Iraq should have emerged as a key site for
the articulation of the modern discourse of development; its past,
as constructed in British representations, meant everything. The
idea of developing Iraq did not raise the preservationist fears of
rapid economic change upsetting indigenous social and political
10
William Willcocks, the irrigation engineer employed in Iraq by the Turkish government on the eve of the war, had earlier applied his Indian training in Egypt and
South Africa. On the imperial reach of Indian engineering, see David Gilmartin,
‘Imperial Rivers: Irrigation and British Visions of Empire’, in Durba Ghosh and
Dane Kennedy (eds.), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World
(New Delhi, 2006).
11
On Egypt, see Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 210.
12
On the roots of the practice of development in nineteenth-century Europe, see
Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton, ‘The Invention of Development’, 29, and
Michael Watts, ‘ ‘‘A New Deal in Emotions’’: Theory and Practice and the Crisis of
Development’, 48, 51, both in Jonathan Crush (ed.), Power of Development (London,
1995). Mitchell argues that development was part of the formation of the economy as
an object and that it was at the level of the colony, rather than the metropolitan power,
that the territorial framing of an economy was first possible: Rule of Experts, 4–6, 82–3.
Others too have questioned the priority of the European experience, acknowledging
for instance the role of Indian precedent in the ‘massive state investment in a coordinated system of infrastructure’, including extensive roads, canals, harbours and
bridges, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which laid the foundation for the later Chadwickian reforms in England: Christopher Hamlin, Public
Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge,
1998), 264–6. Indeed, even during the First World War, British state expansion
took place under Lloyd George’s war cabinet, which brought the state under imperial
administrators such as Lord Curzon and Lord Milner.
13
Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 15.
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order that otherwise tended to undermine the fulfilment of visionary wartime plans for colonial development; there, development
could be framed as preservation, as a restoration of the country’s
lost greatness and precociousness.14 Although the wartime development of Iraq ultimately recalled Chamberlain’s vision in its
actual unfolding, focusing on activities, such as the settlement
of tribes and provision of transportation, that would make the
colony a supplier of raw materials for industrial Britain rather
than an industrial nation in its own right, in Iraq even this limited
notion of colonial development implied something grander.
There, the ability to produce primary goods was the mark not
of backwardness but of the country’s resurgence as a glorious
imperial entrepôt.15 Proponents of wartime development of
Iraq claimed more exalted goals than Chamberlain had, while
India’s wartime reformers anticipated post-1940 efforts to
remake colonies in the image of the metropole. Their determination, so appealing to many nationalists, to prove India a worthy
‘partner in empire’ — indeed, to remake it into an imperial centre
in its own right16 — also bolstered British commitment to development of Indian industrial capacity. Together, during the Great
War, both ‘India’ and ‘Iraq’ emerged as discrete economies in a
British imperial consciousness increasingly committed — at least
in theory — to the idea of empire as a collection of interdependent
and mutually supportive national economies.17
14
On the role of preservationist fears in undermining wartime colonial development
schemes, see Constantine, Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 2, 11, 16–25,
31, 47, 52, 54, 56, 287, 294, 299; Cooper, ‘Modernizing Bureaucrats’, 65, 67, 70.
15
Although it does not address questions of development beyond land policy, see
Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied
(New York, 2003) on how the British Iraqi state’s modernizing imperatives articulated
with an orientalist perspective of Iraqi society to produce ultimately a regime heavily
dependent on entrenching the semi-feudal power of tribal chiefs. The starkest manifestation of this archaizing tendency was, of course, the decision to create an Iraqi
constitutional monarchy under King Feisal, a sort of Iraqi princely state.
16
That British Indian officials hoped to ‘Indianize’ Mesopotamia’s administration
is well known — see Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs; Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 10–11;
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2002), 36–7; Peter Sluglett,
Britain in Iraq, 1914–1932 (London, 1976), 13–18 — but it is less often appreciated
that Indians themselves harboured such ambitions, nor that they saw development,
more than administration, as a mechanism for extending Indian influence.
17
Existing historiography dates the emergence of the notion of an Indian national
economy as a distinct, objectively identifiable and territorially bounded sphere of
social relations to the late nineteenth century, when Indian nationalists also became
determined to unmask the Indian state as the machinery of British self-interest,
(cont. on p. 217)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
217
In what follows, I shall first examine representations of the
Mesopotamia campaign in the official and private accounts of
those who served there in order to illuminate the sources of their
optimism about technology and, as a result, empire, as progressive
forces in that country. The next section outlines Indian efforts to
provision the force, which many Britons saw as proof that empire
was fundamentally a means of technological development, and
the consequences of those efforts for India’s position within the
empire.18
I
Development rested on faith in technology, which, despite received wisdom, not only survived but gained strength in the war
— in the Mesopotamian campaign. Without adequate access to
the most modern technologies, many British officials and soldiers
in Mesopotamia pined for it both privately and officially as the
solution to their troubles. The conditions of the campaign seemed
to suggest that it was not so much that the power of modern technology was limited but that some places simply were not ready for
it and could be made so by imperial progress.
From the outset, soldiers represented Mesopotamia as an oriental land of fantasy: references to the Arabian Nights were on
everyone’s lips.19 One of its acknowledged advantages was that
it offered ‘release’ from the killing fields of France into fabled
(n. 17 cont.)
reinforcing faith in the state as the prime mover in development and ultimately
prompting the empire to become more nurturing of Indian industrial capital. See
Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space
(Chicago, 2004); David Ludden, ‘India’s Development Regime’, in Nicholas B.
Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992), 252–60. These works allow
little room for contingency, arguing that the concept of a national economy followed
almost inexorably from the set of administrative and information-gathering practices
adopted by the British Indian state in the eighteenth century. My point here is that we
need a wider imperial lens to understand the sources of post-war British support for
Indian industrialism and the transformation of the Indian economy from a colonial to
a national one in British imperial consciousness.
18
The impressions and experiences of Indians involved in this story require a study
of their own. Likewise, I shall not address the question of the efficacy of the British
development of Iraq from the point of view of Iraqis.
19
See, for instance, Martin Swayne, In Mesopotamia (London, 1917), 102; ViceAdmiral Wilfrid Nunn, Tigris Gunboats: A Narrative of the Royal Navy’s Co-operation
with the Military Forces in Mesopotamia from the Beginning of the War to the Capture
of Baghdad (1914–17) (London, 1932), 153.
218
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locales.20 Even a decade later, its peculiar conditions prompted
reminiscences of a ‘queer war’, over which hung ‘an ‘‘Arabian
Nights’’ quality of enchantment by desert djinns’.21 British personnel were also intensely aware that the arid tracts between
Indian Expeditionary Force D and Allenby’s troops further west
‘spanned the whole land of Holy Writ, from Jerusalem to Babylon,
and from Babylon to Shush’.22 In private letters and published
memoirs, they wrote of being ‘immensely moved by the close contact’ with the Garden of Eden, Ezra’s tomb, the Tower of Babel,
Ur of the Chaldees and other Old Testament sites.23 Passing by
biblical sites ‘brought to many of us . . . the realization that the tales
of the Old Testament were based on fact’, wrote one soldier.
There, affirmed a war correspondent, ‘you live the story of the
Bible, and you do not wonder in the least if it is true; you know
20
See, for instance, F. S. G. Barnett to his mother, 10 Mar. 1917: Liddle, GS 0089
(Barnett Papers), file 2; Army YMCA of India, ‘The Land of Two Rivers’, found in
various editions among the papers of many soldiers in Mesopotamia in the Liddle
archive (30,000 copies had been printed in the first edition alone). Apparently, Robert
Graves also sought transfer to the Middle East: Fussell, Great War and Modern
Memory, 218.
21
‘Mesopotamia’, review of Arnold T. Wilson, Loyalties: Mesopotamia, 1914–17. A
Personal and Historical Record (London, 1930), in Times, 11 Dec. 1930, 10.
22
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 198.
23
Edward Kinch, autobiographical notes covering early life in England and career
in Iraq, 1896–1959, MS, n.d., 27: Middle East Centre Archive, St Antony’s College,
Oxford (hereafter MEC) (Kinch Papers), file 1/2. Among the countless examples, see
also Reynardson, Mesopotamia, 28, 116; Major Charles H. Barber, Besieged in Kut and
After (London, 1918), 9; Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 82; H. St. John Philby, chs. 2, 8 of
‘Mesopotage’, MS, [1930s]: MEC (Philby Papers); Harold R. P. Dickson to his
mother, 28 Mar. 1917: MEC (Dickson Papers), box 2, file 1; Black Tab (pseud.),
On the Road to Kut: A Soldier’s Story of the Mesopotamian Campaign (London, 1917),
63, 83, 95; Bertram Thomas, Alarms and Excursions in Arabia (London, 1931), 33;
Lieutenant M. M. Thorburn to his parents, 1 Nov. 1915, and to Alison, 3 Jan. 1916:
Liddle, GS 1599 (Thorburn Papers); Captain C. R. S. Pitman to his parents, 20 Jan.
1916: Liddle, GS 1276 (Pitman Papers), box 3; Charles Disney Milward to his
mother, 14 Dec. 1914: Liddle, RNMN/MILWARD (Milward Papers); Sir Reginald
Savory, recollections, TS, n.d.: Liddle, GS 1429 (Savory Papers); 2nd Lieutenant
R. C. Morton, 6 June 1917, entry in ‘Diary of an eastern excursion in war time starting
from my departure from England on Jan. 5th 1917’, vol. iii: Liddle, GS 1144 (Morton
Papers), box 2; Conrad Cato, The Navy in Mesopotamia: 1914 to 1917 (London, 1917),
17. By the end of the war, scarcely a humorist or cartoonist had not milked the irony of
Eden’s paradisiacal reputation given Al Qurnah’s present state. See, for instance,
Major J. D. Crowdy, 13 Feb. 1918, entry in diary of letters to his wife on his service
in Mesopotamia from Jan. 1916 to Dec. 1918, bk 4, fo. 62: MEC (Crowdy Papers);
E.W., ‘In Mesopotamia’, in his mother, Annie Phillips’s, scrapbook of newspaper
cuttings about the Mesopotamian war: Liddle, MES 082 (William Watt Addison
Phillips Papers), box 4.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
219
it is’.24 Given the added advantages of rapid mobility and ‘not
being shot at’,25 the Mesopotamian campaign seemed an oldfashioned imperial adventure where, if nothing else, traditional
heroic values such as enterprise and bravery still mattered. These
unofficial impressions structured British opinions about the
uses of technology in Mesopotamia; ‘in exile from the world’,
they could fight ‘war as we used to imagine it’, with the old,
‘humane’ implements, in the pithy words of the American secretary of the YMCA serving among the British troops. This was the
‘good old fighting’ that had vanished from France; it proved that
‘in the right place war even to-day can be a romance’.26
The old humane implements were all that was necessary in a
country that, however romantic, seemed a vast, autarkic wasteland, a fallen Eden disconnected from the world and its economy.
As one soldier put it derisively, even ‘Adam and Eve might well
have been excused in such a country’. ‘Mesopotamia welcomes
no man’, was his epigrammatic appraisal.27 It was a no man’s land
by its very nature, a ‘treeless waste of swamp and desert’, in the
words of the war correspondent Edmund Candler, ‘only bleak
emptiness to conquer’.28 Desert phenomena, such as mirages,
sandstorms and limitless horizons, also conspired to make it ‘a
country of topsy-turveydom as regards the subjective estimate of
24
Savory, recollections: Liddle, GS 1429 (Savory Papers); Eleanor Franklin Egan,
The War in the Cradle of the World: Mesopotamia (New York, 1918), 76, 197. See also
Black Tab, On the Road to Kut, 78; Crowdy, 3 Mar. 1918, entry in diary, bk 4, fo. 70:
MEC (Crowdy Papers); Captain Ernest Charles Rycroft, 26 June 1918, diary entry:
Liddle, MES 092 (Rycroft Papers); Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 17. Some remained
only partially convinced: see, for instance, Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 199–
202. Egan, an American, travelled the world during the war and was allowed to enter
Mesopotamia by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice in Washington. Much of his book also
appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. It smacks of propaganda, and one presumes
Spring-Rice sent her in much the same spirit as he had sent Lowell Thomas to
Palestine.
25
P. J. Rolt to Liddle, 20 Dec. 1972: Liddle, MES 090 (Rolt Papers).
26
Arthur Tillotson Clark, To Bagdad with the British (New York, 1918), 2, 47–9. See
also Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 26, 28; Rolt to Liddle, 20 Dec. 1972: Liddle,
MES 090 (Rolt Papers); Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 51. The Palestine campaign was
attractive for similar reasons. See Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the
Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, forthcoming, ch. 5.
27
Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 17, 51.
28
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 33, 176. Candler was a travel-writer and novelist with an interest in British India who was stationed in Mesopotamia from the siege
of Kut. He wrote for the Times and published a complete account of the campaign after
the war (and the lifting of the wartime censorship regime). His account was well
received. See, for instance, Times Lit. Suppl., 13 Feb. 1919, 80; ‘The Long Road to
Baghdad: Mr. Candler’s Book’, Times, 29 Jan. 1919, 7.
