Reid Empire of Sand

How Britain Made the Middle East
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-080-7
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 414 Seiten

At the end of the First World War Britain and to a much lesser extent France created the modern Middle East. The possessions of the former Ottoman Empire were carved up with scant regard for the wishes of those who lived there. Frontiers were devised and alien dynasties imposed on the populations as arbitrarily as in medieval times. From the outset the project was destined to failure. Conflicting and ambiguous promises had been made to the Arabs during the war but were not honoured. Brief hopes for Arab unity were dashed, and a harsh belief in western perfidy persists to the present day. Britain was quick to see the riches promised by the black pools of oil that lay on the ground around Baghdad. When France too grasped their importance, bitter differences opened up and the area became the focus of a return to traditional enmity. The war-time allies came close to blows and then drifted apart, leaving a vacuum of which Hitler took advantage. Working from both primary and secondary sources, Walter Reid explores Britain's role in the creation of the modern Middle East and the rise of Zionism from the early years of the twentieth century to 1948, when Britain handed over Palestine to UN control. From the decisions that Britain made has flowed much of the instability of the region and of the world-wide tensions that threaten the twenty-first century. How far was Britain to blame?

Walter Reid studied at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh and is the author of a number of acclaimed biographies and books of military and political history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reid, Walter

Leseproben

1

INTRODUCTORY

Surveying the extent of the British Empire in 1883, Sir John Seeley, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, said, ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’1 The lecture in which he made the remark was published and remained in print until 1956, the year of the Suez expedition. His line has been remembered, but is often misunderstood. He was not being whimsical, nor did he admire the amateurish spirit in which the globe had been painted red. He was deprecating the lack of serious planning behind an enterprise that had so much potential.

The Empire he was looking at was the Second British Empire, the empire that Britain built up after the loss of the American colonies. Contemporary documentary evidence shows clearly that Seeley’s epigram was unfounded on fact. Even before Yorktown a great deal of detailed thought was being given to extending Britain’s overseas territories for strategic and mercantile reasons. A fit of absence of mind is not an appropriate expression in relation to that carefully planned exercise.

It is a much more appropriate description of the way in which the Third British Empire, the Empire in the Middle East, was acquired. The repercussions of that acquisition still reverberate. The reasons for it, largely unexplained, are fascinating.

The scale of this forgotten Empire was enormous. Between 1914 and 1919 the superficial area of the Empire expanded by roughly 9 per cent and in the 21 years from 1901 its population increased by some 14.5 per cent. By 1922 the Empire comprised 58 countries covering 14 million square miles, with a population of 458 million people. The extent of the Empire was seven times that of the Roman Empire at its greatest span. George V ruled over a quarter of the land surface of the planet, and his navies controlled effectively all its water surface. No wonder he collected postage stamps. His empire contained a quarter of the population of the earth.

At the end of the Great War, the British statesman Lord Curzon, a Foreign Secretary and for two terms Viceroy for India, by then the pre-eminent if unofficial architect of the Empire, surveyed what had been added to it and declared: ‘The British flag has never flown over a more powerful and united Empire . . . Never did our voice count for more in the Councils of Nations; or in determining the future destinies of mankind.’2

And it was in the Middle East that the enlargement of the Empire primarily took place. What was gained there was a huge extension from Egypt through Palestine and into Persia. Iraq alone brought 3 million inhabitants within the imperial nexus. The Royal Navy controlled the Black Sea and the Caspian. Britain had acquired some 200,000 square miles of additional territory. Before the outbreak of the First World War, Britain held sway in Iran and power in Egypt, important but contested by France; but nothing else. In 1925 British influence in the Middle East was enormous: Britain controlled Egypt and Iran and ran what are now Israel, Iraq and Jordan. France, the only other Western power with authority in the region, had to make do with Syria and Lebanon, much less desirable pickings.

It was a significant transformation in the scale and shape of the Empire, a transformation which Britain had not sought when she entered the war and which she did not entirely want when the war finished. How did all this happen? Above all, how did it happen 20 years after Kipling had written ‘Recessional’, at a time when many politicians, thinkers and political economists in Britain had concluded that the days of the Empire were over?

