Britain began to gather intelligence in Arab countries in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt was seen as a direct threat to Britain's commercial and imperial interests and the Navy and War Office stepped up their intelligence gathering in the area. The East India Company already had agents in several Arab cities. The rise of the Wahabbi movement led to a British alliance with the Khedive of Egypt in the early nineteenth century. By the 1880's Britain had succeeded in creating a 'veiled protectorate' in Cairo. It also had treaties with the 'Trucial States' of the Gulf. However, by the beginning of the Twentieth century it faced competition from Germany in Ottoman territories. Intelligence gathering in the area became formalized after the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875. Both the War Office and the Navy set up their own dedicated Intelligence Departments. The problem was that the Brits didn't really have an offensive doctrine against the Turks who might ally with the Germans. It couldn't put pressure on Constantinople without first obliterating the fortresses on the Dardanelles. Thus it was looking for a tender spot in the Turkish soft underbelly. Otherwise, there was a threat to both Suez and the Persian Gulf from revived Ottoman military power in the region.
After the War, both France and Britain tried to maintain their hold on Syria and Iraq by brute force. The 1920 Iraqi revolt was so costly in blood and treasure that the Brits back pedalled and installed Faisal as King. The French too had to alter their approach after a big rebellion in Syria in 1925. Neither spies nor 'air power' nor 'Orientalist knowledge' could alter the fact that controlling territory in the Middle East was unprofitable at that time. A political solution had to be found.
Priya Satia takes a different view in her book 'Spies in Arabia- The Great War and the Cultural
Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire
in the Middle East'. The plain fact is, Italy and France had overtly taken over Ottoman territory before the Great War. Britain, but not France, played a role in defeating the Ottomans but France too secured a Mandate over Syria from the League of Nations without any 'cultural foundations'. It was their military victory at the Battle of Maysalun which enabled them to stay on. There was nothing covert about what the Brits and the French and the Italians were doing. Their motto was 'to the victors belong the spoils'. There may have been secret agreements before the war or during it. But there were none after one side or the other had been militarily defeated. Still, the new overlords found that their mandates were a costly headache. Still, for the Brits, there was some sort of geopolitical reason for the thing. The French, however, were pissing their money against a wall. Their one achievement was creating Lebanon as a state for Christians. That hasn't worked out at all well.
At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents first began seriously to venture into the region they knew as “Arabia.”
They had been there since the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. In Egypt, in the 1880's, the Brits had very cleverly used WS Blunt to advance their own interests. Blunt later floated the notion of an Arab Caliphate. This could become a way of neutralizing the Hanafi Ottoman Caliph who might otherwise use his influence against British interests in the sub-continent. In the event, the Brits would have preferred to keep the Caliph as their puppet because it was Ataturk who was the real thorn in their side.
Still, we can't deny there was a measure of duplicity and Machiavellian intrigue by which the Brits established a veiled protectorate over Egypt and began expanding downward into the Sudan. In some cases- e.g. Kuwait- there was a covert aspect to its system of treaties and subsidies which gave it a big footprint in the Gulf. This was resented by the Turks who became more and more dependent on the Germans with catastrophic results for their Empire. All this predated the twentieth century. But, already, the trend was for open annexation of Ottoman territory.
They were drawn there by two objectives: the desire to secure the land route to India
Which had been secured long ago. The Brits had gained control over the Suez canal by 1875. Aden had been conquered by 1837.
and the hope of finding in a proverbially mystical and antique land the metaphysical certainty they no longer felt at home.
Nonsense! The Arabian Nights had enjoyed a great vogue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But that land had lost its mystique by the time Thomas Cook organized excursions to Egypt in 1869. There can be little romance about a place being visited by coach loads of Birmingham haberdashers.
These competing objects created a dilemma for them as agents: How were they to gather practical information and serve the British state in a region they were attracted to because of its legendary inscrutability and promise of escape from Britain?
They had instructions on what information was needed back home. This had to do with the tonnage of dates being exported or which clan appeared ready to launch a rebellion. Intelligence work was carried out by professional military men as well as by commercial agents. Diplomatic and Consular officials had increasing intelligence gathering responsibilities. The 'Oriental Secretary' at the Legation tended to be a sun-burnt man expert in a number of middle eastern dialects who was more at ease on a camel than in a drawing room.
The agents’ grappling with this conundrum in the era of the Great War
When professional soldiers were running Intelligence operations with help from Imperial Police officers and some gifted amateurs who had appropriate 'cover'.
and the manifold consequences of the tactical and methodological choices they made form the subject of this book. This is a story about a state that could not see,
It could see and plan and implement those plans such that it became paramount in that region after the Great War.
that depended on equivocal agents groping blindly through a fog of cultural representations
No. Its agents were professionals who ran 'assets' who may or may not have been 'equivocal'. I suppose some- like Harry Philby- could be seen as double agents while others- like TE Lawrence- may be described as being at war with themselves.
about the new region it sought to control and the unique epistemological and technological remedies they evolved to soothe their consciences and cure their blindness.
This is nonsense. The Brits were on familiar terrain. They had been dealing with the grandfathers and great grandfathers of many of the local tribal leaders. Their mistake was to bet heavily on the Hashemites. Kim Philby's father - an ICS man- decided to switch sides to that of Ibn Saud.
Their work cast a long shadow over imperial statecraft and metropolitan culture in the twentieth century.
Not really. The Empire was pretty much broke by the end of the Great War. It was folly to get too involved in the region. Egypt achieved titular independence by 1922. Iraq did so by 1932. The Brits had to return there in full force during the Second War. But Persia was even worse affected in both Wars despite being a sovereign power.
How states see—or don’t see—is, in my view, a matter intricately bound up with cultural history; it may even be that all states are unseeing, or at least intensely myopic, without the benefit of a cultural lens to bring into focus the otherwise elusive space and people they rule.
This is foolish. There was no need for politicians in Westminster or administrators in Whitehall to understand anything about the culture of far away places. Things would get done in the way they always got done. What mattered was that those things were done on the cheap.
In most instances, this is the lens that concentrates the illuminations of the Enlightenment into a shaft powerful enough to strip a place of all idiosyncrasy and opacity, rendering it universally intelligible, empirically graspable.
This was done by book-keepers not authors of fancy tomes. Imperialism is au fond a matter of Accountancy not arcane metaphysical anthropology.
There are other places, however, in which the modern state’s knowledge-gathering practices are refracted through different cultural lenses, places deemed beyond the domain of the universally accessible, rational, secular world
like India which had plenty of Maharajas and Maharisis and, latterly, a very troublesome Mahatma.
—perhaps, in Edmund Burke’s terms above, those places beyond the equinoctial.
Burke's phrases were fine but he had zero impact on Imperial policy.
Burke was writing about India in the era of the notorious trial of Governor-General Warren Hastings,
He was paid by a particular lobby which included some Indians
but questioning the ways of the empire and the limits of universalism was again the fashion on the eve of the Great War, when the gaze of the British state had fallen intently upon the region known as the Middle East.
Not really. The Fabians- especially George Bernard Shaw- had drawn attention to some mistakes the Brits were making in Egypt but it remained loyal during the War. The success of the Arab revolt did come as a surprise but turned out not to be terribly consequential.
The story of British intelligence gathering in the Middle East reveals the extent to which cultural representations mattered in the epistemological strategies the British state employed there and the extent to which the varying standards of the empire’s “geographical morality” flowed from epistemological principles.
No. The War was a numbers game. It didn't matter if a particular Army officer was pro-Arab or even if he converted to Islam. What mattered is if he kept within his budget and if his dispatches were accurate and punctual enough.