220
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the eyes’, wrote one amazed soldier in his memoir.29 Technology
had no purchase on this country: camels looked like ‘huge dissipated compasses’ and floating ships, infantry became sheep, a
motor car became a ‘few filmy lines’, and wagons merely black
dots.30 Visual signalling was almost useless and ranging difficult
in ‘a fairyland that danced and glimmered’, recalled an officer
soon after the war.31 Indeed, soldiers often became lost and
found it impossible to observe their fire and discern its results.32
The country remained unmapped for much of the war, largely
because British surveyors found it impossible to map. Both official
intelligence summaries and private reports described rivers that
shifted course daily, unnavigable marshes, and homes and villages
whose locations were fleeting at best. Overnight, the ground could
change from a land to a naval battlefield.33
29
Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 66–8.
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 47, 111–20. See also Nunn, Tigris Gunboats,
90; Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 7, 66–8, 119; With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia,
1916–1917, by One of its Officers (Bombay, 1918), 70–1 (in ch. 7, whose author is
identified as A. G. Wauchope) (repr. from Blackwood’s Mag., 1917); Pitman to his
family, 29 Sept. 1916: Liddle, GS 1276 (Pitman Papers); Gertrude Bell to Hugh Bell,
23 Nov. 1916, in The Letters of Gertrude Bell, ed. Lady Bell, 2 vols. (London, 1927), i,
389; Milward to his mother, 14 Dec. 1914: Liddle, RNMN/MILWARD (Milward
Papers); Dickson to Gwenlian Greene, 7 Feb. 1915: MEC (Dickson Papers), 1st
booklet; Sir Harold Frederick Downie, diary of Jan.–June 1916: MEC (Downie
Papers); Rycroft, 8 Feb. 1918, diary entry: Liddle, MES 092 (Rycroft Papers);
Brigadier R. B. Rathbone, recollections: Liddle, GALL (REC) 206/1 (Rathbone
Papers); Major General W. D. Bird, A Chapter of Misfortunes: The Battles of Ctesiphon
and of the Dujailah in Mesopotamia, with a Summary of the Events which Preceded Them
(London, 1923), 43, 46, 229; Dane, British Campaigns in the Nearer East, ii, 56.
31
Bird, Chapter of Misfortunes, 58.
32
See, for instance, Moberly, Campaign in Mesopotamia, i, 325–6; Thompson,
Leicestershires beyond Baghdad, 75; Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 47, 55; N. N. E.
Bray, Shifting Sands (London, 1934), 127; A. J. Barker, The Bastard War: The
Mesopotamian Campaign of 1914–1918 (New York, 1967), 29, 54, 90, 161, 164, 347;
Brigadier-Captain E. V. R. Bellers to his mother, 14 Aug. 1917: Liddle, MES 007
(Bellers Papers); [Aubrey Herbert], Mons, ANZAC, and Kut, by an M.P. (London,
1919), 222; Downie, 18 May 1916, in diary of Jan.–June 1916: MEC (Downie Papers).
33
On the various difficulties of mapping Mesopotamia, see Satia, Spies in Arabia, ch.
3. When maps eventually were produced and Mesopotamia triangulated, it was by
adopting special rules and procedures to accommodate its ‘peculiarities’. See ibid.,
and Captain William Leith-Ross, ‘The Tactical Side of I(a)’, n.d., 12: National Army
Museum, London (hereafter NAM), ARC 1983-12-69-10 (Leith-Ross Papers);
‘Report on Surveys, Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force’, n.d., 1–3: ibid.; appendix
4 of ‘Notes on the special topographical features and information peculiar to
Mesopotamia required on a military map’, 21–2: ibid.; F. W. Pirrie, ‘War Surveys in
Mesopotamia’, Geog. Jl, lii (1918); G. A. Beazeley, ‘Surveys in Mesopotamia during
the War’, Geog. Jl, lv (1920). Mitchell points out that maps are the foundation of the
30
(cont. on p. 221)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
221
Before Kut, all this magic and quaintness seemed forgivably
romantic, but after Kut, ‘The conditions of France were repeated
in Mesopotamia’, in Candler’s ominous words. As the campaign
began to go badly wrong, the more treacherous aspects of its biblical associations gained ground in British representations, and
the old humane implements increasingly began to appear inadequate to the task at hand. ‘[W]e were in a country of excess,
where the elements are never moderate or in humour’, wrote
Candler, ‘and there was something almost Biblical in the way the
deities of this ancient land conspired to punish us . . . malice in
the sky and soil . . . heat and drought; hunger and thirst and flies;
damp and cold, fever and ague, flood, hurricane and rain’. At the
actual site of the Great Flood, these punishments seemed like
a ‘Biblical visitation’.34 The difficulty of using modern boats on
the narrow and tortuous rivers north of Al Qurnah was officially
put down to the ‘idiosyncrasies of the Tigris’ rather than to their
design errors; General Lake, who replaced General Nixon as
commander-in-chief after the Kut disaster (only to be replaced
himself after failing to rescue the troops at Kut), later confessed to
the Mesopotamia Commission his doubt that ‘steamers really
suitable for the Tigris exist anywhere’.35 The Mesopotamia
Commission Report of June 1917 (MCR) explained that while ‘a
river is generally regarded as an admirable line of communication’, the Tigris was in a class all its own: in the memorable words
of the Indian commander-in-chief, ‘a very fickle lady who never
sleeps two nights running in the same bed’.36 To George
Buchanan, the engineer dispatched from Rangoon to improve
port facilities and river conservancy, Basra, unlike even Indian
and Egyptian ports, was ‘only an anchorage . . . and beyond —
a swamp’. Basra Intelligence catalogued these various ‘Physical
and Climatic Difficulties of the Mesopotamian Theatre of War’,
(n. 33 cont.)
imperial production of a country as an empirically knowable and disciplinable object:
Rule of Experts, 230.
34
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 50, 72, 99, 164; ‘A Truce in the Desert: Turks’
Arab Allies’, Times, 22 Mar. 1916, 7. See also Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 56.
35
Lake, quoted in MCR, 47, 53. See also Davis, Ends and Means, 189–94;
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 55; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 65, 70, 88, 109,
112, 131. On the controversy over the design, see MCR, 52–4.
36
Vincent-Bingley Report, MCR, appendix 1, 145; Charles Munro, quoted in
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 129. The Vincent-Bingley commission investigated medical arrangements in Mesopotamia.
222
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explaining that ‘in Iraq all military problems . . . are affected by
climate and physical conditions to an extent rarely met with in
any theatre of war’. The MCR likewise opened with a section
on the challenges posed by the country’s ‘Physical and Climatic
Peculiarities’. These peculiarities signified Mesopotamia’s fundamental remoteness, ‘far away from home, civilization, and comfort’, in the rueful words of one naval captain. The investigation of
the Kut disaster thus unleashed a new, less charming image — in
both official and private accounts — of a land of physical and
moral trial, one that sustained an optimistic view of technology:
the failures in Mesopotamia were the fault of Mesopotamia, not of
British military prowess or of modern military equipment. Rather
than lament, as did Britons in France, that technology had paralysed military activity, those involved in the Mesopotamian campaign lamented that modern military technology was apparently
too sophisticated for their backward theatre.37 Hence in part the
dispensing of technology in the country seemed a task more befitting an intermediate member of the empire than the metropole
itself, as we shall see.
That the campaign was in the hands of the Indian government
also made it possible to deflect blame for the actual absence of
certain advanced equipment onto that government’s colonial
nature. The MCR blamed the force’s heavy casualties and reverses
on the lack of wire-cutters, water-carts, Very lights, rockets, mosquito nets, periscopes — the stuff of trench warfare — essential
to ‘war carried on under modern conditions’. It bemoaned ‘the
discredit . . . to the Indian Military Authority that such a modern
device [the Very light] . . . should have been in use by the
Turks . . . before it was supplied to our own troops’.38 In France,
noted Candler, the wounded were whisked away in ‘smooth
motor ambulance wagons’ and provided with ‘every saving
device that Science can lend’, while in Mesopotamia ‘all was
chaos’. Imperial prestige was at stake in the demonstration of
37
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 45; ‘The Physical and Climatic Difficulties of
the Mesopotamian Theatre of War’, 14 Aug. 1916: NAM (Leith-Ross Papers); MCR,
9; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 10. On the view on the Western front that technology was
paralysing, see Leed, No Man’s Land, 122–3.
38
MCR, 37, 38. See also Chelmsford, speech of 1919, quoted in India’s Services in
the War, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1993), i, 26; the book is based on a Government of India
publication of 1922.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
223
technical efficiency, for Indian soldiers noted begrudgingly that
in France ‘the Sirkar had never failed’. Besides making efficient
medical service impossible, the campaign’s mobility — seen as
the mark of its backwardness — frustrated ‘the business of
range-finding and registering, so easy in the stationary conditions
on the Western front’, however fruitless the ability in those stationary conditions.39 Modern warfare had come to mean the
mobile supply of an army immobilized in a clearly demarcated
battlefield. With hindsight, Mesopotamia’s early mobility
seemed a travesty of modern warfare rather than an escape from
it; the campaign suffered from too little technologically induced
stasis.
The force’s successes after the Kut debacle strengthened faith
in modern technology as enabling rather than paralysing. The
trench warfare that took place after the siege was the campaign’s
rite of passage to a modernity no longer diminished by its colonial quality, for, after the War Office takeover and provision of
long-awaited aircraft with photographic equipment for mapping
Mesopotamia, coupled with the Indian government’s technological transfers and infrastructural reforms, ‘bloody, remorseless
trench fighting . . . was a thing of the past’, as Candler attested.
Armed with all the paraphernalia of modern warfare, they now
waged ‘war as it should be waged, with the spirit of movement in
it, the new scenes a background to the drama of battle . . . waiting
to be explored’.40 At Ctesiphon, a naval officer mused on the great
armies and historic figures that ‘had passed this way before the
coming of men in khaki, with their aeroplanes and wireless’.41 In
short, defying the wisdom from France, that ‘modern warfare’
had rendered long advances impossible without ‘a certain calculated sacrifice which is generally prohibitive’, here the British were
modern and yet highly mobile.42 Moreover, the ubiquitous aircraft, which proved more central to the war in the Middle East
than elsewhere, seemed to herald an ultra-modern warfare in
39
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 47, 56, 102. On mobility as a sign of backwardness, see Leed, No Man’s Land, 19, 64.
40
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 23, 223–4. See also Buchanan, Tragedy of
Mesopotamia, 147; Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 32.
41
Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 168.
42
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 51, 132. See also Barker, Bastard War, 467.
224
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which even chivalry and individual heroism were restored to
technological warfare.43
It was French conditions that now appeared ‘abnormal’.44
The Mesopotamia campaign seemed to prove that the reigning military science was sound — perhaps contributing to the
generals’ reluctance to question ‘the cult of the offensive’ in
France.45 General Townshend, who commanded the force besieged at Kut, later affirmed that
the Napoleonic war of manoeuvre or movement was rendered practically
impossible, after the Battle of the Marne, and a ‘war of positions’, recalling the wars of the 18th Century, a war of entrenchments, more suited to
a secondary theatre, became the order of the day. . . On the other hand,
the operations in the secondary theatres of the war, such as Palestine and
Mesopotamia, were wars of manoeuvre and movement.46
Throughout the war, and despite Kut, the force was praised for its
‘brilliant success’.47 The Times considered ‘no example of the war
of movement . . . better worth study than the careful operations’
by which General Stanley Maude ultimately routed the Turkish
army on the Tigris and captured Baghdad. The ad hoc solutions
to the practical problems posed by Mesopotamian topography
marked the campaign as uniquely inventive, perhaps heralding
a warfare of the future: ‘All the five arms of the Force — the Navy,
Cavalry, Infantry, Artillery, and Flying Corps — were working
together in a way that was new in war’, enthused Candler.48 The
43
On the special uses and cultural resonances of aircraft in the Middle Eastern
theatres of the war, see Priya Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and
the British Idea of Arabia’, Amer. Hist. Rev., cxi (2006), 26–9, 38.
44
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 47.
45
On Haig’s commitment to the idea that modern warfare could be mobile, see
Timothy Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front, and the
Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918 (London, 1987). Haig based his ideas of
modern warfare largely on lessons learnt in wars in Sudan and South Africa, which
were to him the ‘paradigm of what ‘‘normal’’ war should be’: ibid., 72, 87–8, 95.
46
Major General Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, My Campaign, 2 vols.
(New York, 1920), i, 19; see, more generally, ibid., 1–36. See also Nunn, Tigris
Gunboats, 98.
47
Herbert Asquith, quoted in Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 28; MCR, 115.
See also Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 165; Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 278;
Squadron Commander R. Gordon, report, n.d., attached to Nunn to C-in-C East
Indies, 10 Dec. 1915: National Archives, London, Public Record Office (hereafter
PRO), AIR 1/648/17/122/386.
48
‘Mesopotamia To-Day’, Times, 11 July 1917, 7; Candler, Long Road to Baghdad,
ii, 80. See also E.W.C., review of F. J. Moberly, History of the Great War, Based on
Official Documents: The Campaign in Mesopotamia, in Jl Central Asian Soc., xi (1924),
96; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 145, 267; Joseph Napier to Department of War Studies,
(cont. on p. 225)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
225
Mesopotamia campaign proved to many in the military establishment and the reading public at home that trench warfare was not
the last stop of modern warfare, that stalemate could end and war
might still be a productive enterprise. If technology’s dark side
was exposed in France, a new aspect of it was unveiled in Iraq: in
the hands of ‘experts’, it could resurrect a military campaign and,
at once, a devastated civilization.
