| FOREWORD
The British ruled Iraq from the First World War until 1932, and the way in which they ruled was widely regarded as being new. They exercised authority, under mandate from the League of Nations, by means of the RAF, a network of advisers and officials in government departments, and control of the country’s most important economic resource, oil, and they used this authority in order to create an administration and a political order which would in the long run be able to stand by themselves. It was generally thought at the time that the experiment was successful, and by 1930 the British Government believed itself to be in a position to assure its essential interests through a treaty negotiated between equals, and to recommend to the League of Nations that the mandate should be ended and Iraq admitted to membership.
The sense of having done well which was widespread among British officials and politicians was shared by the most influential Arab political writer of the time, George Antonius. In his Arab Awakening published in the 1930s in circumstances which led him to emphasize the contrast between what Britain had done in Iraq and what France had not done in Syria, Antonius wrote in warm terms of the efforts and devotion of ‘an unusually capable and conscientious band of British Officials’ and of Iraq’s good fortune that ‘in many important respects, Great Britain’s interests marched with her own’.
In the post-imperial age, we are perhaps less inclined to believe that there can be a pre-established harmony between the interests of different peoples, or even that it is possible to speak of a whole people as having a single interest. Whether or not we are inclined to make judgements, we at least want explanations of the way in which policies were formed, the means by which they were carried out, and their effects on different sections or strata of society. Dr. Sluglett’s careful study, based on a wide range of unpublished sources, and guided by a historian’s sense of the way in which governments work and societies change, helps us to understand much better than before both the aims and the methods of the British imperial administration. The narrative of political history and the analysis of defence and security policy show clearly that it was not fortune or harmony of interests, but skilful administration, discreet but firm political action, and where necessary the use of the RAF which made it possible for the British to pass responsibility to an indigenous government so soon; and his study of tenurial, fiscal and tribal policy in Chapter 6 and Appendix II disentangles with great skill that combination of misunderstanding of the Ottoman land-system, calculations of interest, and preconceptions about the nature of rural society which led the British to support and strengthen the power of landowners and tribal chiefs.
Albert Hourani | 
