British policy in Mesopotamia, 1903-1914
Stuart A. Cohen
Ithaca
This book is not intended to be either a comprehensive study in international relations or a detailed account of the domestic politics of Mesopotamia between 1903 and 1914. It has two more restricted, but nevertheless important, aims. The first is to measure the extent of official British interest in the region during this period, and in so doing to redress a traditional historical bias. Commonly, Britain’s interest in Mesopotamia before 1914 has been treated merely as a prologue to the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War and the subsequent British mandate over Iraq: the subject has been considered of little importance in its own right. The accelerating momentum of Britain’s Mesopotamian policy (which the present work attempts to describe) suggests that this is to misinterpret the evidence. The British and Indian governments had long possessed a strategic interest in the region, because it constituted a highway to India. By 1914, they had also taken active steps to secure a position of prominence in all areas of Mesopotamian commercial development and to establish a claim on the political loyalties of the Arab inhabitants of the region. Britain’s Mesopotamian policy before 1914 must therefore be treated as an important element in Britain’s general policy towards the Middle East in the early twentieth century. The second aim of this book is to weigh the various pressures which influenced British officials in the formulation of their policy towards Mesopotamia. This aim is restricted, and accounts for the exclusive concentration on the motives of the British government. However, it is also of wider relevance, since the subject forms part of a reassessment of the purposes of British foreign policy before the First World War. Thus the study aims to investigate not only the details of Britain’s involvement in Mesopotamia but also the motives (idiosyncratic and collective) which accounted for the parabola of that involvement.
.....
Contents
Foreword / ix
Preface / xi
Guide to Abbreviations Used in Citations / xiii
Maps / xv
Introduction 1
Part One
The Foundation of Policy, 1903–1907 / 21
1 The Absence of Policy, 1903 / 27
2 The Context of Policy / 35
3 The Formulation of Policy / 53
Part Two
The Implementation of Policy, 1907–1910 / 69
4 The Criteria of Decision-Making / 75
5 The Implications of Decision-Making / 107
6 The Method of Decision-Making / 133
Part Three
The Modification Of Policy, 1910–1914 / 147
7 The Pressures on Strategy / 151
8 The Modification of Strategy / 169
9 The Significance of Strategy / 187
10 Epilogue to Policy: The Genesis of I.E.F. ‘D’ / 221
11 Conclusion / 233
Bibliography / 239
Biographical Appendix / 259
Index / 263
FOREWORD
There has been increasing interest in recent years in the study of the establishment of Britain’s position in the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is partly a question of its relevance to the contemporary political situation. But there are also important historical questions concerned with analysing the establishment of an “informal” empire in an area of great power rivalry poised midway between the spheres of interest of the Foreign Office and Colonial Office in London and the government of India in New Delhi. European merchants, financiers and entrepreneurs also had a significant role to play. And over the whole enterprise, at least in its latter stages, there hangs the smell of oil.
Stuart Cohen has made a useful contribution to an understanding of the expansion of British interests at the northern end of the Gulf, in Mesopotamia. Unlike other historians, he is concerned principally not with the genesis of the Indian expeditionary force which landed at Basra soon after the start of the First World War but with the developing British efforts to consolidate a position in the Ottoman provinces of Iraq in the face of the threat posed by foreign, mainly German, rivalry and by the plans to build the Baghdad Railway. Using material from government archives, Dr Cohen describes the search for a coherent British policy in askilful and convincing narrative.
Although this work is not directly about the internal situation in the Iraqi provinces, students of the Middle East will also find much interesting information relating to the politics and economics of the area. Early British contacts with politicians like Seyid Talib are described in detail, and there is as well a great deal of material relating to plans to develop the area by improving the system of irrigation and river transport.
Roger Owen
Preface
This book is not intended to be either a comprehensive study in international relations or a detailed account of the domestic politics of Mesopotamia between 1903 and 1914. It has two more restricted, but nevertheless important, aims. The first is to measure the extent of official British interest in the region during this period, and in so doing to redress a traditional historical bias. Commonly, Britain’s interest in Mesopotamia before 1914 has been treated merely as a prologue to the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War and the subsequent British mandate over Iraq: the subject has been considered of little importance in its own right. The accelerating momentum of Britain’s Mesopotamian policy (which the present work attempts to describe) suggests that this is to misinterpret the evidence. The British and Indian governments had long possessed a strategic interest in the region, because it constituted a highway to India. By 1914, they had also taken active steps to secure a position of prominence in all areas of Mesopotamian commercial development and to establish a claim on the political loyalties of the Arab inhabitants of the region. Britain’s Mesopotamian policy before 1914 must therefore be treated as an important element in Britain’s general policy towards the Middle East in the early twentieth century. The second aim of this book is to weigh the various pressures which influenced British officials in the formulation of their policy towards Mesopotamia. This aim is restricted, and accounts for the exclusive concentration on the motives of the British government. However, it is also of wider relevance, since the subject forms part of a reassessment of the purposes of British foreign policy before the First World War. Thus the study aims to investigate not only the details of Britain’s involvement in Mesopotamia but also the motives (idiosyncratic and collective) which accounted for the parabola of that involvement.
Such considerations have largely determined the structure of the argument presented in the following pages. The formulation and the nature of Britain’s policy towards Mesopotamia between 1903 and 1914 is here treated in three chronological parts. These are preceded by an examination of the government’s attitude towards the Baghdad Railway in 1903; they are followed by an analysis of the reasons for the dispatch of an expeditionary force to Basra in 1914. Together, the successive chapters attempt to describe the manner in which Great Britain became increasingly, albeit hesitantly, involved in the region. Individually, each of the parts also attempts to account for the pressures which at various points in time precipitated that process. Consequently, much of the book is devoted to an analysis of the tactics and strategy of individual “policy-makers”. This is undoubtedly not the whole story. But it does seem an indispensable part of any fruitful enquiry into the factors which determined Britain’s imperial policy.
* * *
I have many debts to acknowledge. Since this book grew out of an Oxford D. Phil. thesis, the foremost are to individual members of that university: to the late Mr A. Hourani of St Antony’s College and to Mr D. K. Fieldhouse of Nuffield College for their strenuous supervision of the original enterprise and for their benevolent interest in its subsequent development; to the Master and Fellows of St Catherine’s College for their warm encouragement throughout my stay in their midst; and to Miss E. Monroe of St Antony’s College for the benefit of her advice
and erudition. In addition, I would like to make special mention of the help and criticism received from the late Prof. M. Verete of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
My debt to the officials of the archives and libraries in which I have worked will be obvious, but it is nonetheless great for that. The unfailing patience and habitual courtesy of the staffs of the Public Record Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office, the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Cambridge University Library and the Middle East Centre, Oxford measurably increased the pleasures of historical research. Extracts from the material in their possession appear by their kind permission.
Thanks of a particular, and more recent, kind are due to those who have made the publication of this book possible: the directors of the Middle East Centre, who invited me to participate in their monograph series, and the Publication Committee of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, which contributed generously towards the cost involved.
My greatest debt, which is impossible to specify, is to my wife.
Stuart A. Cohen
British policy in Mesopotamia, 1903-1914
Ithaca
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British policy in Mesopotamia, 1903–1914
Stuart A. Cohen
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