Indeed, after Kut, rescuing Mesopotamia was the new call to
arms: abject failure had raised the stakes of the campaign, while
the refitting of the troops had triggered a refitting of the country.
The country was represented less as a miserable backwater, a
mere ‘side-show’ of the war, and increasingly as the place where
war could find meaning; it was less an oriental escape from industrialism than the proving ground for industry and empire. By
‘reclaim[ing] a wilderness’ and ‘rebuild[ing] a civilization after
many years of anarchy and desolation’ for ‘a new country and a
new people’, the force determined to give meaning to the sacrifices of British soldiers, explained one officer at the war’s end.
Theirs was the blessed task of revitalizing not just any civilization
but one of ‘mysterious and divine’ origins. Indeed, Gertrude Bell,
then a powerful force in the British civil administration, confessed
to feeling ‘rather like the Creator’.49 In this doubly hallowed terrain — hallowed by its past and by the sacrifice of British lives —
Britons constructed a new imperial identity that could even
explain away the, retrospectively charming, missteps that had
landed them in such a Great War in the first place. A sailor
wrote in a 1917 memoir:
We Britons spend our lives in making blunders, and give our lives to
retrieve them. But . . . the dawn has come, and with it the confident assurance that in this new burden of Empire — the task of restoring
Mesopotamia to her former prosperity — the generations to come will
(n. 48 cont.)
Sandhurst, 1976, and to his mother, 28 Feb. 1917: Liddle, GS 1162 (Napier Papers);
Thompson, Leicestershires beyond Baghdad, 7–8; Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia,
161; Candler, ‘The Super-Cavalry of the Tigris: Navy’s Aid to General Townshend’,
Times, 28 July 1917, 5.
49
Reynardson, Mesopotamia, 272; Barker, Bastard War, 42; Bell to her family,
5 Dec. 1918, quoted in Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell: From her Personal Papers,
2 vols. (London, 1958–61), ii, 101. Bell was one among a slew of upper-class Britons fascinated with ‘Arabia’ in this period, many of whom served in various official
capacities in the region during the war. On this community and its cultural formation, see Satia, Spies in Arabia, esp. chs. 1–2.
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gain inspiration from the long chronicle of heroic deeds which make up
the story of her deliverance. The lives of Britain’s sons have not been
sacrificed in vain.
The British were the bearers of a new ‘dawn’ for Iraqis — and
for Britons.50 British representations now stressed that this bit
of the East, far from unchanging, had metamorphosed from
a locus of secular power and worldly riches, tightly bound
to Hellenistic-Christian culture, to a ‘sordid relic’. ‘When
European Christendom looks to-day at the desolation of these
lands’, wrote the historian Edwyn Bevan in a wartime publication, ‘it is looking at a lost piece of itself’. The object of the British
campaign was now nothing less than a ‘regenerated Babylonia, in
which the ancient streams reflect once more mighty structures of
men and gardens like Paradise, and in the streets of whose cities
traffickers from all the earth once more meet’. Man would once
again be ‘master of the great waters’, prophesied Bevan, and the
wanton destruction wrought by feckless and savage imperial
tyrants since the Mongol invasion would be brought to an end.
They would resurrect an older imperial tradition of improvement,
the tradition of the Persians, Seleucids, Parthians, Sassanids and
the Saracen caliphs; in this, too, development was styled as restoration.51 The conviction that they could not possibly worsen such
a derelict land made the steady grind of imperial administration
especially reassuring.52 These were by no means idiosyncratic or
privately held views; in parliament, for instance, Robert Cecil,
Bell’s friend and the assistant secretary of state for foreign affairs,
earnestly praised the ‘very satisfactory progress . . . being
50
Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 106, 117. See also Richard Coke, The Heart of the
Middle East (London, 1925), ch. 20, ‘The Dawn of a To-Morrow’.
51
Edwyn Bevan, The Land of the Two Rivers (London, 1918), 10–11, 112, 124–6.
See also J. T. Parfit, Mesopotamia: The Key to the Future (London, 1917); Reynardson,
Mesopotamia, 243; Valentine Chirol, ‘The Reawakening of the Orient’, in The
Reawakening of the Orient and Other Addresses by Sir Valentine Chirol, Yusuke Tsurumi,
Sir James Arthur Salter (New Haven, 1925), 4; Sir William Willcocks, From the Garden
of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan, 3rd edn (London, 1929). Even before the war,
Willcocks had called for imitation of the ancient empires’ mastery of irrigation in
Mesopotamia. He saw a certain type of strong, paternalistic imperial state as critical
to proper river management and held the ancients up as the British model. See
Gilmartin, ‘Imperial Rivers’.
52
See [Gertrude Bell], The Arab of Mesopotamia (Basra, 1917), 117; Candler, Long
Road to Baghdad, ii, 185, 188.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
227
made . . . in redeeming [Mesopotamia] from the state of ruin into
which it had fallen under the Turks’.53
The project of reclaiming Mesopotamia and rejoining it to a
prosperous West seemed to some to invest the entire war with
meaning. In an essay much circulated amongst the troops, Bell
described how, once again, the ancient markets of Iraq would
thrive and would ‘add immeasurably to the wealth of a universe
wasted by war’, besides providing new fields for European industry.54 ‘Nowhere, in the war-shattered universe’, she held, ‘can we
begin more speedily to make good the immense losses sustained
by humanity’. She effused in letters home about the government’s
unprecedented strides in ‘the making of a new world’. While those
at home were ‘over-strained’, ‘we are out of that atmosphere
here’. Candler too found it ‘comforting to think that the war
which had let loose destruction in Europe was bringing new life
to Mesopotamia’.55 Perhaps more importantly, in this global salvation lay the salvation of the British empire. An officer confided
to a fellow combatant,
All this show of ours out here is nothing in itself . . . It’s a beginning of
something that will materialise a hundred or two hundred or a thousand
years hence. We are the great irrigating nation and that’s why we’re here
now. . . We’ll fix this land up . . . and move the wheels of a new humanity.
Pray God, yes — a new humanity! One that doesn’t stuff itself silly with
whisky and beef and beer and die of apoplexy and high explosives.56
Mesopotamia proved that the British could still civilize, even if
they had lost civilization itself. While a few soldiers may have felt
that ‘All the things one is fighting for are so far away. . . admiration
in women’s eyes, houses and farms to defend like one’s own’,
others found a monumental ideal to fight for in that breach.
53
Robert Cecil, House of Commons debate, 23 July 1918, quoted in A. T. Wilson,
Mesopotamia, 1917–1920: A Clash of Loyalties. A Personal and Historical Record
(London, 1931), 99.
54
[Gertrude Bell], ‘Turkish Provinces: The Anatolian Coast’, in Arab of Mesopotamia, 201–2. This collection of historical and ethnographic essays also received
very favourable reviews in London literary circles.
55
Bell to Florence Bell, 15 Nov. 1917, in Letters of Gertrude Bell, ii, 431–2; Candler,
Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 183. See also ‘A New Mesopotamia’, Guardian, 13 Dec.
1919, 2; Clark, To Bagdad with the British, 244; [Gertrude Bell], ‘Arab Provinces —
Baghdad’, in Arab of Mesopotamia, 131; Bell to Hugh Bell, 18 May 1917, in Letters of
Gertrude Bell, ii, 410–11; Bell to Hardinge, Feb. 1918, quoted in Busch, Britain, India,
and the Arabs, 156.
56
Quoted in Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 166.
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Major General A. G. Wauchope of the Black Watch described
how,
watching these columns of Englishmen and Highlanders, of Hindus,
Gurkhas and bearded Sikhs advancing [within sight of the Median
Wall], one felt the conviction that this struggle was being fought for the
sake of principles more lofty, for ends more permanent, for aims less
fugitive, for issues of higher service to the cause of humanity, than those
that had animated the innumerable and bloody conflicts of the past.
In the advance on Baghdad, he saw the apotheosis of the British
imperial dream, which the cultural resonances of the cradle of
civilization and the land of the Bible had infused with even greater
moral fire. The fall of Baghdad in 1917 inspired wonder and
hope: it was no ordinary city, but, many pointed out, a place
‘famous for the men and armies that had crossed it’.57 By crossing
it, the British too had achieved epoch-making imperial greatness;
far from bankrupt, the empire had finally arrived.
To Britons in Mesopotamia, this proof of the noble purposes of
their imperial campaign saved the empire from abasement at the
hands of the growing number of anti-imperialists at home and
abroad. ‘British seed’ would make the desert ‘bloom as the
rose’, promised an officer, furnishing a fitting rebuke to ‘fluent
decriers of their own country’, who called empire ‘a thing of pitiless blood and iron’. As in Egypt and Punjab, explained the Arabist Mark Sykes in an official note, here too the British imperial
ideal was ‘not . . . conquest but . . . redemption’. The development
of Mesopotamia offered proof of the queerly selfless and attractive
nature of British imperialism: ‘Truly we are a remarkable people’,
Bell mused; ‘We save from destruction remnants of oppressed
nations, laboriously and expensively giving them sanitary accommodation, teaching their children, respecting their faiths’, yet
remained cursed by subjects who, nevertheless, ‘when left to
themselves . . . flock to our standards . . . It’s the sort of thing
that happens under the British flag — don’t ask us why’. British
occupation was thus exempt from the sins ordinarily associated
with such a regime. Montagu, secretary of state for India, pointedly remarked in parliament, ‘It was interesting to compare
57
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 176; A. G. Wauchope, ‘The Battle that Won
Samarrah’, ch. 8 of With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia, 85; Clark, To Bagdad
with the British, 239. See also Savory, recollections: Liddle, GS 1429 (Savory Papers);
Bell to Florence Bell, 22 Nov. 1917, in Letters of Gertrude Bell, ii, 432–3; Wilson,
Loyalties, 278; Reynardson, Mesopotamia, 243; Army YMCA of India, ‘Baghdad:
The City of the Caliphs’ (Baghdad, 1918): Liddle, MES 094 (Sampson Papers).
DEVELOPING IRAQ
229
British occupation in Mesopotamia with German occupation in
Belgium. (Hear, hear.)’ Surveying ‘the sound and colour of the
reviving world’, Bell felt she was ‘really part of Mesopotamia and
not part of an army of occupation’.58 If the Arabs appeared
ungrateful for their deliverance, what better proof of Britons’
total selflessness as imperial improvers?59 To be sure, some did
see a more material redemption of British sacrifices in Mesopotamia’s future ‘untold wealth’ as a supplier of cotton, wheat and
oil.60 But even this seemingly selfish hope was no stain on the
imperial conscience, insisted one officer; for, rather than proof
of ‘motives of ‘‘land-grabbing’’ and Imperialism in its worst
aspects’, the ‘large reward’ awaiting the ‘rescuers of Mesopotamia’ would provide minor compensation for their redemption of
the British empire from centuries of (equally selflessly) policing
the Middle Eastern seas and inadvertently abetting the Turks’
truly rapacious imperialism.61
58
Reynardson, Mesopotamia, 172; ‘Political Note on our Advance in Irak’, 17 Sept.
1917: MEC (Sykes Papers), box 2, file 7, document 78; Bell to Hugh Bell, 10 Nov.
1922, in Letters of Gertrude Bell, ii, 657; Montagu, speech in House of Commons
debate on Indian reform, 6 Aug. 1918, reported in Times, 7 Aug. 1918, 8; Bell to
Hugh and Florence Bell, 31 Jan. 1918, in Letters of Gertrude Bell, ii, 441–4.
59
See Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 188.
60
Barnett to his mother, 6 Oct. 1916: Liddle, GS 0089 (Barnett Papers). See also
Milward to his mother, 14 Dec. 1914: Liddle, RNMN/MILWARD (Milward Papers);
extracts from First Lord of the Admiralty, letter, 26 Dec. 1922: PRO, AIR 8/57. The
vision of Iraq as an imperial granary was not the basis of the decision to go for Baghdad,
but was adduced by various individuals to persuade others to agree to it: M. E. Yapp,
The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792–1923 (New York, 1987), 332. Oil was a
growing concern, motivating much of the imperial interest in the region, but was not
yet the main variable in geopolitical calculations. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company
was an asset requiring protection immediately upon the outbreak of war in 1914, and
the suspected oil wealth of Mosul ensured its inclusion in British-mandated Iraq after
the war; however, oil only began to flow in Mosul a decade after the war and remained
decidedly secondary to security considerations among the factors that made
Mesopotamia an attractive addition to the empire in official discourse. When
Britons talked during and after the war about the promise of Iraqi wealth, they were
almost always talking about its agricultural potential as a restored granary of the world.
Thus, for instance, Arnold Wilson, soon after leaving his post as civil commissioner in
Iraq, attested that ‘There is oil in Mesopotamia’, but that it would be unwise to ‘bank
too much’ on it, for the infrastructure required to extract it was so complicated that
‘we must wait, perhaps a long time’: Arnold Wilson, ‘Mesopotamia, 1914–1921’, Jl
Central Asian Soc., viii (1921), 151. Still, many critics of the British mandate in Iraq
seized on oil as the real reason behind the government’s determination to hold the
country. See also Satia, Spies in Arabia, intro. and ch. 9; Keith Jeffery, The British Army
and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–22 (Manchester, 1984), 35.