This is a story of a state so conscious of the particular illegibility of the terrain it sought to control that it forsook empiricism for intuition,
Nonsense! The Brits knew that Kut al Amara had been a disaster. Empirically, you are fucked if the enemy kills you and captures your commander. No intuition can prevail over brute facts. Ibn Saud defeated the Hashemites. This wasn't expected but it had to be accepted.
with critical consequences for both Britain and the Middle East as the war and its violent aftermath unfolded in the region. I am interested in this book in piecing together the world of British intelligence in the Middle East. More importantly, however, I want to unpack the enduring fascination with Arabia as a spy-space which colored this British effort (and has perhaps even attracted readers to this book).
TE Lawrence wrote well. WS Blunt and Doughty too had their admirers. But, thanks to Thomas Cook, too many Brits had actually been to the Middle East. Every other mantlepiece had its souvenirs from Port Said.
My focus is on the formation and fallout of the cultural imagination that shaped agents’ approach and methods, rather than on the efficacy of the information order as such— on thinking about intelligence and agents’ skills rather than on the agents’ actual abilities (a subject better left to intelligence experts).
Rudolph Valentino's 'The Sheikh' and the 'Mummy' films and the associated Music Hall dance may have created an image of Arab lands but this was as true of Americans as it was Britishers. Such representations had zero impact on Imperial policy. Intelligence experts have commented on particular policy failures- e.g. the British Indian Army's miserable performance in Iraq or the baffling incompetence of its diplomats in Ottoman Turkey. I suppose, lessons were learned or, at any rate, the budget for such foolishness was cut.
Nor is my purpose to hold British representations of Arab views up against the Arab reality but to demonstrate that the activities of the modern state are shaped by the cultural imagination.
The problem here is that Americans shared that 'cultural imagination' but played no role in the MENA. Imperial policy has to focus on the financial bottom line.
Indeed, given received wisdom about the power of European cultural representations of the Orient, the cultural formation of intelligence agents must lie at the heart of any effort to understand British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East.
But actual intelligence agents have diverse 'cultural formations'. This guy has a PhD in ancient Semitic languages. That guy is on loan from the Punjab police. The officer in charge used to be a Wine Merchant on Civvie Street. He got the job because he plays golf with the ADC. Still, he has a head for figures, is good at recruiting Armenian informants, and runs a tight ship.
The cultural imagination mattered especially in a region conceived in its very essence as a space for the imagination.
The London of Sherlock Holmes was a 'space for the imagination'. So what?
As it happens, the intelligence agents wandering in the Middle East were among those early-twentieth century Britons questioning the reliability of sense perception at a time when what Weber famously called the “disenchantment of the world” had triggered an almost desperate interest in matters spiritual.
This may have been true of German intelligence agents. By and large, it wasn't true of the Public School educated British agent who liked riding horses and shooting at anything which wasn't a horse. Huvelin and the French educators and businessmen interested in Syria may have had complicated spiritual urges and a feeling of 'Crusader' affinity with the Maronites. But they weren't able to squeeze much money out of the place. Messianic missions cease to matter when you run out of cash.
These were not the obscure, anonymous intelligence workers of a later, more bureaucratic era, but social, political, and, in some cases, cultural elites emerging from a range of professional backgrounds, from military to diplomatic to scholarly. As a community, they shared almost without exclusion an intense literary ambition—many were prolific—and social contact with the British cultural and political establishments.
There were able writers- Blunt, Lawrence, Bell- but the machinery of intelligence was a prosaic enough affair. Bell had influential family friends though, no doubt, it was her own personal qualities which allowed her to shine. I suppose one might say that Churchill, as a great writer himself, would appreciate the literary genius of a Lawrence more than most. But it was Lloyd George and Clemenceau who dictated policy. Churchill's interventions, apart from Gallipoli, were often quite sensible. But they weren't affected by his own experience of the Sudan or by his reading of any particular author.
Their personal searches for spiritual and cultural redemption, coupled with their practical difficulties in navigating desert topography, profoundly shaped their methods as agents,
If they were agents, they had to follow prescribed methods.
and their mixing with the worlds of letters and politics at home ensured that awareness of their work in the Middle East was diffuse.
No. It was narrowly focussed because they were making particular policy prescriptions.
In a sense I am trying to bring the history of perceptions of the Orient together with the history of perception as such, for, the social world of Edwardian Britain ensured that imperial statecraft and metropolitan culture were mutually influential.
No. This was a 'social world' where only money mattered. Edwardians may have read Ibsen or Tolstoy but their Government did what was financially prudent or rewarding.
Well read Americans may have had the same 'history of perceptions' as Edwardians but their country was not interested in Imperial adventures in the Middle East. On the other other hand, their medical and educational missionaries played a positive role in the region.
These agents’ most important methodological innovation was an intuitive intelligence epistemology modeled on their understanding of the “Arab mind.” Long immersion in the desert would, they thought, allow them to replicate the apparently intuitive knowledge-gathering and navigational practices of nomadic Arabs.
The Brits were aware that the Bedouin had a different habitus from the fellaheen or the urban Arabs. They also had long standing links with the maritime Arabs of the littoral.
The premium this modus operandi placed on “genius” guaranteed them an enormous infl uence over the planning and execution of the Middle East campaigns of the Great War and over the postwar administration of the British-controlled Middle East.
Bell did have some role. The other artistic types did not. What mattered in the MENA was how to get as much order as possible for the smallest outlay of money. This turned out to involve using the RAF to bomb tribal raiders or else paying or withholding a subsidy. Harry Philby got Ibn Saud a goodly subvention from the Brits even though he did a deal with the American oil companies.
In the influence of their tactical imagination and epistemological outlook, this book argues, lies the explanation for the gradual transformation of British intelligence-gathering in the region from the informal, even accidental, work of world-weary Edwardians to the paranoid preoccupation of a brutal aerial surveillance regime after the war.
This is foolish. The RAF was called in because that was the cheapest way to drive back the Wahhabis. The same tactic was used on the Afghan frontier. The French Air Force in Syria was bombing rebel areas in 1925. One could say that France blundered blindly in that theater. It wasted a lot of blood and treasure and gained little in return. Britain's mandate in Iraq, by contrast, was cheap and efficient. However, during the Second World war, its military intervention was quite brutal.
If, as James Scott has recently urged, local knowledge can serve as an antidote to the imperialism of the modern state’s flattening gaze, in this instance agents of the British state fetishized local knowledge as the foundation of a violent effort to render nomad terrain legible.
Cartographers had rendered that terrain legible. Geologists would turn up to find petroleum. Local knowledge didn't greatly matter. Arabs preferred to drive trucks on motorways rather than ride camels across sandy dunes.
Their story is a reminder that imperialism is a political relationship more than a perspective; intimacy does not make it go away.
No. It is a reminder that even if there is 'Protectorate' or other political relationship embedded in a Treaty still there may be a practical relationship of dependency or hegemony.
British intelligence in the Middle East was, in short, different from British intelligence projects in other parts of the world in this period.
No. During the nineteenth century, some portion of British intelligence came under the India office while others portions came under the Colonial or Foreign office. The Admiralty had a separate network of its own.
Certainly, British agents were also venturing into Germany, Japan, Persia, North America, India, and elsewhere. No other region, however, possessed such a combination of geopolitical cachet, cultural resonance, and utter unfamiliarity potent enough to indelibly mark intelligence practices and profoundly influence British popular and official culture.
Nonsense! The Brits were content to prop up both the Khedive and the Ottomans for most of the time. They had to move in because the Caliphate was breaking up and the Germans stood to gain.
The intuitive mode was also a radical departure from the dogged empiricism of earlier and contemporary efforts to gather information in other regions perceived as essentially deceptive and disorienting, such as India, Australia, the Poles, and central Africa.
India was well understood by the 1820s. The Australian aborigines didn't matter at all. There was some interest in Africa but that was 'exploration' not 'intelligence gathering'.
Furthermore, the peculiarities of British relations with the Ottoman Empire and of the political organization of that empire meant that the intelligence project was itself interested in unique objects, as we shall see.
It is only about unique objects that we can gather intelligence. My dog is unique. I want to find him. Dogginess is non unique. You won't hire a detective to find it.
