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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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 216 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 226 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 228 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 230 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 234 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 99 242 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 244 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 247 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. 248 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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 249 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. 250 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. 252 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. DEVELOPING IRAQ 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. 138 254 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 197 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. DEVELOPING IRAQ 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.