61
Reynardson, Mesopotamia, 50. See also Sir Henry Dobbs to duke of Devonshire,
10 Jan. 1924: PRO, AIR 8/34.
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That the Indian colony was the primary agent of Mesopotamia’s technological recovery only strengthened faith in the altruism of the British empire. Indians’ prodigious efforts, as soldiers,
labourers, experts and so on, proved, according to an exultant
parliamentary paper on the subject, that they knew Britain
ruled for their good and ‘not to exploit India for the benefit of
this country’. John Stuart Mill’s version of empire had been vindicated, announced the Times: Britain’s was a ‘steadfastly progressive rule . . . the most beneficent in design and execution
known in the history of mankind’. Through the Mesopotamia
campaign, their beneficence towards India had been ‘blessed
not only to the giver and the receiver, but to the world at large’.62
Modern technology was the linchpin of this vision of the work of
the British empire. Irrigation works seemed the appropriate antidote to the indiscipline of the nomad terrain that the cradle of
civilization had become. The dams and canals ravaged by the
Mongols, on which ‘some fifty centuries of prosperous civilisation
had been based’, would be restored, read a post-war article in the
Times, and Clio would return as Baghdad’s lingering aura of mystery was ‘violated by the whirring wheels . . . of trains, of cars, of
aeroplanes’.63 Aircraft, whose uses in post-war Iraq were, if anything, even richer than in wartime,64 were seized on as a fittingly
miraculous technology for restoring the country to its old prominence as a cosmopolitan entrepôt. The agelessness of the Orient
was only reaffirmed by their arrival, enthused the Times, recalling
the sorcerers who, once upon a time, had made Sindbad the Sailor
turn airman on the back of a great bird. Motor cars too were like
‘snorting land monsters which rush across the deserts’. ‘Naturally,
the inhabitants take these things as a matter of course’, assured the
paper, for ‘The age of miracles has happily returned, and we may
see strange Arabian nights in the coming years’. The advent of air
and road transport, averred the post-war writer Richard Coke,
62
East India (Military), P.P., 1914–16 (Cd. 7624), xlix, p. 15; Times Trade Suppl., 2
Dec. 1918, 206b, quoted in India’s Services in the War, i, 39. Mill is a pivotal figure in
the Cowen/Shenton story. He stressed personal choice as the condition of development, a condition absent in societies bound by ‘custom’, such as, for instance, the
India he helped oversee from the East India Company office. He viewed trusteeship as
the necessary principle of imperial government in such a place: Cowen and Shenton,
‘Invention of Development’, 38–41.
63
‘Four Centuries of History’, review of Stephen Hembley Longrigg, Four Centuries
of Modern Iraq, in Times, 22 Jan. 1926, 17.
64
See Satia, ‘Defense of Inhumanity’.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
231
made it possible to restore to its rightful importance that great
artery of world trade to which the Arabs, the most promising
among the sundry peoples liberated by the war, owed their
uniquely distinguished past.65 Developing Mesopotamia was an
act of restoration, not transformation, a refitting of it, through
modern technology, to resume its traditional role in a modern
world. Technologies such as dams and modern roads would not
only produce battlefields from Mesopotamia’s disordered landscape but also produce Mesopotamia itself as a geographical and
political object.66 They would both improve the fabulous and
terrible country and bring it within the realm of the knowable,
within the pale of the economy that development sought to make.
This mix of heady rhetoric and mundane technocratic activity
was the essence of that moment in the twentieth-century formation of British imperial identity when, as Robert Colls has put it,
‘The traditions of an ancient realm were held aloft to signify
Englishness to the world, while behind all that it was understood
that modern men ran the business’. The return of a king to the
Baghdad of Haroun was one thing, but, as one sentimental
American noted a decade after the war,
in the shadows beside the dais stand men in green-brown uniforms —
blue-eyed men of a tribe that [earlier] had no standing in Arabia . . . Angles
they call these men, and they are not like the other conquerors who flowed
into Iraq with sword and torch in the days whose record may be read in the
ash piles along the Tigris. They are children — fussy children — eternally
worried over the removal of rubbish, the ‘improvement’ of roads and
bridges that for hundreds of years served our ancestors . . . the disciplining
of the police force and what not.
Efficient as these imperial professionals were, they were not
George Orwell’s famously lamented dull ‘clerks’ of the 1920s,
the ‘Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits’, prefiguring
his nightmare vision of bureaucracy. The sentimental American
concluded, ‘The flying carpet of the Cairo air-mail has come to
rest in the landing field beyond Hinaidi and a sergeant is inspecting its hot motors . . . Who can say that romance is dead in a spot
65
‘A Traveller in Mesopotamia’, review of E. S. Stevens, By Tigris and Euphrates,
in Times, 14 Dec. 1923, 8; Richard Coke, The Arab’s Place in the Sun (London, 1929),
11–12.
66
On state projects to render disorderly or ‘nomad’ terrain legible and on their
centrality to British development discourse, see Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 78, 230;
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998); Jonathan Crush, ‘Imagining Development’,
in Crush (ed.), Power of Development, 2, 15.
232
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such as this . . .?’67 These new joiners were unequivocally ‘young
men of spirit’, looking for adventure in the post-war world,
inspired by the legends of their wartime predecessors and their
recuperative vision of technology in the Middle East. Indeed, so
warmly did the light of hope glow in Mesopotamia in the dimly lit
post-war world that soldiers at a loose end sought transfer there to
find an assuredly constructive role. James Mann, who became a
political officer, reasoned with his mother, ‘if one takes the Civil
Service, or the Bar, or Literature, or Politics, or even the Labour
movement, what can one do that is constructive? Here on the
other hand I am constructing the whole time’.68 British authorities in London and Baghdad insisted on post-war control of
Mesopotamia, despite American opinion, as just recognition of
British sacrifices for the country’s development;69 a war of conquest was reconfigured as an international development effort.
In short, British officials, journalists and politicians claimed a
special status for the new colony — that it was the site for imperial
expiation through technocratic development. Of course, there
were early enthusiasts of development in other parts of the
empire as well, but Iraq’s special relevance as a site for articulation
of this vision of empire was guaranteed by representations of it as
the fallen cradle of civilization where development would hail a
new age of miracles. In India, for instance, the signs of wartime
modernization were most often viewed as a violation of the
67
Robert Colls, ‘The Constitution of the English’, History Workshop Jl, no. 46 (1998),
105; Robert J. Casey, Baghdad and Points East (London, 1928), preface, pp. vii–viii;
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’
(1941), pt 1, x5:5http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/lionunicorn.html4;
Casey, Baghdad and Points East, 98. See also H. C. Luke, Mosul and its Minorities
(London, 1925), 139, 151; correspondent in Alexandria, reporting interview with
Lord Thomson after his eight-day flying tour of inspection of the Middle East,
‘Air Minister’s Tour’, Times, 4 Oct. 1924, 9.
68
Mann to his mother, 25 Jan. 1920, in An Administrator in the Making: James
Saumarez Mann, 1893–1920, ed. by his father [James Saumarez Mann Sr]
(London, 1921), 206. Mann was killed during the Iraqi rebellion later that year. See
also John Glubb, The Story of the Arab Legion (London, 1948), 19; and file of applications, many from war veterans, for appointment to the Mesopotamian Civil
Administration, especially as Political Officers: British Library, London, India
Office Records, L/PS/10/676, 1918–21. To the Conservative party especially, opportunities for constructive work in the field of imperial development helped strengthen
youthful commitment to the empire — and the party. See, for instance, Dominion
Secretary Leo Amery’s speech in City Hall, Glasgow, at a meeting of the Junior
Imperialist Union, 21 Jan. 1926, reported in ‘Youth and Empire’, Times, 22 Jan.
1926, 7.
69
See Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 158, 190, 275.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
233
colony’s romantic aura, betokening social, cultural and political chaos.70 To be sure, much of the enthusiasm was ultimately
disappointed. In a dramatically changed post-war atmosphere,
George Buchanan aired his disgust with the wild wartime exaggerations of Iraq’s economic possibilities and the disgraceful
extravagance of the military authorities in an angry series in the
Times, entitled ‘The Development of Mesopotamia’.71 With no
railway or irrigation project yet completed nine years after the
occupation, ‘the brilliant chance which the British had of restoring an ancient country and opening up for the world a new agricultural belt would now appear to have been completely lost’,
concluded Coke. Nevertheless, he, like others, affirmed that the
idea of restoring Mesopotamia had evoked more passionate discussion, both laudatory and abusive, than any other issue, ‘From
the days when this land of ‘‘untapped wealth and virgin oil’’ was
thought to be only waiting . . . ‘‘to pay the whole cost of the war’’,
to the days of the furious ‘‘bag and baggage’’ campaign [calling
for] the severance of all connection with the accursed land’.72
Whatever the ultimate fate of development schemes in the country, during the war it emerged as a key site for the construction of a
new imperial identity focused on technocratic developmentalism.
II
The image of a fallen Eden made Mesopotamia a fitting object for
development, understood as a kind of restoration, in the eyes of
wartime Britons, but much of the wartime investment of experts
and materials for this development came from India as part of
70
See Meeta Sinha, ‘ ‘‘Where Electricity Dispels the Illusion [of the Arabian
Nights]’’: The British and the Modern in Interwar India’, paper presented at the
Pacific Coast Conference of British Studies, Irvine, 2006. The Arabian Nights had
long informed orientalist constructions of India, but in this instance, the slight geographical remove seems to have made a difference.
71
Sir George Cunningham Buchanan, ‘The Development of Mesopotamia: I.
Exaggerated Hopes, An Orgy of Waste’, Times, 23 Sept. 1919, 9; ‘The Development
of Mesopotamia: II. River and Railway Transport, Importance of Persian Trade’,
Times, 24 Sept. 1919, 9; ‘The Development of Mesopotamia: III. A Great Future
for Basra, Work That Must Be Done’, Times, 25 Sept. 1919, 9; ‘The Development of
Mesopotamia: IV. Agricultural Development, Moderate Irrigation Scheme’, Times,
26 Sept. 1919, 9. Extravagant attempts to develop Mesopotamia rapidly were proving
not only wasteful but also culturally noxious, he argued the following year in ‘Mesopotamia: Our Commitments under the Mandate, a Too Great Attempt’, letter to the
editor, Times, 21 June 1920, 10.
72
Coke, Heart of the Middle East, 11, 143, 251.
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the Indian government’s belated atonement for the devastating
results of its early parsimoniousness. India’s own colonial status
seemed to guarantee that its technologies would work in a country
so obviously unfit for British-made equipment. Indian effort to
pass on the benefits of British tutelage was accommodated so
enthusiastically into the discourse of progressive imperialism
unleashed in Mesopotamia that it began to inspire visions of a
progressive Indian imperialism in the region as a mark of India’s
growing independence from and parity with the metropole, from
the point of view of Indian nationalists as much as British Indian
officials.
The fetishizing of Mesopotamia’s ancient glories as a great
artery for the traffic of goods and people was partly an ironic
comment on the fact, exposed by the MCR, that the Kut disaster
had largely been the result of inadequate transportation facilities.
Of the many criticisms levelled at the Government of India, most
egregious was that it had allowed the army to approach Baghdad
with a fragile line of communications extended 300 miles up the
Tigris without sufficient river transport for the conveyance of
reinforcements, supplies and medical facilities. The campaign’s
mobility and the topographical centrality of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meant that ‘Everything in Mesopotamia depended
on transport’. As the scope of the campaign continued to change,
it became impossible for the supply of boats to keep up with, much
less anticipate, demand, while alternative modes of transportation, such as roads and railways, required lengthy preliminary
investment in infrastructure. Without river transport, even land
transport needed at the front, such as carts and animals, remained
inaccessible, restricting access to medical facilities and confining
operations to the vicinity of the river. Troops could not cross from
bank to bank. Efforts to relieve the besieged men at Kut also suffered from the inability to transport reinforcements and equipment there with any degree of efficiency. The land’s liability to
morph into marsh overnight made boats all the more crucial.
Furthermore, only British boats of ‘antiquated design’, like the
Espiegle, possessed shallow enough draught to be of any use.
The force needed either made-to-order boats or local craft —
unchanged, Candler speculated, since the time of Herodotus.73
73
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 126–32, 270; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 10, 142,
195, 204; Sir Beauchamp Duff, ‘Memorandum on the Report of the Vincent-Bingley
(cont. on p. 235)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
235
By the armistice, the Inland Water Transport Department
(IWTD), formed by the War Office in July 1916, had commandeered roughly 2,500 ‘native craft’. Many were modernized into
‘a curious sort of miniature battleship’ fitted with old Ford car
engines, iron plating and heavy guns, each converted into ‘a new
weapon of war’. Eyewitnesses remarked on this ‘picturesque’ and
‘peculiar’ flotilla and the quaint sight of the ‘uniformed tommies
and sepoys learning . . . how to punt’.74 However, the army did not
resign itself to local craft for the duration. The construction of
new craft in England was ordered in the summer of 1915, but
remained subordinated to orders for France. New craft were
also costly, while labour shortages in England, unclear or missing
reassembly instructions, insufficient expertise in Mesopotamia,
and faulty design resulted in such delays that boats ordered in
August were not available until after the desperate months of
early 1916. The MCR considered that ‘More inept proceedings
than those connected with the purchase and shipment of river
craft in England in 1915 and early in 1916 would be hard to
find’.75
Meanwhile, the force did have recourse to Indian (including
Burmese), and to a lesser degree Egyptian, river craft because of
their relative accessibility and presumed adaptability to the intractable Tigris and Euphrates. Despite losses at sea, delays due
(n. 73 cont.)