Perhaps the most important evidence of the peculiarity of this intelligence project is Britons’ frequent remarking of the fact, a theme that runs throughout what follows.
Briton's did not remark on the fact that the Consul in Basra gathered information on the tonnage of dates exported.
To be sure, the British were not the only Great Power spying on the Middle East in this period; their concern about improving their intelligence sources was partly intensified by news of the exploits of Continental spies. An unsigned secret memorandum of 1909 among the papers of Vernon Kell, founder of the British Security Service (later MI5), urged the British state to emulate the German, French, Russian, and other foreign intelligence organizations in the lengths of deceit to which they were willing to go.
Kell was pretty junior- a mere Captain- at that time. However, it was the Indian Imperial Police which the Brits needed to emulate.
That said, in the end, no other European country sent as many agents or made as large a cultural investment in agents who went to Arabia.
No other European country held so much territory there. Moreover, Suez would always be of more importance to the British Empire which had the biggest Navy at the time.
Nor did any other power eventually obtain a stranglehold over the region that allowed the logic of its intelligence system to play out in such dramatic ways.
That logic had to do with money- whom to subsidize and when to stop the subsidy and accept a new ruler who had taken power by the sword.
I am not making a claim for British cultural exceptionalism but for exceptional opportunity. Indeed, Germans shared many of the same cultural fascinations with the Middle East, but German withdrawal from the region after the war makes it a less useful case for exploring the relationship between those fascinations and statecraft. Russia’s ultimate domination of Persia and Central Asia make a Russian version of the story more promising, not least for the light it might shed on what, if anything, is exceptional about the cultural fascinations with “Arabia” as opposed to the Middle East more broadly construed. The French story might also be usefully told, given the intensely brutal nature of postwar French rule in Syria, but the cultural significance of French agents in the Middle East is less clear. They never made the kinds of claims Britons, Germans, and Russians did to a special sympathy with the inhabitants of the region, and in British eyes at least, they were remarkably “clumsy.”
I suppose, the Brits claimed a special relationship with the Arabs because their King Emperor ruled over more Muslims than any other Monarch. During the Great War, an ICS man- Abdullah Yusuf Ali- did very useful propaganda work for the Brits.
Historians, too, have called them “poor competitors”; in Edward Said’s succinct phrase: “There were no French Lawrences or Sykeses or Bells.”
Massignon accompanied the Huvelin mission to Syria. He wrote well enough. Sykes and Bell weren't great literary luminaries. Lawrence was exceptional. With hindsight, the Arab Bureau was amateurish and counter-productive. I suppose, it's strange policies reflected British reverses in Iraq and later, Gallipoli. Johnny Turk had turned out to be a formidable adversary. The other big worry was that of a mutiny by Indian, particularly Indian Muslim, soldiers. Originally, the British war-aim was to turn Iraq into a granary to feed India!
In short, the British story is the big story about European intelligence gathering and colonial control in the Middle East in the twentieth century, but its usefulness in helping us understand empire is general.
The story of the Arab Bureau is dispiriting. It was amateur hour with a vengeance. By 1917 it was obvious that the age of Empires was ending. The problem was how to pass power to politically cohesive, economically viable, nation-states.
Thus, I am offering here a cultural history of the interwar British imperial state, of imperial information systems, the tactics of conquest, and the mechanisms of colonial rule, of how the colonial state sees, and the drastic steps it takes when it thinks it cannot see.
The problem here is that there was no 'colonial rule'. There were protectorates and League of Nations mandates as well as 'unequal treaties' and machinations behind the scenes.
The Sudan intelligence service or the Indian Political Service show how colonial states see and think. But that model is a poor fit with the topic Priya is concerned with.
Ultimately, as we shall see, the state that could not see became a state that could not be seen.
The British could be seen and they saw plenty.
The aerial surveillance regime in the Middle East was the ethereal outcropping of a style of imperial rule I call “covert empire.”
Why? Britain was either the mandatory power or had treaties and gave subsidies to the local rulers. There was nothing 'covert' about such relationships. Still, I suppose, one could say the 'Arab street' objected to the sway the Brits held over their monarchs. But this was true even after the Second War.
The constitutional monarchies established in the British Middle Eastern mandates after the war are usually classed as instances of “indirect rule,” a style originally evolved in the Indian princely states. This book argues, however, that the British did not so much rule through these potentates as sideline them for all matters pertaining to “imperial security”—a highly elastic rubric—by creating a parallel state, entirely informal and in the hands of intelligence officers who held real executive power.
This was equally true of the Indian Political Agents in Princely States. Defence and Diplomacy were in the hands of the Imperial government. The Arab states in the Thirties had more sovereignty- at least on paper. Palestine, for obvious reasons, was a separate kettle of fish.
This was a new form of imperial rule, invisible, barely existing on paper, designed for an increasingly anti-imperialist postwar world, both at home and abroad. This was more than a case of the (unsuccessful) application of old imperial ideas—orientalist stereotypes, Indian experience, and so forth—in a new imperial space; certainly there are continuities with the past, but there is also a historical specificity to British ideas about the Middle East and the style of imperial rule they underpinned.
Not really. Tegart was brought in from Bengal to the Palestine when the A-rabs got out of hand. The same tactics worked in both places. The one big difference was that India no longer paid for Indian troops when those troops were used outside India. The British tax payer wasn't getting a good return on its MENA operations.
Racist constructions of Arabs go only so far in explaining the origins of the covert state and its technological infrastructure of air control, both considerable departures in British imperial practice.
Nonsense! TE Lawrence turned up in India where tribes on the frontier were being subjected to aerial bombardment. There is a story that he married the lady who would become Sheikh Abdullah's wife. Needless to say the marriage was not consummated.
The explanation lies, I think, in British ideas about the kind of place Arabia was, historically contingent ideas informed by the cultural concerns of early-twentieth-century Britain and generating a commitment to a particular epistemological framework for knowing and governing the Middle East.
British ideas in this respect were the same as informed Indian or Japanese ideas.
The Great War is the pivot of this story and must lie at the heart of any effort to understand the way affective knowledge informed state practice in the Middle East.
Affective knowledge didn't matter in the slightest. Amba Prasad Sufi and Maulana Azad had one sort- which was unavailing. The Brits had money and this could buy them support- some of the time.
It was the moment when the agents and their methods were bestowed with an official legitimacy and began to extend their reach into the realms of military operations and colonial administration.
Sykes and Lawrence were Army officers. Bell held an official diplomatic position as 'Oriental Secretary'. None were intelligence operatives as such. Somerset Maugham, who wrote some good spy stories, was an actual secret agent in Geneva, Samoa and then Russia. But British spies in Russia were pretty useless.
In recounting the story of the agents’ growing influence within official circles, and, increasingly, with the public at home,
Agents can only have influence after they retire and start writing their memoirs. Sidney Reilly came to be seen as 'the Ace of Spies' and is said to be the model of James Bond. But it was people like Basil Zaharoff, the international 'man of mystery', who had the money and influence to affect policy.
this book inevitably expands our understanding of the military, political, and cultural legacy of the war—which has for the most part been understandably but nevertheless narrowly focused on the Western introduction front—and of Britain’s imperial project in the Middle East, of which we know very little beyond the apparently idiosyncratic popularity of Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence, an archaeologist, had been recruited to survey the Negev desert before he enlisted. But he was not a professional spy.
If intelligence agents were shaped by the cultural anxieties of British modernity, British modernity was itself touched by the shadow of the surveillance tactics applied in the Middle East.
No it wasn't. The Brits had got their own counter-intelligence Department before the Great War. They interned Germans working in the UK and rolled up foreign intelligence networks where and when they found them. I suppose one may mention surveillance of Indian students in the UK as a precursor to the creation of MI5.
The state’s blindness was part of a wider contagion—as even the term, the “state,” refers not to a discrete entity, but to “a whole network of people and institutions,” a shifting organism whose assorted appendages are dispersed into the substrate of society.