By the early twentieth century, partly because of post-Darwinian notions of decadence, there was a view that the days of the British Empire as a great power were ending. It was a matter of concern that it had proved difficult to raise enough healthy recruits for the South African war, and this fact stimulated belief in ideas about ‘racial decline and degeneration. The advancing front of the empire was threatened from the very centre.’ Gibbon’s description of the decay and decline of the Roman Empire seemed unpleasantly relevant.3

The jingoism of mid nineteenth-century imperialism had been replaced by a much less confident approach; at its climax the Empire was attended by anxieties. ‘After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as invariably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their “racial stock” . . . [T]he imperial gothic themes of regression, invasion and the waning of adventure [in the stories of Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard, for example] express the narrowing vistas of the British Empire at the time of its greatest extent, in the moment before its fall.’4 Even Churchill, not notably introspective, was more concerned with reducing the size of the imperial commitments because of their cost, than with extending or even maintaining them.

It was precisely this concern about national degeneracy and a little England outlook, the lack of a sense of what Empire could do for Britain, that prompted Seeley to criticise the absent-minded approach and to advocate a positive, forward Imperial policy. He was not alone. Joseph Chamberlain, for example, felt that the Empire could provide a guarantee of continued greatness, and Leo Amery, whom we shall meet again, was one of those who were seized by this idea. In the particular circumstances of British involvement in the Levant during the First World War the neo-imperialists exercised a disproportionate degree of leverage, but they were far from typical of policymakers.

Most politicians and officials were against expansion, or at the very least not in favour of it. After all, in 1914 Britain entered the First World War declaring that she had no territorial ambitions. How then did she emerge with so many possessions? Did she act in bad faith? Did she deceive and manipulate her allies? That is what this book is about.

British foreign policy in the Middle East in the war was topsy-turvy. She acquired her new possessions from the Ottoman Empire, a state Britain had ardently wanted as her ally but which in the event was her enemy. Her allies, on the other hand, were those countries which had been her traditional rivals.

Confusion and wartime expedients were powerful motors for the extension of the Empire in the Middle East. But while formal governmental policy was not behind much of what happened, there were some elements of planning and design. I have tried to give due weight to the role, which seems to me crucial, of individuals and groups who operated at fairly low political levels or in the capacity of administrators and who shaped events in the Middle East in the war and post-war years. Some of them had no significant status at all. The desperate conditions of a war of a sort for which no one had planned propelled ambitious enthusiasts into positions of great importance. Colonial administrators and Oxford archaeologists found themselves constructing new polities.

A cast of privileged individuals fills the pages of this history. Many of them knew each other from childhood. If not, they met as their careers crossed. They shared an élite background of influence and of wealth which freed them from the need for gainful employment. Despite their fortune, they threw themselves into their project with verve and engagement, and it is difficult not to like most of them. Characters such as Aubrey Herbert, Captain William Shakespear, Mark Sykes, Lord Kitchener, Arnold Wilson, Percy Cox, Gertrude Bell, Charles Tegart, T.E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, Leo Amery, St John Philby, will come on and off the stage regularly.

I have deliberately sought to highlight such people because I believe that they were the true decision-makers so far as concerns Britain in the Middle East in this period. Much recent history of the area has been written ‘from below’. It looks, for instance, at the history of Iraq under the British mandate from the perspective of the governed. Such partisan approaches shed little light on the of the quasi-colonial power. It is very often asserted that Britain entered the Middle East for purely selfish reasons such as gaining access to oil reserves. My aim is to examine motives, to explore the subject subjectively and to seek to identify the intentions of those who made the decisions and implemented them.

Britain’s territorial gains were effected through the new system of mandates, the licence which the recently created League of Nations gave to certain of the victor nations in the Great War to administer former enemy territories (here former parts of the Ottoman Empire) for the benefit of the inhabitants and to prepare them for self-government. The first question this book addresses is whether Britain by the standards of the time, which did permit some legitimate self-interest, and by her own lights, addressed the acquisition and the administration of the mandates in a different way from that in which other territories, such as Egypt, were handled, or, say, from that in which France acquired and handled her mandate, Syria. The earlier parts of the book deal with the acquisition of the mandates, and in the later parts I have focused, after a brief look at alternative systems (France’s version of mandate in Syria and Lebanon, and British influence in Egypt and Iran), on Britain’s mandates in Jordan, Iraq and Palestine.

Secondly, how well did the British mandates operate? They were intended to move the mandated territories towards self-government. How did they do so? Could...