Commission’, MCR, appendix 2, 167; Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 59–60, 64,
79; Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 31. See also Davis, Ends and Means, 185–94. Local
craft were inserted into an evolutionary hierarchy echoing a national/racial one. Thus,
a juxtaposition of the gufar with the British Aerial offered ‘a striking picture in the
evolution of craft’; the mahaila was ‘a wild, piratical-looking craft, rude and primitive
as the Arabs’: Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 130, 132. See also MCR, 9;
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 49; Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 75;
Chamberlain, quoted in ‘The Vessels Sent to Mesopotamia: Questions to Mr.
Chamberlain’, Times, 12 July 1917, 5. The names of the gunboats brought from
England — Firefly, Dragonfly, Mantis, Gnat — also paid tribute to their pestilential
destination.
74
Lieut.-Col. L. J. Hall, The Inland Water Transport in Mesopotamia (London,
1921), 95–6; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 142; Cato, Navy in Mesopotamia, 33; Candler,
Long Road to Baghdad, i, 130–1; Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 6; Swayne, In
Mesopotamia, 12.
75
MCR, 52–4; Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 127; Buchanan, Tragedy of
Mesopotamia, 21, 112; Hall, Inland Water Transport, 24; Moberly, Campaign in
Mesopotamia, ii, 188. Those behind the inappropriately designed boats continued to
protest their superiority to local craft. See Sir John Biles, letter to the editor, Times, 28
June 1917, 7; Austen Chamberlain, comments in the parliamentary debate on the
MCR, reported in Times, 13 July 1917, 10.
236
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to the monsoon, and the lack of an organized system for identifying
and collecting useful vessels, these colonies managed to supply
a significant number of boats. Indian princes donated ships,
yachts, motor boats and launches. The MCR mentions the purchase of lighters and steamers in India in February 1915 and the
arrival of a number of Indian barges and steamers early in 1916.76
At first, the Royal Indian Marine was in charge of these procedures; after Kut, the newly formed IWTD was stationed at
Karachi and Bombay, to considerable positive effect: of 466
vessels dispatched before 1917, eighty-six were lost; of 243 dispatched after 1917, only one. Another 171 smaller vessels were
sent from India on the decks of larger transports between 1916
and 1919. When the IWTD took over, 367 non-native vessels
were in commission in Mesopotamia; when Baghdad was captured, 744; in December 1917, 1,299; and by the armistice, 1,634
vessels.77 By then, the Mesopotamian flotilla was ‘mainly composed of vessels drawn from Indian rivers or put together in
Indian workshops and manned by Indians’, reported the Times;
‘[India] has provided 883 vessels to Mesopotamia, and also more
than 500 anchor boats and dinghies’.78 The precise story of these
boats, their origins and their uses remains something of a mystery; the paper hoped in vain that ‘some day. . . the story will
be told of how these useful little vessels, fast, well armed, and
handy for their size, well able to negotiate the shoals and the
shallows of the Tigris, were provided for the campaign’.79
One strand of their story, at least, can be told. After Kut, and
as part of the Indian government’s efforts to mobilize Indian
resources more fully and prove that it was up to the task of
modern warfare, many of these boats were not merely plucked
from Indian rivers but were specially constructed in Indian shipyards. Till then, Indian shipyards had been used only for repairs
76
See Hall, Inland Water Transport, 168; Townshend, My Campaign, i, 311;
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 12, 62; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 124–5, 199,
241–2; Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 37; Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, ii, 5; MCR,
44. For descriptions of boats sent from India before Kut, see Moberly, Campaign in
Mesopotamia, ii, 42–4, 188–9.
77
Hall, Inland Water Transport, 169, 171, 217–20.
78
Times Trade Suppl., 2 Dec. 1918. See also East India (Progress and Condition), P.P.,
1919 (143), xxxviii, p. 22.
79
‘The Advance on Baghdad: Work of the Gunboats, Captain Nunn’s Report’,
Times, 22 Sept. 1917, 4.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
237
and reassembly of British craft subsequently towed to the front.80
According to the MCR, the difficulty of importing machinery and
materials from Britain had precluded Indian construction of new
vessels through 1915; Britain could make them faster. However,
by the spring of 1916, there were ‘24 steamers, 52 tugs and 3
sternwheelers either en route from, or under construction in,
England or India’.81 For instance, an order of March 1916 specified the construction of two river hospital steamers in Calcutta.82
The next year saw the founding of the shipbuilding branch of the
Indian Munitions Board, established to mobilize India’s resources
for ‘total war’.83 Records of shipbuilding activity in India confirm
a sudden and marked change: total sailing and steam vessels
built in Bombay, Sind, Bengal, Madras and Burma jumped
from 107 vessels of 4,285 tons aggregate in 1914/15 to 142 vessels
of 11,808 tons in 1917/18 and 341 vessels of 36,264 tons in 1918/
19. The end of the war saw a sharp decrease in numbers of vessels
built: 200 vessels of 21,013 tons in 1919/20 and only 83 vessels
of 5,007 tons in 1923/4. Still, tonnage per vessel remained well
above pre-war levels, suggesting a shift to construction of larger
ships.84
Clearly something drastic happened to Indian shipbuilding —
both in its capacity and in its technological sophistication — during the war.85 That the construction of craft for the Mesopotamia
80
Approximately 200 such vessels were re-erected at Basra and India during the
time of the IWTD: MCR, 44, 54; Hall, Inland Water Transport, 168, 178–9; Nunn,
Tigris Gunboats, 123–4, 154–5, 239.
81
Vincent-Bingley Report, MCR, appendix 1, 146, emphasis mine. See also Nunn,
Tigris Gunboats, 199.
82
MCR, 57. For more such examples, see ‘India’s Work in the War’, Times, 17 Oct.
1917, 9; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 214, 237; General Gorringe, quoted in MCR, 96.
83
The board’s task was to expand industrial production and co-ordinate purchasing
and supply operations.
84
East India (Statistical Abstract), P.P., 1924–5 (Cmd. 2534), xxix, p. 555.
85
The Indian shipbuilding industry had been more or less moribund since the mid
nineteenth century as a result of predatory British business practices and British protectionism. See Frank Broeze, ‘From Imperialism to Independence: The Decline
and Re-Emergence of Asian Shipping’, Great Circle, ix (1987); Frank Broeze,
‘Underdevelopment and Dependency: Maritime India during the Raj’, Mod. Asian
Studies, xviii (1984); Indrajit Ray, ‘Shipbuilding in Bengal under Colonial Rule: A
Case of De-Industrialisation’, Jl Transport Hist., xvi (1995). That the war was pivotal to
the industry’s revival is well known, but what, precisely, made this transformation
possible is not, nor how this industry figured in the broader reconfiguration of the
Indian state as a model technocracy. See the references above, and India’s Services in
the War, i, 180–1; T. S. Sanjeeva Rao, A Short History of Modern Indian Shipping
(Bombay, 1965), 77; N. G. Jog, Saga of Scindia: Struggle for the Revival of Indian
(cont. on p. 238)
238
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campaign was at the heart of this transformation is evident from
this parliamentary report on Indian trade:
Very good work in the form of launches, barges, lighters, motor-boats,
&c., has been turned out of Indian yards during the war, and they have
contributed greatly to the solving of the transport problem in
Mesopotamia. In the course of a few years it is expected that a great
number of the coasting and river craft in India will be manufactured in
the country, and there is apparently no reason why the yards, both in
Calcutta, Bombay and one or two other places, should not extend their
activities to ships of from 2–4,000 tons.86
This contrasts sharply with the assessment in 1916 that ‘India
. . . is not yet a ship-building country and the industry is conducted on the smallest basis’.87
It was Mesopotamia’s topographical ‘peculiarities’ which, by
defying the use of allegedly universally adaptable modern technology, created an opportunity and need for Indian shipbuilding
in the war. Hence the war marked, in the words of Frank Broeze,
‘the rapid eclipse of the European-style sailing ship and, in consequence, a much sharper dualism than ever before . . . between the
traditional sector and the technologically still advancing modern
sector’.88 Construction of small, wooden craft suitable for ‘eccentric’ rivers became something of an Indian specialty. The report
on Indian trade praised the wartime revival of this specialty while
urging the continued impracticability of construction of ‘steel and
composite steamships’ in India, primarily to protect British shipbuilding interests.89 Shortage of steel also encouraged the revival
of a strictly ‘indigenous industry of wooden ship-building’.90
(n. 85 cont.)
Shipping and Shipbuilding (Bombay, 1969). Indrajit Ray calls the shipbuilding industry
‘the least researched topic in Indian historiography’: ‘Shipbuilding in Bengal under
Colonial Rule’, 77.
86
Trade of India, P.P., 1919 (Cmd. 442), xxxviii, p. 79. See also Aga Khan III [Sultan
Muhammad Shah], India in Transition: A Study in Political Evolution (London, 1918),
198.
87
East India (Trade), P.P., 1916 (Cd. 8228), xxi, p. 78.
88
Broeze, ‘From Imperialism to Independence’, 82.
89
Trade of India, 123.
90
East India (Progress and Condition), 23; MCR, 57. Hence also the excitement
surrounding the announcement of the launching of an 8,000-ton ferro-concrete
ship on the Pacific, for ‘India produces all the materials for ferro-concrete shipbuilding
except engines, besides a cadre of engineers conversant with ferro-concrete work. The
Times of India urges that information should be immediately obtained by cable for the
building of ferro-concrete shipyards in Bombay and Calcutta’: ‘Ferro-Concrete Ships
for India’, Times, 28 Mar. 1918, 5. Before the war, India had built crude river craft for
inland trade and transportation, as British ships could not negotiate the bends of
(cont. on p. 239)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
239
Still, those committed to Indian self-rule thought Indian shipyards might do even more, for, given cheap labour and abundance
of teak, wrote John Pollen of the East India Association to the
Times, ‘there is no reason at all why Indian dockyards should
not have been utilised during the last three years to supply the
wants of the Allies’.91 Shipbuilding came to be seen as the mark of
self-sufficiency and was, to many Indian nationalists, the industry
most important to reclaiming India’s pre-colonial glory.92
Besides boats, India also began to supply materials to prepare
the ground for the eventual incursion of modern transportation
technology. Development radiated from Basra, now lauded as ‘a
hive of industry’.93 The IWTD provided ‘equipment and supplies
of every kind on a scale of magnificence unknown in India’,
including iron sheets to line the river embankments, ‘machinery’
from Calcutta, ‘shiploads of timber and iron-work wherewith
to build the new wharves and landing stages’, Tata steel, railways,
pontoons and bridge-work, and dredgers for digging canals.
The wharves at Ma6qil and Basra were constructed from Rangoon teak, which, although expensive, was more readily available than English steel.94 These contributions were not merely
(n. 90 cont.)
eastern Indian rivers. See Ray, ‘Shipbuilding in Bengal under Colonial Rule’, 79; Peter
Reeves, Frank Broeze and Kenneth McPherson, ‘The Maritime Peoples of the Indian
Ocean Region since 1800’, Mariner’s Mirror, lxxiv (1988), 248; Frank Broeze, Peter
Reeves and Kenneth McPherson, ‘Imperial Ports and the Modern World Economy:
The Case of the Indian Ocean’, Jl Transport Hist., vii (1986), 5.
91
John Pollen, letter to the editor, Times, 7 Nov. 1917, 5.
92
See, for instance, Aga Khan III, India in Transition, 181–4. Like the Aga Khan, the
MCR urged the creation of an Indian navy, as the existing Royal Indian Marine was
neither autonomous nor a naval force ‘in the real meaning of the term’: MCR, 64–6.
See also C. R. Low (commander, late Indian Navy and Historian of the Service), letter
to the editor, Times, 20 Aug. 1917, 11. The announcement of G. K. Gokhale’s death
sparked much of this discussion; in his programme for India’s future, which he
entrusted on his deathbed to the Aga Khan, he too had called for an Indian navy.
See ‘Mr. Gokhale’s Political Testament’, Times, 15 Aug. 1917, 7.
93
Sir Geoffrey Collins, second in command at Basra, Oct. 1917, quoted in Davis,
Ends and Means, 230. See also Dane, British Campaigns in the Nearer East, ii, 208;
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 100, 137; A. T. Wilson (for Cox) to Arab Bureau,
telegram, 21 Mar. 1917: Brit. Lib., India Office Records, L/PS/10/617.
94
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 31, 57, 73, 85, 90, 101, 110, 113, 122, 134,
135; Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 34, 38; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 245; ‘Mobilizing Indian
Resources’, Times, 11 Sept. 1917, 5.