The State wasn't blind. It caught and killed spies and traitors of various descriptions. The 'State' refers to a juridical entity of a precise, not inchoate, type.
I argue in this book that the cultural fascinations of the Middle East and of the agents who made their mark in it ensured that at a time when Britain hungered for heroes, imperial confidence, and the remains of a lost civilization, their traces could be found as much in contemporary literary modernism as in the romantic military tactics of the Middle Eastern theaters and the wartime turn to “development” as a means of reestablishing the constructive benevolence of the British Empire.
It was an American journalist who turned Lawrence into a popular hero. For the Brits, Kut al Amara and Gallipoli were bitter memories. Previously, Egypt had been booming thanks to massive f.d.i under the veiled protectorate. A place where people are making fortunes loses its romantic sheen. As for 'constructive benevolence', it could scarcely burgeon under 'Geddes axe'- i.e. massive cuts in defence spending. The nation wanted lower taxes and higher wages. It didn't give a shit about niggers or wogs in far away places. People would queue up to watch a movie about American gangsters. They had no burning desire to go ride a camel and learn Arabic.
Imperial expansion in and development of the Middle East helped blunt the sense of total rupture with the prewar past.
No. Nobody gave a shit about the place where Uncle John had died of dysentery.
In other words, in an increasingly mass democracy, how the state saw was a matter of public contention; the state’s growing invisibility in the Middle East
Britain was the mandatory power in Palestine and Iraq and had protectorates in the Gulf. It was highly visible in Egypt even after U.D.I.
was partly intended to evade this political flashpoint.
Which one? The Labour Party gave up on its 1918 pledge to give home rule to India. The world was clearly a more complicated place then the early Fabians had imagined. Muddling through while trying to balance the books was the only option.
Covert empire came into its own in the Middle East because a self-assertive mass democracy was coming into its own in Britain;
with the result that there was less and less interest in distant colonies
in this sense, too, did it differ from the older paradigm of indirect rule.
Which continued into the Fifties. Prof. Zaehner and Kim Roosevelt toppled Mossadegh so Britain could keep its stranglehold on Persian oil. Nuri Said was Britain's man in Baghdad from 1930 till 1958 when he was killed. The Brits had restored him to power after a brief rebellion during the Second War. Apparently, Gurkha soldiers dressed as Arabs committed a lot of atrocities at the time.
In a postwar political moment shaped by the campaign to assert democratic control over the state—to make the institutions of the state a mere administrative machinery manned by an actually governing citizenry—some segments of the British public were desperate to see what their state was up to in the land of imperial redemption.
No. In the pre-war period, some Fabians and Radicals had views on such issues. The Great War put an end to such dreams. What mattered was getting the books to balance. Winston, as Chancellor, took a shilling off Income tax instead of spending it on the Navy. This doomed the Empire.
As they squinted at the desert horizon for evidence of their government’s good faith, a coarse critique of state secrecy gathering in their parched throats, they ensured not only that the state would twist into ever new shapes to avert and avoid their gaze, but that wider cultural perceptions of the Middle East would continue to shape its activity in the region.
Nonsense! The British voter didn't give a fuck about India or the MENA. If making Egypt or Iraq independent would save money- just do it already.
The point for my purposes is not whether ordinary Britons knew about or cared anything for their Middle Eastern empire but that there was a conversation about how much they knew, could know, should know—and why.
There was no such conversation. British voters had been turning insular since the 1880s. Look at Churchill's first election speech. It is about 'Workmen's comp'. Though he turned up in military uniform he scarcely mentions the Boer War or the Indian Empire. Labour politicians- like Sidney Olivier- soon gave up their illusions regarding Home Rule for dusky folk of various stripes. Only the Budget deficit mattered.
Thus, despite conventional wisdom about the relative absence of a culture of paranoid politics in Britain, it was in fact doubly present: in the conspiracy thinking about “Eastern unrest”
John Buchan's 'Greenmantle' came out in 1916. I suppose he was the foremost representative of the espionage novelist. Buchan started off as Milner's private secretary in South Africa. During the Great War he worked for the Propaganda Bureau. He ended up as Governor General of Canada.
that underpinned the government’s obsessive surveillance of the Middle East and in the public’s growing suspicion of its government’s covert imperial activity once the promise of an affordable developmental empire was proven false.
There was no such 'growing suspicion'. Even in the Fifties, Labour politicians were profoundly uninterested in what Zaehner was getting up to in Teheran. Their attitude was that the voter wanted cheap oil. Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. It wasn't till the mid-Sixties that attitudes towards lands 'East of Suez' changed. But this had a lot to do with the Vietnam war. Nobody mentioned Britain's own role in suppressing communism in Malaysia.
In Britain, as on the Continent, political paranoia played a fundamental role in the unfolding of interwar violence—albeit displaced, in this case, onto colonial theaters—as the state strained under the triple burden of an increasingly recalcitrant empire, straightened means, and a critical public at home.
The public was critical of the fucking Great Depression. But primary product prices collapsed during the Thirties and so 'recalcitrance' didn't matter. It is difficult to be truculent if your belly is empty.
Neither the exclusive intellectual property of the Right or the Left, political paranoia was the product of a certain epistemological outlook in which the intelligence agents at the heart of this book figured centrally, as servants of that state and symbolic proof of its ability to wage war and covertly conquer vast terrain by means of a single, intrepid genius.
What was the point in 'conquering vast terrain' if it meant more money would have to be spent on the Royal Navy? The sort of 'intrepid genius' the public wanted would invent a cheaper and better Car or Television.
This book thus seeks to illuminate some of the interwar ramifications of the British state’s much-remarked “culture of secrecy” and the public’s critique of it, particularly their joint influence on the shape of interwar empire, whose unique material and ideological forms have not been much recognized.
Perhaps this dim bint is thinking of Communist propaganda during this period. But, it failed utterly. Nobody cared if some clique had got hold of petroleum or diamonds or other such stuff in some distant land. On the other hand, 'paranoid' suspicion of Bolshevik plots (e.g. the Zinoviev letter) did harm Labour in 1924. The General Strike, too, evoked strong reactions. But, after that, Labour became thoroughly respectable. The Communist was merely an eccentric, not a grave threat to the common weal.
Certainly, the critique evolved partly from an older tradition of populist working-class suspicions of a corrupt and conspiratorial state, a kindness returned by the state’s habitual interpretation of domestic subversion as the work of foreign agencies, whether in the assumption of a French hand behind working-class discontent during the Napoleonic Wars, the fears of German espionage that produced the security state of 1909–11, or the paranoia about Soviet manipulation of labor and the British Communist Party between the world wars.
The Brits did overreact to the perceived German threat. Oddly enough, it was Oswald Moseley who took up the cause of the Germans who had been interned during the War.
The cultural history of British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East reveals the centrality of the Arabian imaginary,
But the Brits already knew that Egypt was nothing like Palestine which was nothing like Iraq which was nothing like Aden.
and the particular epistemology it produced,
SOAS was only founded in 1916. What was its 'epistemology'? I suppose one might say R.B Haldane could be considered the presiding genius of new institutions like LSE and Imperial College. There was a touch of German idealism to him but this was scarcely true of these institutions.
to the interwar state’s conspiracy thinking, even its focus on Bolshevism.
Sadly, there was a focus on some supposed Jewish conspiracy encompassing the Kremlin and Wall Street. Previously, a British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte had gotten it into his head that the Young Turks were actually Jewish.
What distinguished this moment of the state’s and the public’s mutual suspicions was its commentary on the democratic conditions of the postwar period. The apparent elusiveness and mystery of the region at issue permitted expression of the public’s and the government’s shared skepticism about the authenticity and viability of mass democracy from the moment of its inception.
Where in the Arab world today do you find 'mass democracy'? By 1922, it was obvious that even the non-violent Babu barrister could not get the thing to work in India. Why would the Arabs want to go down that road?