240
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supplemental, for, as a parliamentary report of 1919 on conditions in India affirmed,
it would have been impossible to carry on the campaign without the iron
and steel of India, which has been the foundation not only of railway but
also of water transport in the country . . . India has also supplied to
Mesopotamia the whole of the railway transport, as well as the telegraphic
and telephonic equipment employed in the country.95
Indeed, the Indian Telegraph Department supplied and maintained over 9,000 miles of cable. Besides ten million cubic feet
of timber for constructing ships and railways, electrical plant —
and operatives — arrived to light up Basra and Baghdad. Two
hundred engines, thousands of vehicles — the list of materials
became an inventory of British imperial beneficence transferred
via India, for, as Montagu put it in parliament in August 1917,
days before his famous declaration that the British government
was in favour of responsible government in India, ‘Those
resources provided by India were gradually changing the appearance of the country and eradicating the blight of Turkish
misrule’.96
British Mesopotamia suffered from a shortage of expertise
and compliant labour, and this too India supplied. Indians
formed by far the largest group among the diverse nationalities
and ethnicities represented among the labourers on the docks at
Abadan and Basra. The Indian army brought in tens of thousands
of followers as workers of various sorts. By the end of the war, there
were upwards of 71,000 men, mostly Indian, in the Labour Corps,
besides 42,000 in the IWTD. Roughly 20,000 Indian labourers
remained after the war.97 Indian technical expertise in developing ports, rivers and boats also proved critical. The operations
95
East India (Progress and Condition), 22. See also Chelmsford, speech in Simla, 5
Sept. 1917, quoted in ‘India’s Work in the War’, Times, 17 Oct. 1917.
96
Montagu, House of Commons debate, 6 Aug. 1918, reported in Times, 7 Aug.
1918, 8; ‘India’s Work in the War’, Times, 17 Oct. 1917; Times Trade Suppl., 2 Dec.
1918; Hall, Inland Water Transport, 60–1.
97
Moberly, Campaign in Mesopotamia, ii, 279–80; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 211;
Townshend, My Campaign, i, 314; ‘India’s Work in the War’, Times, 17 Oct. 1917;
Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, 1994), 132; Hall, Inland
Water Transport, 182, 203, 226–7. Besides ‘Orientals of all shades’, there were
labourers from Argentina, Zanzibar, Greece and elsewhere: Candler, Long Road to
Baghdad, i, 131, 232. Much was made of the shared cosmopolitanism of the dock
population and the vessels. See, for instance, Edmund Candler, ‘The Model Coolie in
Mesopotamia: Recruits from an Indian Utopia’, Times, 20 June 1917, 5; Swayne, In
Mesopotamia, 78; ‘Odd Craft on the Tigris: A Medley of Transport Auxiliaries’, Times,
14 Mar. 1916, 5; Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 102, 177.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
241
of the IWTD were ‘carried on by local committees composed
of engineering firms at Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi, and Rangoon’.98 Buchanan brought a survey party of fifty-three AngloIndians and Indians. He recalled from France two of his ‘best Rangoon engineers’ and a staff of engineers and surveyors from the
Indian Public Works Department. From Bombay he also brought
a Chinese contractor with a gang of a thousand carpenters to build
the Basra wharves. His own staff consisted of three men with experience in Indian ports. In February 1918 a Mesopotamian Irrigation Directorate was formed with experts from India. Land and
river surveyors arrived. Buchanan planned to reorganize Basra
‘along the lines of an Indian commercial port’. When, after the
war, the Mesopotamian administration was accused of running
the country like an Indian province, Buchanan retorted that
‘Indian Provincial Administration was . . . the most efficient in
the world’, making it ‘difficult to see where the complaint lay’.99
Now, more than a mere training ground and laboratory for
engineering expertise, India had come to function as the imperial
fount of state-led, technocratic development dispensed as a total
system for a newly configured proto-nation state.
Of course, all this activity spelled major change in India as well.
In Simla, everyone was now in khaki; there was a new quartermaster general, new bureaux for army recruitment, and most
notably, the new Indian Munitions Board under Sir Thomas
Holland. The overlap between the processes of Indian and Mesopotamian transformation was such that the board hired George
Buchanan directly on his return from Basra.100 Now, Thomas
Holland had also headed the 1916 Indian Industrial Commission,
whose objective had been the transformation of India into a
‘worthy partner in Empire’ so as to avoid ‘the dangers to which
industrial unpreparedness exposes a nation’.101 Indeed, India’s
98
‘Mobilizing Indian Resources’, Times, 11 Sept. 1917.
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 36, 37, 73, 89, 99, 101, 110, 127, 250, 267.
100
There, his star began to fade, particularly because of his huge and
ambitious scheme for the Backbay reclamation project in Bombay, whose ever mounting costs and ever elusive date of completion prompted an inquiry that ultimately
censured his superior, Sir George Lloyd, the governor of Bombay and veteran of the
wartime Arab Bureau, whose many intelligence tasks had included a special mission to
Basra in 1916. Lloyd recovered from the project that became known as ‘Lloyd’s folly’,
returning to the Middle East as high commissioner in Cairo.
101
Report of the Indian Industrial Commission, 1916–18, quoted in ‘India’s Great
Need’, Times, 10 Dec. 1918, 7.
99
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performance in Mesopotamia was heralded in some quarters as
proof of its own progress and of the need for a permanent technocratic policy of ‘energetic intervention’ in Indian industry. Near
the end of the war, Chelmsford visited the Tata steelworks in the
new industrial town of Jamshedpur and praised the company’s
enterprise in producing the steel that had saved the Mesopotamian campaign. The Tatas had obtained American assistance for
the project when their own government had proved indifferent,
and they, like many others, made reform of that government’s
aloofness their goal. Dorabji Tata served on the Industrial Commission, whose report in December 1918 proposed what the
Times described as a ‘large administrative and technical Government organization’ to support Indian entrepreneurship, amounting to an ‘epoch-making’, ‘complete change in Government
policy’.102 Writing from Jamshedpur three years later, the journalist, Middle East expert and ex-diplomat Valentine Chirol
reminded readers of the Times that Tata had been forced to turn
to the United States for assistance during the war, and warned the
Indian government against relapsing into its old tradition of ‘redtape obstruction’.103 Certainly, Indian reform had long been on the
table,104 but the expansion of the reform agenda from administrative matters to include a generally more entrepreneurial attitude towards industry can be traced in some measure to Kut.105
Indeed, administrative reform also owed something to Kut.
‘Red tape’ was blamed as much for the government’s inertia
in encouraging Indian industrialism as it was for their general
bungling of the Mesopotamia campaign before Kut; Montagu
considered the India Office regime ‘an apotheosis . . . of redtape . . . beyond the dream of any critic’. In the House of Lords
debate on the MCR, even Lord Sydenham, the former governor
of Bombay who ultimately proved a staunch opponent of the
102
‘India’s Great Need’, Times, 10 Dec. 1918.
Valentine Chirol, ‘India Old and New’, Times, 19 Mar. 1921, 9.
Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 133–4 (who adds that it came soon after the
war, thanks partly to the ‘considerable role’ of the Mesopotamian scandal). Davis
argues that the post-war reform of the Indian government and army were the ‘only
real actions taken after . . . the Report’, but concludes that the MCR was a waste of
time, since Indian reform was already on the table: Ends and Means, 220, 226.
105
Gandhi may have seen industrialism as the source of the world’s ills, but other
nationalists denounced the colonial state for stunting India’s industrialization. See
Sugata Bose, ‘Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India’s
Historial Experience in Comparative Perspective’, in Cooper and Packard (eds.),
International Development and the Social Sciences, 47, 50.
103
104
DEVELOPING IRAQ
243
Montagu declaration of August 1917, voiced in indignant tones
the general feeling that the Indian government ‘must be overhauled’. The Industrial Commission found itself in close agreement with the changes recommended by that totemic piece of
post-war Indian legislation, the Montagu–Chelmsford Act of
1919, whose recommendations were announced just when the
Industrial Report went to press late in 1918. The Montagu–
Chelmsford reforms responded to moderate nationalist demands
for political and administrative reform but also to the MCR’s revelation of the need to better prepare India for total war by making
its government less autocratic and bureaucratic. To many Britons
this implied reducing the Indian government’s subordination to
Whitehall in order to decentralize the empire and, in the words of a
Times editorial of July 1917, giving ‘Indians a further share in the
control of their own affairs’.106 Montagu himself used the
Commons debate on the MCR as a platform for urging the
British government to commit itself to giving Indians a ‘bigger
opportunity of controlling their own destinies . . . by control . . . of
the Executive itself’. This is not to slight the role of Indian nationalism — although even it, according to the journalist Lovat Fraser,
was greatly intensified by the MCR’s public arraignment of ‘the
executive methods of the Indian administration’ — but to shed
some light on the logic that made a loosening of the reins desirable
and acceptable to many Britons too. Within a week of his speech in
the MCR debate, Montagu was appointed the new secretary of
state for India, the scandal having forced Austen Chamberlain to
resign. His declaration of August 1917 prompted the Montagu–
Chelmsford Report on Indian constitutional reform the next year.
In the parliamentary debate on this report, which laid the groundwork for the 1919 act, the Indian government’s evident success in
turning itself around in Mesopotamia proved critical. Montagu
launched into the case for constitutional reform by enthusing
about India’s restoration of Mesopotamia’s former fertility
through its contribution of rail and river transportation, electrical
plant, modern irrigation, agricultural machinery and various
106
Montagu, speech in House of Commons debate on the MCR, reported in Times,
13 July 1917, 10; Sydenham, quoted in House of Lords debate on the MCR, 12 July
1917, reported in Times, 13 July 1917, 8; ‘Defects of the Indian System’, Times, 2 July
1917, 9. See also Aga Khan III, India in Transition, 30; Commander Josiah Wedgwood,
minority report, MCR, 132; Montagu in a House of Commons debate, quoted in
Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 133.
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technical experts and labourers. Likewise, in a speech on Indian
constitutional reform in Simla, Chelmsford catalogued Indian
contributions to the Mesopotamia campaign — from boats to
railways to personnel, and so on.107
Nationalists’ goal of greater Indian independence was thus
guaranteed at least partly by a demonstration of India’s own
paternalistic powers;108 it was tinged with the glamour of empire, which continued to colour the assertion of Indian independence. For, in the process of developing Iraq, Indian officials’
early view of the campaign as a mere frontier skirmish morphed
into a notably more extravagant vision of a Mesopotamian colony for India that would make up for India’s earnest sacrifice, at
London’s bidding, of the men, money and materials needed to
make Mesopotamia fit for modern warfare.
Now, the Indian government had long seen itself, in significant
ways, as entirely separate from the Home government to which it
was legally subordinate: ‘Their world was south Asia; their primary duty to protect the Indian empire’.109 While Britons saw
Mesopotamia as the frontier of the West, from the outset India’s
participation in the Mesopotamian affair had been more or less
guaranteed by a sleight of hand that configured Mesopotamia,
and Arabia more generally, as a geographical and political extension of the vast barren and tribal world of the Indian North-West
Frontier.110 ‘The physical features of the country are familiar to
107
Montagu, House of Commons debate, July 1917, quoted in S. R. Mehrotra,
India and the Commonwealth, 1885–1929 (New York, 1965), 101; Lovat Fraser,
‘Problems of Indian Administration’, Edinburgh Rev., ccxxvii (1918), 169;
Montagu, House of Commons debate, 6 Aug. 1918, reported in Times, 7 Aug.
1918, 8; Chelmsford, speech in Simla, 5 Sept. 1917, quoted in ‘India’s Work in the
War’, Times, 17 Oct. 1917.
108
The ‘dyarchical’ scheme instituted by the 1919 act transferred the nation-building departments of provincial government — agriculture, industries, education,
public works, public health and so on — to ministers responsible to elected legislatures
(reserving departments critical to the maintenance of imperial rule, such as finance
and revenue, for the governor).
109
Galbraith, ‘No Man’s Child’, 375; MCR, 96.
110
Mesopotamia was part of the newly christened ‘Middle East’, a name coined in
1902 to refer to ‘those regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India, and which are . . . bound up with the problems of
Indian . . . defence’: Valentine Chirol, The Middle Eastern Question: or, Some Political
Problems of Indian Defence (New York, 1903), 5. (Received wisdom credits the
American Captain Mahan with the introduction of the term in the British National
Review, but a British intelligence officer in Persia, General T. E. Gordon, had used it in
an essay of 1900 in Nineteenth Century, ‘The Problem of the Middle East’, also in the
(cont. on p. 245)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
245
our Indian troops’, attested Candler; ‘The villages resemble those
of the Punjab or the North-West Frontier’.111 Indeed, the troops
of Force D took refuge in the romantic mythology of the Great
Game whenever the campaign forced a confrontation with the
ugliness of modern war.112 Hence also the Indian government’s
initially dilatory attitude towards provision of transport to Force
D; frontier wars were by definition exercises in resourcefulness
and economy. The MCR could find nothing in the mass of communications between the various Indian authorities indicating
that they ‘recognised the immense differences between the conditions of an Indian frontier and a Mesopotamian campaign’,
when in fact their ‘climatic and military [conditions] proved to
be . . . very different’.113
To be sure, Mesopotamia’s ties with India were also real: the
London and Indian governments more or less overlapped in Mesopotamia, where Indian residencies and political agencies were
also posts in the Foreign Office’s Levant Consular Service.114
(n. 110 cont.)
context of Indian defence.) So defined, it was a term that could stretch Indian interests
all over the continent. See, for instance, Angus Hamilton, Problems of the Middle East
(London, 1909), p. xiii; J. G. Lorimer to Government of India, 20 Aug. 1910: PRO,
FO 371/1015. Witness one parliamentarian’s attempt to understand why the
Government of India controlled Mesopotamian operations:
Sir J. D. Rees: May I ask whether, in the existing state of things, Mesopotamia is
not rather remote from India, and whether connection between Mesopotamia and
Egypt has not become rather nearer?
Mr. Tennant: I am not aware of any geographical change. (Laughter).
Sir J. D. Rees: May I ask the right hon. gentleman whether, though he is not
responsible for the geography of the globe, he is not responsible for answering with
regard to the military proximity of these operations?
Mr. Tennant: It may be true that Egypt is nearer than India, but the arrangement
has been made for military convenience, and I do not see any possibility of it being
altered.
House of Commons debate, reported in Times, 14 Jan. 1916, 10.
111
Candler, Long Road to Baghdad, i, 34.
112
See, for instance, ibid., ii, 140–1.
113
Duff, quoted in MCR, 37; MCR, 13, 105. See also MCR, 81, 112.
114
This overlap was a result of the westward spread of the old East India Company’s
consular establishments into Iraq, Persia and the Gulf, and the eastward expansion of
the Levant Company’s consular establishments, which passed to the Crown in 1825.
Officers were generally appointed by the Indian government and the cost shared by
both governments. Residents were the main administrative and diplomatic representatives of the Indian government in regions surrounding India. They were staffed by
the Indian Political Service (IPS), and their responsibilities could verge on executive
control even in ostensibly sovereign regions. Political agents were IPS officers in
Ottoman provinces that possessed some autonomy, such as the Hejaz and Kuwait.
246
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The Persian Gulf had long been a British Indian lake: Lord
Curzon had termed it the ‘maritime frontier of the Indian
Empire on the west’.115 Indian and Arab trade on the Arabian
Sea and the Persian Gulf and Indian Shia pilgrimage to Najaf
and Karbala also ensured close ties with Iraq, as did the social
and financial connections fostered by the Oudh Bequest, which,
since the mid nineteenth century, had channelled millions of
rupees from India to the Shia holy cities through British mediation.116 Thus, summary incorporation of Mesopotamia into the
Indian geographical imaginary did not require much of a conceptual leap. During the war, the Raj reached into all aspects of
military life in Mesopotamia and extended the fiction of Mesopotamian contiguity. Officers and troops convalesced in the
Indian hills, the vitalizing voyage back offering yet more ‘healthy
existence, with plenty of games, exercise, and recreation’. Basra’s
cantonment atmosphere centred on a club offering a range of
entertainments from tennis to game-shooting, football grounds
and arrangements for concert parties from India.117
115
Quoted in V. H. Rothwell, ‘Mesopotamia in British War Aims, 1914–1918’, Hist.
Jl, xiii (1970), 277.
116
See Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global
Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); J. R. I. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shı̄ 6ism in
Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859 (Berkeley, 1988); Meir
Litvak, ‘Money, Religion, and Politics: The Oudh Bequest in Najaf and Karbala,
1850–1903’, Internat. Jl Middle Eastern Studies, xxxiii (2001). The Oudh (Awadh)
Bequest originated in what was known as the Third Oudh Loan, extracted by the East
India Company in 1825 from the king of Awadh to finance its war in Nepal. The
principal was never repaid; the interest was to be applied by the Indian government
in perpetuity to specific purposes. Among other things, the agreement stipulated
monthly allowances to four women required to bequeath two-thirds of their allowances to the mujtahidun, or Islamic scholars, in Najaf and Karbala to support religious
education. The monthly instalments were accumulated in the East India Company
treasury and, through the British Resident at Baghdad, the mujtahidun appointed an
agent to withdraw the money in Bombay. After two years, in 1852, the Resident
persuaded his superiors to let the Residency disburse the funds to ensure that they
were used properly. He did this partly to assuage Ottoman fears about the funds being
used subversively. In its first fifty years, the bequest channelled six million rupees.
British administrative control over the bequest tightened at the turn of the century as
they found it an increasingly convenient tool for exercising influence over the ulema in
Iran and Iraq, particularly the latter once the war began, and also for earning the
goodwill of Indian Shias. See also Meir Litvak, ‘A Failed Manipulation: The
British, the Oudh Bequest and the Shi6i Ulama of Najaf and Karbala’, Brit. Jl
Middle Eastern Studies, xxvii (2000).
117
Nunn, Tigris Gunboats, 239–40; Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 146–7. Although
much of this extension of the social and cultural infrastructure of the military Raj
was part of the over-provision of the force in response to criticism of the parsimoniousness that led to the Kut disaster, it was ultimately criticized after the war as
(cont. on p. 247)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
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This geographical sleight of hand helped justify (even disguise)
the conquest of Mesopotamia as but one more in a long tradition
of frontier annexations designed to shore up the territory already
held by the Indian government. In early discussions about the
post-war fate of Iraq, India’s strategic, commercial, political and
religious interests, besides the fact that the campaign was being
fought by Indian troops, seemed to many to justify incorporation
of the country into the Indian empire and even Indians’ colonization of the country as settlers. In a campaign fought by the Indian
army, officers of the Indian army and Indian Political Service
(IPS) quickly imported Indian administrative methods. Indian
police, currency, legal code — all followed within a week of the
occupation of Basra. Even London’s warnings against prematurely annexing Basra as an Indian province did not prevent
Viceroy Charles Hardinge from encouraging Sir Percy Cox, the
IPS officer serving as Iraq’s Chief Political Officer, in his Indian
methods. This was India’s due, Indian officials argued; she had
made the sacrifices for the campaign.118 It was ‘taken for granted
that at the end of the campaign Mesopotamia would become a
British possession’, Buchanan explained after the war, ‘probably
controlled from India’.119
The Indian failure to imagine Iraq as a place apart prompted an
intense reaction in the empire’s other policy-making centres.
Besides some London officials,120 the military and political establishment at Cairo remained unconvinced of India’s claims to
authority in Mesopotamian affairs. Many British Arabists had
long romanticized Arabs as a race apart from ordinary degenerate orientals, as a naturally freedom- and democracy-loving
people.121 Among these, Mark Sykes, who held a series of
(n. 117 cont.)
careless extravagance. See also Jeffery, British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 147, on
this point.
118
Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 41–2, 50–1, 54. The idea of Indian settlers
was raised even before the war by Willcocks. See Gilmartin, ‘Imperial Rivers’.
119
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 261.
120
On Arthur Hirtzel’s early doubts in particular, see Busch, Britain, India, and the
Arabs, 41, 46, 204.
121
See, for instance, Mark Sykes, The Caliphs’ Last Heritage: A Short History of the
Turkish Empire (London, 1915), 5, 118; Mark Sykes, Dar-ul-Islam: A Record of a
Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey (London, 1904), 13; Douglas
Carruthers, Arabian Adventure: To the Great Nafud in Quest of the Oryx (London,
1935), 32; E. B. Soane, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise (London, 1912),
11; Louisa Jebb, By Desert Ways to Baghdad (Boston, 1909), 173.
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influential positions at Whitehall during the war, emerged as the
most vocal critic of Indianization of Mesopotamia. India’s customs and laws were radically different from those of Arabs, he
argued; Arabs, unlike Indians, could not be run ‘on black and
white lines’. Paternalism would not do.122 (India’s ambitions
also interfered with his secret arrangement for a British–French
partition of the region according to his infamous agreement with
François Georges-Picot in 1916.)
Through mid 1916, Cairo’s many attempts to overwhelm
Indian influence in Iraq failed.123 But after the campaign’s transfer to the War Office, India’s influence, Briton Busch has argued,
began to diminish. For instance, the new Indian commander-inchief, Charles Monro, was now directly responsible to the Chief of
General Staff and Army Council in London on military affairs and
matters of supply.124 In 1917 the MCR’s revelations profoundly
shook any residual British confidence in Indian administration
of Iraq. That year the Mesopotamia Administration Committee
under Curzon insisted on the creation of a special government
service for Iraq that would be drawn from the Levant and Sudan,
not from the Indian service; the India-derived legal code would
not be extended to the Baghdad vilayet; and Indians would not be
employed in any branch of the administration.125 The general
faith among Arabists staffing the Egyptian and Mesopotamian
political establishments that certain Britons possessed an intuitive
insight into the Arab mind limited even the application of the
existing Indian justice system. ‘Col. Knox [the former Gulf Resident in charge of the Iraqi judicial system], though of limited
intelligence’, averred Gertrude Bell, possessed such ‘knowledge
122
Sykes, minute, Dec. 1916, quoted in Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 121–2.
T. E. Lawrence was also publicly critical of Indianization.
123
Including, for instance, High Commissioner Henry McMahon’s correspondence with the Sharif Hussain, which promised him Iraq as part of an independent Arab
state; the Arab Bureau’s attempt to function as the ultimate authority on policy in the
Arab world; Lawrence’s and Aubrey Herbert’s arrival in Mesopotamia to bribe the
Turks to release the British troops at Kut; Cairo’s proposed overtures to Sayid Talib;
and so on. See Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 100–9.
124
Before this the Indian commander-in-chief had been responsible to London only
through the Indian government (even though 70,000 British troops were part of the
campaign).
125
Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 37, 112, 141–7, 207.
DEVELOPING IRAQ
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of and sympathy with Arabs’ that he was able to apply the Iraq
Code almost whimsically without demur.126 It was thus that Britain rather than India received the Iraqi mandate after the war.
(As an independent member of the League of Nations, India certainly could have, as for instance South Africa had in the case of
German South West Africa.) The Indian government’s new irrelevance to Iraqi affairs was most symbolically evident in its total
exclusion from the Cairo Conference of 1921, at which the form
of Iraq’s government was finally settled.127 Hence, Busch concludes, the dreams of empire of India’s rulers were ephemeral, if
important in their time and place, despite the Indian government’s lingering influence on Iraq through the India Office and
the India-derived political establishment as long as it continued to
supply the campaign in Iraq and those launched from Iraq into the
Caspian and Persia.128
The hopes for wider Indian influence did not, however, dissipate entirely. Despite metropolitan determination to retain control
of Iraq in London, some Britons continued to expect the expansion of Indian power and influence within the empire, based on
the colony’s new industrial strength. In the midst of the fury over
the publication of the MCR in June 1917, the Times made a point
of commending the colony for
doing more than people credit her for. The Government have taken up
with vigour the development of Indian resources for the production of war
material . . . and there is good hope that India may be able to expand her
powers considerably, and to take at least a portion of the burden from
England in many particulars.129
126
Bell to David Hogarth, 20 May 1916: Firestone Library, Princeton, Arab Bureau
Papers, FO 882/XIII, MES/16/16. On the belief that the British possessed an intuitive
insight into Arabs, see Kathryn Tidrick, Heart-Beguiling Araby (Cambridge, 1981).
The Cairenes also determined the content of Maude’s proclamation upon his entry
into Baghdad, which promised (falsely) not to impose alien institutions on the Arabs.
127
This conference of the various luminaries of the Middle Eastern political establishment was convened by Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, in order to
arrange for the administrative and military needs of the British mandates in the
Middle East. With respect to Iraq, it determined to establish a constitutional monarchy under Feisal, garrison the country with the Royal Air Force, create an indigenous
army, and formulate a new treaty specifying in particular the functions of and financial
arrangements for the British advisory officials in the Iraqi government.
128
Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 213–14, 265, 274, 316–17, 319, 390, 415,
434, 464–7, 478–81.
129
‘Mesopotamia: Past and Present: The New Spirit’, Times, 29 June 1917, 7. See
also Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 235, 257.
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The idea that India was pulling its weight effectively enough to
expect an enlarged role in the empire was still being articulated in
1917. In the wake of the post-war decision in favour of an Arab
government for Iraq, Indian supporters in Britain continued to
insist on the preservation of Indian ‘rights’ there, particularly of
settlement and commercial influence, in recognition of India’s
new status as a ‘partner in the British Empire’, a rank purchased
during the war in blood and money.130
These British calls were amplified by those of Indians themselves for whom the post-1916 effort to transform Iraq continued
to herald the beginning of an Indian empire. The Aga Khan,
whose opinion British officials and the British press took very
seriously, examined ‘Indian expansion westwards’ in his book
India in Transition (1918), foreseeing ‘a vast agglomeration of
states, principalities and countries’ from Aden and Mesopotamia
to ‘India proper’ to the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon and Tibet, together making up a ‘South Asiatic Federation . . . of which India
must be the centre and the pivot’. Whatever became of British–
Mesopotamian relations, ‘[Mesopotamia’s] relations with India
must so grow as to give us in practice a trans-Gulf frontier to
defend’.131 This was an imperial ambition founded not on administrative Indianization (as in, say, Burma or Aden) but on development, as an Indian area of expertise to be performed in a place
India had a history of improving: the early Oudh donations had
mostly been spent on public projects such as the construction of
the Hindiyya canal to bring water to the holy cities.132 That Indian
130
J.A.S., letter to the editor, Times, 20 June 1921, 6.