Britons insisting on democratic control, particularly over foreign policy, remained unconvinced that their assertions would translate into real power; they were less anti- imperialist than concerned about what the covert, because brutal, pursuit of empire did to democracy at home.
It did nothing to democracy at home. The extension of the franchise hurt the Liberals and helped Labour. But Labour soon understood that working people don't care about wogs, nignogs and other such dusky folk.
By the same token, government officials, despite lip service to the principle, remained doubtful that an empire could be managed democratically without succumbing to manipulation by antiimperial forces—the self-fulfilling anxiety that produced covert empire.
Prior to 1947, the Brits went in for overt empire or else had unequal treaties. The Suez crisis marked the end of that dispensation. It was swiftly followed by Macmillian's 'winds of change' speech and the rapid decolonization of Africa. One may speak of covert operations in Iran- which was always formally sovereign- and the previous 'veiled protectorate' in Egypt. However, it was only in 1967 that the Brits quit Aden. Still, British mercenaries continued to play a role in that region.
This episode of political paranoia thus produced a powerful impact in both imperial state practices and domestic political culture.
Which episode? The Suez affair? Eden was a sick man and thought Nasser was the second Hitler. But Eisenhower soon put a stop to that nonsense. The Tories continued to win elections. There was no effect on 'domestic political culture'. National Service ended in 1960. It was obvious that Britain had accepted a greatly diminished role in the post-war world. But voters were happy because 'they never had it so good'.
The covert and brutal form of interwar empire
was overt and not particularly brutal- at least compared to what came before and would come afterward.
was a product of the British state’s imbrication with wider British culture
all state's are imbricated with their own culture
in its enthrallment to certain cultural conceptions about Arabia
Arabs ride camels and eat dates.
but also in its theoretical accountability to a democracy.
Ministers were held accountable by Parliament.
This was not only a state that couldn’t see but a democratic one in the throes of coming to terms with itself.
The State could see. Everybody and everything has to come to terms with itself. Arguably, Britain wasn't particularly democratic. It was deferential and had a hereditary peerage sitting in the upper House.
In short, this book describes how particular intelligence and military practices and, ultimately, a particular kind of imperial state emerged from a particular cultural construction of the Middle East.
The Germans and the Japs and the Hottentots may have had a 'particular cultural construction' of the MENA. But they didn't rule any portion of it. 'Intelligence and military practices' were dictated by economic considerations. Britain had a big navy and could project force in that theatre. If it could do so profitably, it went ahead. Sometimes the game was not worth the candle and the thing atrophied.
In doing so, it argues that violence and culture were more closely and literally allied in imperial rule than has generally been recognized.
Violence and culture were closely allied in Germany and Russia and Japan. But they didn't get to do any imperial ruling in the MENA.
That Europeans derived power from cultural knowledge about the “Orient” is a commonplace;
It is false. Germany had great Indologists but it didn't get any fucking power over India as a result. Lots of Indians knew a lot about Britain. But they didn't get power over the Brits.
this book examines how representations shaped the practical knowledge-gathering projects of intelligence and surveillance in the Middle East.
Those projects were shaped by questions asked by military and political leaders. Lawrence was sent to survey the Negev desert so as to aid military planning. He wasn't given a representation of a giant Arab cock and requested to lodge the said cock in his rectum though, no doubt, something of the sort might happen during the course of a tete-a-tete.
Recent literature
Grievance Studies bullshit
has told us a great deal about the cultural violence done by the construction of colonial knowledge,
Viceroy sucked off billions of Indians thus depriving us of valuable jizz.
in censuses, ethnographies, museums, and so forth.
Also those fuckers put up a statue of Cecil Rhodes! That's totes triggering.
However, cultural representations also perform a more literal, physical kind of violence; Said argued from the outset that “representations have purposes, . . . they accomplish . . . many tasks.”
Which is why you draw a picture of a cock jizzing on Joe Biden, the guy will turn into a homo.
This is a book about how representations mattered in the creation of material structures of power in the Middle East, how they functioned, how they underwrote the horrific episode of state-sanctioned violence that was the air control regime.
Maulana Azad thought it was a bad idea for Nehru to give up using this regime in Waziristan. Essentially, if the tribes have no fear of being bombed, then only appeals to Islam could divert them from preying on the settled folk.
Incidentally, when this book came out Priya's country was doing plenty of drone strikes.
By attending to cultural conceptions, this story sheds light on the continuities between the violence of imperialism and total war, as urged in the recent work of Mark Mazower,
who writes well
Isabel Hull, Hew Strachan, and others.
who aren't as anti-Brit as Priya even though her family rose under the Raj.
Hannah Arendt
knew nothing about Britain and its Empire
long ago implicated the British secret agent in the origins of European totalitarianism, although ultimately acquitting the British Empire itself of the “real” horrors of the twentieth century: When the British Intelligence Services (especially after the First World War) began to attract England’s best sons, who preferred serving mysterious forces all over the world to serving the common good of their country, the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. . . . The happy fact is that . . . cruelty played a lesser role [in the British Empire] between the two World Wars than ever before and a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded.
The Intelligence Service never attracted England's 'best sons'. True, during a War, smart people might be recruited by it but they would soon return to Civvie street.
It is time, I think, to reexamine received wisdom about the relatively benign nature of the British state and to begin to understand how British officials reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of imperial policing in the Middle East.
Kipling did that once and for all in 'under the City walls'. District Commissioner Petit quotes Caiaphas 'it is better than one man perish for the sake of the people...' Somerset Maugham has a good story about a spy luring a Chatto type Indian revolutionary to his doom using a honey trap.
Indeed, there remains a tendency to belabor Britain’s relative sanity, compared to the excesses of the Nazis, Soviets, and other goons of the twentieth century, but this is an argument from false premises: it depends on uncritical acceptance of the empire’s self-representation as the Solomonic creator of a rule of law to whose authority it humbly, gracefully, and yet patronizingly submitted even itself. But this “rule of law” was in many ways a Trojan horse of codified and normalized exceptions that underwrote the coercions, corruptions, expropriations, and various forms of abasement that made the empire possible.
What made the Empire possible? The answer is the Royal Navy and Merchant Marine. Plenty of people showed up on Ind's coral strand and were corrupt or criminal but they didn't get to rule shit.
“Perversion of the law” (in Richard Price’s phrase), including the rules of war and any notion of the rights of “civilians,” was part of the empire’s daily functioning; atrocity was endemic to the “policing,” “pacification,” “punitive expeditions,” “counterinsurgency,” and “small wars” (small in the manner that the Himalayas were “hills”) that were routine aspects of imperial government, security, and expansion.
Yet those colonial wars cost very few lives. Pax Britannica genuinely reduced fatalities. When it ended many of Priya's own people were massacred.
Air control, too, was a system of everyday violence.
No. It was cheap and took few lives. Essentially, it gave tribal chiefs an excuse not to join a raiding party. The Brits ruled Iraq with very few troops. France sent about 30,000 to Syria.
The crime was empire, air control merely its most technologically advanced instrument.
The crime was that Brits are White. Whiteness should be banned. Do you know that many White people have penises? Penises cause RAPE!
This book strives to understand how Britons squared the belief that a unique ethical scrupulousness anchored their liberal empire and its compassionate counterinsurgency with the violent reality on the ground.
Kipling did this long ago.
These are weighty historical myths that continue to guide the unfolding of international military intervention. Some time after World War One, Britain forgot it was a “warfare state,” David Edgerton has shown; even while pioneering offensive air warfare, it packaged its bomber as a force for peace.
Baldwin & Co thought air power could keep the home islands safe. There was an element of truth to this but they forgot the U-boat could make the country vulnerable. In the end, Britain did need its Empire to prevail over Hitler. Later it took the trouble to develop an independent nuclear deterrent.
It is not, I think, incidental to this forgetting that British airpower first stretched its wings in the mythical terrain of Arabia;
Nonsense! It first stretched its wings on the Western Front.
it is there that we must search for the door to oblivion.
What fucking oblivion?