Aga Khan III, India in Transition, 11, 13, 24, 29. The idea of regional federation
within the wider embrace of the British empire was much in play in this period as
various imperialists strove to prove empire’s progressive potential in the post-war
world. Reginald Wingate, for instance, hoped that ‘in the theory of Arabian
union . . . may lie not merely a partial solution of many of our present difficulties but
possibly the foundation of a really constructive scheme for the future’. Britain would
be the ‘Patron & Protector’ of an Arab federation. Note on British Policy in the Near
East, 26 Aug. 1915: Firestone Lib., Arab Bureau Papers, FO 882/XIV, MIS/15/9.
132
See Juan Cole, ‘ ‘‘Indian Money’’ and the Shi‘i Shrine Cities of Iraq, 1786–
1850’, Middle Eastern Studies, xxii (1986). That the Aga Khan had development
rather than formal empire in mind was made explicit in the pages of the Times after
the war when, in a two-part article, he protested the indefinite garrisoning of
Mesopotamia by Indian troops and asked that the country be left alone to work out
its destiny: ‘British Policy in the East’, Times, 5 Nov. 1920, 13, and ‘Our Mistakes in
Mesopotamia’, 6 Nov. 1920, 11; emphasized further in ‘India and the Middle East’,
editorial, Times, 5 Nov. 1920, 13. When Lord Sydenham, the wartime governor of
Bombay, pointed out that the Aga Khan had urged a much more forward policy in his
131
(cont. on p. 251)
DEVELOPING IRAQ
251
public opinion on the matter was strong is evident from the fact
that British officials objected to an absolute end to Indian influence in Mesopotamia after 1916 on the grounds that it would
excite ‘bitter and legitimate resentment’ in India, and that it was
highly impolitic to order Indian labourers and personnel to return
home. Besides the thousands of labourers, so many private Indian
citizens had begun to arrive in the country that in April 1920 the
viceroy was forced to issue an Order in Council restricting
recruitment of Indians in Mesopotamia to government service
only, and that too as a concession to public opinion. By 1921
even Gandhi had taken up the fate of would-be Indian settlers
in Iraq.133
The impression that India had been in some sense promoted
within the empire inspired a revaluation of India’s own dissoluteness by some Britons in the region. Buchanan pronounced its
climate much less cruel than Mesopotamia’s, given the relief
afforded by ‘all the amenities and safeguards that go with civilisation’. His Indian surveyors ‘had never worked under such trying
conditions’. Candler contrasted the successful taming of the
Indian climate and terrain with the utterly degenerate state of
Mesopotamian nature. ‘Convalescent Tommies’ longed desperately for transfer to India, and ailing Indian troops were evacuated
to Bombay for food, drink and ‘cheerful society’, allegedly finding
Mesopotamia intolerable: according to Candler, sepoys — admirably ‘set off by the rabble on the bank’ — regarded ‘both the
country and its inhabitants in equal contempt’, declared Punjab
‘a health resort’ in comparison, and questioned ‘why the Sirkar
should desire this Satanlike land’, to which he obligingly replied
that ‘a wise Sirkar might find the means of rendering it fertile’.
A British soldier affirmed that ‘There is no love lost between the
Indians and the Arabs’, the latter having long feared ‘the incursion
of India into their country, for they know that the Indian farmer
(n. 132 cont.)
book of 1918 (letter to the editor, Times, 10 Nov. 1920, 13), one of the Aga Khan’s
defenders quoted from the 1918 text to prove that His Highness had always argued for
the influence of Indian civilization in the region, regardless of whichever flag flew there:
Malabar Hill, letter to the editor, Times, 13 Nov. 1920, 12.
133
Viceroy, telegram to Secretary for India, 27 Apr. 1917, quoted in Busch, Britain,
India, and the Arabs, 143; see also ibid., 145. Gandhi, ‘A Wail from Mesopotamia’, in
Young India (May 1921), quoted, according to Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs, 391
n. 37, in Chelmsford’s Order in Council, 30 Apr. 1920. I have not been able to locate
this article in edited collections of Young India available to me.
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under the British engineers would make Mesopotamia blossom
like a rose’. In British portrayals, Indians saw Mesopotamia with
the orientalist eyes of the agent of development.134
III
While India may have been promoted within the imperial system,
the empire still had a glass ceiling; wooden river craft were not
steel steamers. And, of course, economic development is no guarantee of empowerment: as Frantz Fanon put it, ‘Raftways across
the bush, the draining of swamps and a native population which is
non-existent politically and economically are in fact one and the
same thing’.135 This article does not seek so much to fully flesh
out the post-war implications of the discourse about Indian development of Iraq in India and Iraq — a subject better left to scholars
in those areas — but to expose their intra-imperial sources and
their imbrication with the cultural and military history of the
Great War. Nevertheless, I shall venture to say that the wartime
effort to develop Mesopotamia played an important role in the
shaping of Indian national and imperial ambitions — specifically,
the imperial nature of Indian national ambitions.136
134
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 106, 109, 111; Candler, Long Road to
Baghdad, i, 34–5, 237; Swayne, In Mesopotamia, 78, 161. To be sure, Candler
added snidely that the sepoy invariably preferred ‘his own sterile plot of earth, even
if it be a firepit like Multan’.
135
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New
York, 1963), 250.
136
As Sugata Bose puts it, the insufficiently decolonized, centralized state of independent India eventually seized on national development as a primary source of its
own self-justification: ‘Instead of the state being used as an instrument of development, development became an instrument of the state’s legitimacy’: ‘Instruments and
Idioms of Colonial and National Development’, 53. See also Ludden, ‘India’s
Development Regime’, 278. Besides the imperial nature of the Indian state at
home, the story of Indian technological transfers to Iraq might also help us understand
India’s continuing role as a global source of technical expertise and a regional superpower. Strobe Talbott, the American diplomat who negotiated with the Indian government after the 1998 nuclear tests, later wrote about an ‘unnerving’ meeting in 2000
when the BJP Home Minister, L. K. Advani, had ‘mused aloud about the happy days
when India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar (formerly Burma) would
be reunited in a single South Asian ‘‘confederation’’. Given India’s advantages in size
and strength, this construct, especially coming from India’s highest-ranking hard-line
Hindu nationalist, would have been truly frightening to all its neighbors’: Strobe
Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb (Washington DC,
2004), 101.
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253
It also left an important legacy in Iraq, notably in the state’s
fetishizing of technological solutions to political and social problems. The Iraqi population refused to fade into the transforming landscape, rebelling violently in 1920; hence the title of
Buchanan’s account, The Tragedy of Mesopotamia, and its sad
affirmation that the British became ‘more hated than the Turks
themselves had ever been’. Iraq was a monument to the White
Man’s Burden, ‘a tragedy of heroism, suffering, wasted lives, and
wasted effort’.137 Many of the developmental projects the British
undertook (mainly, after all, to serve the needs of the army) were
quickly abandoned, partly because of financial stringency and
partly because military needs now dictated another use of technology in the region: aerial bombardment as a means of surveillance and pacification, of which I have written elsewhere. These
‘enormous political possibilities’ of aircraft were also discovered
during the war; they were the other side of the coin of technological development of the Middle East.138 As Walter Benjamin
once defined it, ‘Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology
. . . Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream
into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes,
it drops incendiary bombs over cities’.139
Still, this post-war air control regime, by which the Royal Air
Force policed Iraq and used aerial bombardment to put down
unrest and subversive activities, was understood in the same
developmental vein as the wartime projects. The centrality of
air power to the rule of Iraq, the British thought, made
Baghdad the ‘Clapham Junction of the air’.140 Flying over the
desert, Hubert Young, a former political officer serving at the
Foreign Office, ‘felt that a new era had dawned, and that with
137
Buchanan, Tragedy of Mesopotamia, 182, 261, 276–8, 284–5.
Brigadier-General Salmond, commanding Middle East Brigade, RFC to CGS,
GHQ EEF, 12 Nov. 1916: PRO, WO 158/626. On this, see Satia, ‘Defense of
Inhumanity’.
139
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
(1937), repr. in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York, 1968), 242. For a post-war account of wartime achievement, see,
for instance, Richard Coke, Baghdad: The City of Peace (London, 1927). See also
Ghassan Atiyyah, Iraq, 1908–1921: A Socio-Political Study (Beirut, 1973), ch. 6.
Certainly, some of Saddam Hussein’s ‘developmentalist’ (and punitive) obsessions
with draining the marshes of southern Iraq can also be traced to this era.
140
This phrase was ubiquitous. See, for instance, ‘Britain and Mesopotamia’, Daily
Telegraph, 10 May 1921; CAS, Scheme for the Control of Mesopotamia by the Royal
Air Force, 12 Mar.[?] 1921: PRO, AIR 5/476.
138
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PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
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the goodwill of His Majesty’s Government and the powerful help
of the Royal Air Force the Arabs of Iraq would undoubtedly
win their independence at last’. Technology remained the handmaiden of progress: the ‘romance’ of desert flight derived from the
‘demonstration of the power of modern inventions which are able
to conquer vast open spaces of the world, as yet little known to
civilised man’. When this cheap air control scheme finally defused
post-war criticism of the government’s extravagant waste of
money and men in Mesopotamia, the British public once again
seized on the idea of developing the cradle of civilization as the
path to national redemption. Indeed, the air afforded a lofty viewpoint from which to observe the effects of the new loftier imperialism, to witness, in the words of the Illustrated London News,
‘ ‘‘adoring Asia kindle and hugely bloom’’ ’. The development of
Iraq, the geographical centre of the world’s most ancient and most
modern traffic routes, would ‘safeguard humanity from famines,
wars, and social revolution’, foresaw its most visionary supporters. Even the government’s most insistent post-war antagonist,
the Times, agreed: ‘The time has come to consider seriously the
possibilities of developing the . . . considerable resources of the
country. . . [A] country once so rich may surely be made rich again
by modern methods’. The promise of development underwrote
the British presence in the country through the decade; in 1926,
Colonial Secretary Leo Amery was still speaking of the ‘great
development in Iraq which will bring us some recompense for
the great sacrifices we made in the Great War’. The notion that
they might develop Iraq so that it would be able to ‘stand on its
own feet’ sustained each government’s commitment to holding
Iraq, whatever its political complexion.141
In Britain, the dream of developing Mesopotamia left its mark
on a new vision of colonialism, reconfigured in the direction of
technocratic developmentalism. Through India’s efforts to make
up for its early failures in the Mesopotamia campaign, a Faustian
vision of technology endured along with faith in empire as a
141
Major Sir Hubert Young, The Independent Arab (London, 1933), 338;
Ilay Ferrier, ‘The Trans-Desert Route: Baghdad–Jerusalem’, 1926: Brit. Lib.,
India Office Records, Eur MSS C874 (Ferrier Papers); Illustrated London News, 1
Feb. 1919, 149 (the quotation alludes to Stephen Phillips’s poem Marpessa, first
published in 1897); Captain R. J. Wilkinson, ‘The Geographical Importance of
Iraq’, Jl Royal United Services Inst., lxi (1922), 665; ‘Progress in Mesopotamia’, editorial, Times, 17 Mar. 1923, 11; Amery at the Leeds Luncheon Club, quoted in ‘The
Middle East’, Times, 9 Feb. 1926, 11. These are but a few of countless such examples.
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255
progressive force. The avowed abstemiousness of the new imperial idea acquired traction in an increasingly anti-colonial
world.142 The wartime investment in the notion of an imperial
economy of progress by which Europe’s human and material
losses could be recouped in the development of Iraq helped
produce the inter-war vision of empire as an ‘interlocking economic unit’ that collectively guaranteed Britain’s advancement,
if not in one place, then in another.143 The wartime episode foreshadowed the stream of technocratic experts that continues to
flow to the Middle East, a region, as Timothy Mitchell points
out, whose supposed abject aridity, mineral wealth and lack of
natural national cohesion has continued to pose the canonical
developmental problem. Like the post-colonial discourse of the
global development institutions he describes, British development
discourse constituted itself as a neutral form of knowledge standing apart from its objects — Iraq and India — despite the central
fact of the empire’s historically powerful economic and political
role in them; their poverty was configured as the traditional poverty of peasants beyond the pale of modernity rather than a product of the modern era.144
Stanford University
142
Priya Satia
The post-war hope that colonial development might benefit distressed British
industries by increasing demand for British materials (Constantine, Making of British
Colonial Development Policy, 300, 303) owed much, I think, to the wartime equation of
development of Iraq with imperial redemption. At the same time, the 1930s conviction
that colonial living standards, rather than British ones, should be the object of development (Cooper and Packard, ‘Introduction’, 7) was also anticipated by the wartime
insistence on viewing the empire as a benevolent, humanitarian, philanthropic
institution.
143
On the notion of empire as an interlocking economic unit, see John M.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion,
1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), 10–11, 107.
144
Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 44, 210–11, 223. See also Cooper and Packard,
‘Introduction’, 3 (referring to James Ferguson’s article in the volume); Ludden,
‘India’s Development Regime’, 251–2.