Given my cultural preoccupations,
with proving that Brits be totes evil due to they iz White and, worse yet, many of them have penises!
readers looking for a guide to British policy in the Middle East might instead look to the extremely rich and sophisticated historiography on that subject, cited throughout this work.
In other words, don't bother reading Priya's diatribe against the Brits.
A qualifying word about one of the key protagonists of this story is perhaps also in order. Scores of authors have minutely dissected T. E. Lawrence,
who was turned into a hero by an American journalist
although perhaps no one more than himself. I am less interested in the truth of his claims and his military insights than in the way contemporary Britons understood and valued them.
They thought he was a damn fine writer. Also he distracted attention from the bungling of the British Indian Army in Iraq.
Unique as he was in many ways, he was also a man of his time, and our understanding of him can only benefit from contextualization.
But this stupid woman doesn't know the context. One good perspective is provided by Indian Muslims like Yusuf Ali and Maulana Azad.
I have tried here to embed the Lawrence phenomenon—both his self-fashioning and his popular reception—in the context of the cultural and political exigencies of early-twentieth-century Britain by restoring him to an ensemble cast in what is at one level a prosopography. As Lawrence himself put it, others “could tell a like tale”: “My proper share was a minor one, but because of a fluent pen . . . I took upon myself . . . a mock primacy.”
Lawrence was a great writer. Bruce Lockhart was pedestrian by comparison. But it was Buchan who rose high politically speaking. Somerset Maugham, on the other hand, had the sort of ice in his veins that a great spy needs.
As for my own epistemological practice
which consists of saying Whitey be debil more particularly if they iz British
—apart from the perhaps ironic intuition of a connection between prewar musings on Arabia’s inscrutability and the postwar aerial surveillance regime—I have tried to tell this story about intelligence-gathering by drawing on an assemblage of intelligence records, correspondence, memoranda of the Foreign, India, Colonial, and War offices, the Air Ministry, and other official records, assuming that their language emerges out of a particular cultural formation, for, such documents are, in the last analysis, written by individuals shaped by a particular set of ideas and cultural concepts, a mentalité.
This is foolish. Those memoranda arise out of a particular institutional, not cultural, formation.
In general, “Arabia” connoted a vaguely defined desert domain of Bedouin; it had coasts—on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf—but near the Mediterranean it became something else. In intelligence contexts, it initially bled into Africa and Persia but was eventually reined in from those regions for practical reasons. Defining it was ultimately deemed a somewhat “academic question,” for topographic and ethnographic continuity belied any attempt at drawing lines in the sand.
Yet such lines existed. Britain controlled territory where Arabic was the main language. There were borders dividing their territory from Ottoman possessions.
During the war, however, the problem acquired a practical urgency. If more people began to appreciate the question, the answer remained elusive, with dire consequences that are still being played out. I am referring here to the infamous correspondence in which Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Cairo, and Sherif Hussein, ruler of the Hejaz, attempted to define the borders of the “Arabia” that Hussein’s followers would inherit in exchange for their help in ousting the Ottomans from the region. The deliberate imprecision of these exchanges ensured that various powers in the Middle East would remain in intractable disputes ever after.
Nonsense! The Hashemites were kicked out of Hejaz and had to settle for a small kingdom in Jordan and a bigger kingdom in Iraq which lasted into the late Fifties. Intractable disputes are resolved by warfare.
To be sure, the borders were only vaguely defined partly because
dividing a cake which somebody else possesses is a vague, not a concrete, business
they were only vaguely known—ignorance serving Machiavellian politics. It became, in Lawrence’s wry phrase, “indiscreet only to ask what Arabia is.”
This was in the context of Wilsonian nation-states eligible to join the League of Nations. Could there be a united Arab republic? The answer was no- but this did not become obvious till about 1979.
“Arabia” was, however, a word with more than a cartographic definition.
Like India or China
It was a geographic and cultural imaginary, “a country of the mind more real than any place on a map,” as Kathryn Tidrick puts it.
Only in the sense that leprechauns are more real than Leo Varadkar.
In what follows, I use the word in that cultural sense, as a signifier for the land of mirage, myth, and imprecise borders that the British imagined it to be, but when I speak of the places in which the practical effects of its influence on the British imagination were felt, I am referring essentially to the region comprising present-day Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, but most especially Iraq, as I track the gaze of the postwar British state homing in on what it took to be the “key to the future” and the centerstage of global conflict.
There had briefly been a Kurdish Soviet State. The fear was that the Kurds would spread Communist ideas into Syria, Turkey, and Mesopotamia. This was one reason the Kurdish area was soldered to Iraq. Christian Assyrians were useful to the Brits who heartlessly abandoned them soon enough.
I venture into Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon only when the agents’ activities in the wider region take them there. Kurdistan also lingers at the margins of this story, reflecting its position in the geographic imaginary of Arabia.
Kurds are linguistically similar to Persians. There is also quite a sizable Turkoman population in Syria and Iraq.
The “Middle East” was an equally fraught neologism that tended to spill willy-nilly over the borders it was assigned. Coined in 1902 by the American Captain Mahan in the British National Review, it referred to “those regions of Asia . . . bound up with the problems of Indian . . . defence.” Those exercised by the newly christened “Middle Eastern Question” were at pains to explain why they could not refrain from investigating the Young Turks, Korea, and Persia too, given the impossibility of confining the “political interests of the Middle East within their geographical boundaries.”
Korea? Does this silly lady mean Kurdistan?
Indeed, at the most fundamental level, the “Question” was inspired by the region’s dangerous lack of geographical discipline. The East “all hangs together,” in the epigrammatic words of Gertrude Bell. Sir Mark Sykes warned his colleagues in Parliament in 1913: “The break-up of the Ottoman Empire in Asia must bring the powers of Europe directly confronting one another in a country where there are no frontiers. . . . That very awkward geographical situation troubled the mind of Alexander the Great, the mind of Diocletian and the mind of Constantine.”
But France and Germany had already confronted each other in Agadir. German railway construction in Ottoman territory concentrated British minds. Land routes unifying the Eurasian land mass would reduce the salience of British naval supremacy- itself being challenged by the Kaiser.
He thus summed up both the geopolitical quandary posed by the region and the epic proportions in which the British conceived the struggle for hegemony in it. This was “a Debatable Land . . . prone to involve in its own unrest those responsible for the peace of the world,” warned the eminent David Hogarth; it was a no-place, a mere “thoroughfare . . . between the West and the West-in-East.”
Egypt was rising economically at a time when India was stagnating. If the Ottomans accepted their expulsion from the Balkans, they might start to develop the Levant- which had plenty of wily mercantile communities. Indeed, King Edward was a great pal of some of those Iraqi Jews.
For what it may be worth, the domain of the Middle East Department established at the Colonial Office after the war included the Arabian peninsula, the mandates in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, but not Syria, Persia, or Egypt, although this was likely as much for practical reasons as for any pedantic attempt at precision.
Pedantry is stuff stupid pedagogues like Priya do. Politics is about spending tax dollars in a sensible manner.
in 1904, the geographer Halford John Mackinder famously named that wedge of “Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day to be covered with a network of railways,” the “pivot region of the world’s politics.”
He thought it was Eastern Europe- 'Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.' The silly man forgot there was a little place known as the US of A.
The geopolitical centrality of the Middle East was partly heralded by the relative calm in old zones of inter-imperial contest: the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and the Entente Cordiale of 1904 diffused Great Game tensions in Central Asia and “Fashoda mentality” in Africa.
But both Britain and France were under pressure from the Kaiser's aggressive tactics. However, it was the Balkan wars which produced the spart that set off a world wide conflagration.
The second factor urging improved intelligence-gathering in the Middle East were the political rumblings within the Ottoman Empire. Burgeoning Arab nationalist movements such as Sayyid Talib’s in Basra,
he was exiled to Bombay when the Brits captured it. Bell and Arnold Wilson tried to get him to take a role in the Mandatory government.
the rise of new provincial rulers such as Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in Najd, and the Young Turk revolution recommended diplomatic preparation for the demise of the allegedly “sick man of Europe,” lest, as Sykes feared, the various empires—Russia, Britain, British India, British Egypt, France, and Germany—found themselves facing each other across a no man’s land.
William Scawen Blunt might be said to have promoted a vague notion that an Arab Caliphate would be helpful to Britain with its own Muslim subjects. Britain had some non-Hanafi Indian Muslims serving in the ICS or occupying high positions who were in favour of this. However, during the Khilafat movement, they piped small. Still, the economic possibilities of the region were apparent. Iraq might have just as much oil as Persia- upon whose petrol the Royal Navy was becoming dependent.
This required knowing something about the emerging provincial powers. To be sure, the old diplomatic priorities, like the sick man, had not yet expired: an Anglo-Turkish Accord of 1901 committed both parties to the status quo. Even this, however, recommended more intensive intelligence-gathering, for, as the British chargé d’affaires in Constantinople put it, “it is somewhat hard to say at the present moment what is the true state of affairs in the Nejd.”
The Hajj was a source of worry to the Brits. The Turks did try to protect pilgrims from predatory tribes but this displeased the Meccans. Strangely, Ibn Saud turned out to be an excellent custodian of the two holiest places. The Grand Mufti, however, was a pain in the ass who threw in his lot with Hitler.
At the same time, creeping actions behind the scenes—like the secret British arrangements with Sheikh Mubarak of Kuwait—
it is said that he hoped to become the leader of a big Arab kingdom.
undermined the status quo and stoked Ottoman paranoia
they were right to be fearful. Perhaps if they had been quicker off the mark in recognizing Mubarak as ruler of Kuwait, they could have maintained the status quo.
about British commitment to the accord. The Ottomans banned British travel in the region, just when Britain was growing keen to know more about it—a move with which some British officials, long sensitive to interlopers in the North West Frontier, sympathized.
I don't understand this. Does Priya mean Russian agents- as in Kipling's Kim?
That their imperial alliance was foundering was most blatantly evident in the Taba affair of 1906, when threats were exchanged during the joint effort to delineate a British-Ottoman border in the Sinai peninsula.
There had previously been trouble over Kuwait. The Berlin Baghdad railway could alter the balance of power dramatically. British dependence on Persian oil made it vulnerable.
Thus, the lack of knowledge
of a type useful to military planners
about this geopolitically crucial zone was increasingly remarked after the turn of the century and the time deemed a fitting one for “taking stock of knowledge.” In 1901 and 1903, official proposals to expand intelligence into the peninsula were seriously entertained for the first time, if ultimately postponed in view of the region’s “disturbed” condition.
Previously, intelligence in the region was Naval led.
Following the Gulf tour of Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon, a new Political Agency opened at Kuwait, specifically to address intelligence needs, and the Indian government’s twin projects of the Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia and a new map of Arabia were launched. Geographical exploration of Arabia received a new impetus. Douglas Carruthers, a naturalist and agent who traveled in the peninsula in 1909, would later write: The era of the Great Arabians from Ibn Batuta to Doughty and Huber was complete in itself. There followed a long pause during which no voice spoke of the great desert peninsula. . . . Unwittingly I was to open up the second phase of Arabian exploration, which culminated eventually in the part Arabia played in the Great War, and the almost exaggerated interest aroused since then in all things appertaining to Arabia. Arabia emerged on, indeed dominated, the British stage in the period after the turn of the century.
It was a side-show. The reason TE Lawrence became a hero was that the Allies weren't doing well in 1916. The fear was that France might capitulate though, in the event, it was the Tzar who fell.
It is thus then that I begin my story. The turn of the century also signaled a new era for Britons at home. The end of the South African War and of Victoria’s reign heralded a new epoch. The incipient rise of the new security state was formalized with the 1909 foundation of the secret service and the 1911 Official Secrets Act. Mirroring the new appreciation for the need to develop British intelligence systems,
which the Army and the Navy already had
the spy emerged for the first time as a heroic figure in novels like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901)
about a kid who has adventures on the Grand Trunk Road
and Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903),
about a clerk in the F.O who has adventures on a boat among the Frisian islands
entwining his cultural and institutional careers from the outset.
These were adventure stories. Professional Intelligence operatives did not appear till a later period.
These developments were part of a new cultural fascination with investigation, also manifest in journalism, social investigation, and police work.
It was there in Dickens and Balzac. Indeed, it was there in Defoe.
One of the period’s most prominent social investigators, the playwright Florence Bell,
wasn't prominent at all
was stepmother of the agent Gertrude Bell, with whom she carried on an intimate correspondence throughout the period (her edited volumes of Gertrude’s letters appeared after the latter’s death in 1926). Her husband, the steel magnate Hugh Bell, introduced Gertrude to travel in the Middle East.
Because he was her daddy.
Gertrude’s The Desert and the Sown and Florence’s study of Middlesbrough, At the Works, both appeared in 1907.
So what? Neither had much impact.
This was by no means an exceptional coincidence. After the war, the agent Wyndham Deedes embarked on social work in the slums of Bethnal Green.
Because he was a committed Christian just like Clement Atlee. To describe this army officer and diplomat as an 'agent' is somewhat peculiar.
And, as we know, late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century investigators of urban Britain drew on the vocabulary of imperial explorers
no they didn't. Henry Mayhew did spend a little time in India but it was a sojourn in the Paris of Balzac which gave him the vocabulary he needed for his studies of London's poor.
and were invested in tactics of cultural immersion, masquerade, and “intrapsychic incorporation,” as Judith Walkowitz has put it.
what about vampiristic fellatio?
This taste for deceptive practices was but London’s homage to the investigatory world from which they were seen to have derived and which was their primary setting.
The French had turned ex-crooks into police detectives and this inspired a literary genre. England has its Sherlock Holmes who could disguise himself as a young flower girl named Eliza Doolittle who, as I well remember, married my old pal Professor Henry Higgins who was actually a Gujerati gentleman named Mohandas Gandhi.
The whole culture of turn-of-the century social investigation was orientalized, as Seth Koven has recently pointed out: “street arab”
dates from 1853- i.e. before Britain had Arab subjects.
and “nomad” were common synonyms for the homeless, and incognito investigators dubbed their work “going ‘Haroun Al Raschid,’ ” after the Baghdadi caliph of the ‘Arabian Nights who nightly masqueraded as a poor man to learn more about his subjects’ needs.
So, it had nothing to do with Imperialism. In Islamic countries, the beggar did not lack in dignity as is shown by the Maqamat of Al Hariri. But then Sir Walter Scott showed this was also true of the Scottish licensed beggar or bedesman.
Despite these tactical similarities, intelligence-gathering in the Middle East remained a world apart epistemologically.
Because it involved learning Arabic and other such languages.
As Walkowitz points out, social investigatory work of this period continued to aspire to the “ ‘grand tradition of English empiricism’, which assumed that facts spoke for themselves, that they were perceived by the senses and gathered by an impartial mind.” It remained allied with the classificatory impulse that drove the rising interest in criminology and anthropology as disciplines integral to the process of defining social and cultural identity.
Then those disciplines turned to shit. Social and cultural identity is what we get from Netflix. I'm actually a teenaged Vampire Slayer from Southern California.
The agents in this book were certainly also animated by a positivistic ambition, but one adulterated by other intellectual motives: their very desire to travel in a region that seemed to defy all fixity in its places, persons, and information was the mark of their engagement with the cultural and introduction epistemological questioning of an avant garde increasingly suspicious of Victorian positivism.
Positivism was French. The Victorians were evangelical when they weren't utilitarian. It was the Chinese who were considered inscrutable. The Arabs were matter of fact and down to earth though, no doubt, they too had their smooth talking swindlers. The Brits tended to prefer the virile frankness of the Bedouin to the metaphysical bombast of the Indian Babu.
That their intelligence project was shaped by the intellectual trends that informed new attitudes toward knowledge more generally is one of the arguments I press in this book, although the agents themselves were always careful to attribute their methodological choices to the stage on which they worked. Their work thus acquired its own cultural signifi cance as a special, Arabian strand of contemporary grappling with epistemological questions.
Archaeology and Philology and Cartography did not face any 'epistemological' questions. They were idiographic and alethic. At a later point, there was some attempt to make Linguistics nomothetic but it failed almost immediately.
While these various domestic and international factors set the stage for the start of this story of intelligence-gathering in Arabia, its end remains elusive. At some level, we are still witnessing its unfolding climax, as similar fascinations with Arabia continue to guide both the tactical imagination governing the U.S. and British war in the Middle East and the post-9/11 conversation about the apparent practical and epistemological peculiarities of intelligence- gathering there.
Arab countries imported specialists to train their own Intelligence bureaus. The Israelis may have made some innovations but they too could be tricked as happened during the Yom Kippur war and then again 50 years later.
Nevertheless, the tale of the genesis of the unseeing British state in the Middle East unfolded in a discrete time period and distinct social, cultural, economic, and political context, before its repercussions began to echo down the tunnels of time.
The British saw things clearly enough which is why their sojourn there wasn't too costly. The 'War on Terror' was a different story but, we imagine, this was because particular contractors were making mega-profits as a result of our blundering.
This was the period when Britain was paramount in a region of inchoate states,
They were clearly enough delineated on maps. No doubt, the borders were porous but so are our own borders today.
before the political and economic crisis of 1931, before Iraq joined the League of Nations as an ostensibly independent country in 1932, and before the emergence of the modern state of Saudi Arabia and the rise of the American star in the peninsula in 1933.
September 1932 was the year in which Ibn Saud officially unified the two kingdoms. But he had prevailed by 1925 and, after defeating the Ikhwan in 1929, he was clearly in charge of what is now Saudi Arabia.
These events were all linked in some way to the emergence of oil as the central geopolitical concern in the region.
Aramco only started exporting Saudi oil in 1941
Certainly, oil had long been a growing concern, motivating much of the imperial interest in the region. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company on the Persian Gulf was an asset requiring protection immediately upon the outbreak of war in 1914; the suspected oil wealth of Mosul ensured its inclusion in British- mandated Iraq after the war; oil concessions were a critical component of the negotiations leading to Iraq’s “independence” in 1932; and foreign oil prospectors were a constant source of unease to British officials anxious to maintain exclusive surveillance of the region. However, oil began to flow in Mosul only near the end of our period, was discovered in Saudi Arabia only in 1933 under American auspices, and remained a decidedly secondary factor—after the Bolshevik threat and the security of the route to India—among those that made the Middle East a crucial sphere for intelligence-gathering in the early twentieth century.
It was the lack of an offensive doctrine against the Ottomans who might turn their backs on Europe in order to develop their Arab possessions which imparted a sense of urgency to British intelligence gathering. But this still had to do with the Suez Canal and the route to India.
When Britons talked about the promise of Iraqi wealth during and after the war, they were almost always talking about its agricultural potential as a restored granary of the world. In 1921, just after serving as civil commissioner in Iraq, Arnold T. Wilson attested publicly that “there is oil in Mesopotamia” but that it would be unwise to “bank too much” on it; the infrastructure required to extract it was so complicated that “we must wait, perhaps a long time.”
There was some notion that Iraq might be the granary India needed.
Bookended by the turn of the century and the turn of the imperial tide, the story will unfold in two parts. The first, covering the period through the war, describes how British hopes for spiritual, cultural, and, eventually, military redemption in the Middle East found fulfillment in the emergence of an intelligence community whose peculiar methods and unique wartime achievements shimmered with the aura of authentic heroism at a time when it was most desperately needed.
I suppose what Priya means is that Lawrence's heroics were needed to offset the disastrous Indian Army incursion into Iraq and Churchill's Gallipoli misadventure. But the thing scarcely mattered. Allenby wanted Egyptian UDI to go through and that's exactly what happened in 1922. Meanwhile, Ataturk and Lenin prevailed against the Allies and their proxies in Anatolia and the Soviet Union. Spies in Russia might have been important but Russia was lost. Gassing on about some dude who rode a camel and had lots of Bedouin pals didn't cut any ice. Secret Agents were supposed to get their hands on the formula for invisibility or the Death Ray or something of that sort. Getting hitched to a camel was nothing to write home about.
Part II tells the story of the terrors unleashed when, following postwar rebellion in the region, the scales fell from the eyes of the British state and public.
Those rebellions were crushed with insulting ease. Ireland had mattered but it got independence and went its own way. India didn't matter but, in a War, it could supply a lot of soldiers. Would the Brits be able to use Indian troops to garrison the Levant? Yes, if they could find a way to pay for it. But the place did not greatly matter.
As hopes for redemption were dashed,
What redemption? The Brits had taken Jerusalem. The Arabs might revolt but they were easy to kill. Poverty was so acute that it was easy to get Palestinians to switch sides. A few thousand Arabs were killed. British casualties were minimal. Nobody in the UK expressed any horror or disapproval of what was happening. Shaw's playlet 'Arthur and the Acetone' came out in 1936. Balfour is shown as conceding a Jewish homeland in return to the formula for acetone which would cut the cost of cordite production. Shaw predicts 'another Belfast' in Palestine but, in common with the rest of Britain, showed no great interest in the Arab uprising occurring at the time.
the petrified British state turned to the agents for help in devising a regime of terror in the Middle East, and the British public began to fear for the soul of their state.
Britain could have accommodated Palestinian demands. As a matter of fact, the Nashashibi clan broke ranks and sided with them after the genuine fighting began. But the issue was Jewish immigration which, for obvious reasons, had greatly increased. As for 'the soul' of Britain- it was felt 'appeasement' had soiled it. Declaring war on Hitler was Britain's redemption.
Priya thinks there was a 'covert Empire' in the Middle East created by spies of a certain sort. If so, any country in the world, by sending some bookish fellows to that region, could have created a covert Empire. Indeed, it could be argued that the Thais have established a covert Empire over England because us Brits can't get enough of their delicious cuisine. But, it must be said, Siamese cats have so far not been able to dislodge Corgis from the throne of Engyland. Sad.
The truth is that the War Office and the Royal Navy got some information about an area of potential strategic importance from various sources- some Consular or Diplomatic and some from archaeologists or aristocratic explorers. This did lead to overt hegemony as the Mandatory power or through Protectorates or other such Treaties. There were actual British boots on the ground in the Levant and the Gulf. At a later point, there were some 'Secret Service' shenanigans- e.g. the bringing down of Mossadegh- but the interwar period was one where Britain, France and Italy, acted openly in the MENA. They sent troops to crush resistance to their rule or to protect the puppet they had installed. What mattered then was what mattered now- money and military force projection capability. What never mattered at all was stereotypes about A-rabs or I-ranians or Chinkies or Hindooooos. Nor did Professors matter. The SOAS was only set up when the tide had turned against Imperialism in Asia and Africa. I believe it is now very well supplied with money from Oil Sheikhs of various descriptions.
Edward Said's America did invest in 'knowledge systems' about various parts of the world. There was once an 'Operation Camelot' which was meant to be the 'Manhattan Project of the Social Sciences'. Professors in Area Studies Departments were supposed to work together to find ways to 'manufacture consent' in Indo-China and Latin America and the Middle East. But, almost immediately, the thing fell apart. On Campuses, it was the hippie who prevailed. The Left began a 'long march' through the Institutions which ended in 'Woke' paranoia of the type Priya Satia displays. This silly woman thinks overt British rule in places like Iraq and Palestine was actually 'covert'. No doubt, she will next discover that British rule in Britain was actually wholly covert. Queen Victoria used to pretend she was actually a Sikh gentleman. Disraeli had to learn Punjabi to converse with her. Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, isn't Punjabi at all. He is covertly Gujarati.
