Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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375 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

governments and especially India. Most important of all was the fact

that not even the return to gold could reverse the great shift of ﬁnancial

power towards New York. America had become, like Britain, a great

creditor nation. London could no longer control interest rates across

the world as it had before 1914, nor draw in the gold it needed by

an upward shift in its own bank rate.

And, by the 1920s, the City’s

prime international asset, the collateral for any future crisis, was leak-

ing rapidly away. In 1931, of the great treasure trove of dollar securities

built up before 1914, scarcely one-tenth remained.

The war-chest of

the British system was almost empty.

West of India: the British in the Middle East

The logic of Britain’s position after 1918 was to maintain its world-

system but cut down its cost. Its Middle East policy seemed to throw

this in reverse. There the British acquired a huge new commitment. The

original impulse sprang from the need to defeat the Ottoman Empire,

once it became Germany’s ally. It was supercharged by the panic (in

1918) that followed Russia’s collapse and the great German offensive

in the West. In retrospect we can see that the strategic imperative that

drove the British into the Middle East was symptomatic of the funda-

mental instability of their whole system. Ever since the 1870s (arguably

since the 1840s), protecting their most valuable spheres and preserving

the cohesion of their global empire had forced them periodically into

new and heavy liabilities. Whatever ultimate beneﬁts they promised,

these new zones of imperial control increased the risk of collision with

a rival power. They raised the costs of imperial defence. And, partly

as a result, they threatened to upset the political balance of the British

world-system by loading new burdens on its taxpayers and rousing new

fears among its disparate communities.

Before 1914, British leaders had been acutely aware of this dan-

ger even if they had few means of mitigating it. The furious arguments

over the occupation of Egypt that lasted at cabinet level into the mid-

1890s sprang from the fear that in so exposed a salient Britain would

face (sooner or later) a hostile European combination or be driven

willy-nilly into a costly alliance. To sprawl across the globe like a gouty

giant, warned a philosophical diplomat, courted a united onslaught by

resentful rivals. But as it turned out, neither the occupation of Egypt nor

200 400

100 200 300 miles

600 km

Mecca

Riyadh

Basra

Abadan

Baghdad

Jerusalem

Cairo

Constantinople

Damascus

Tehran

SOVIET UNION

Russian control restored

1920–1921

British Informal Protectorate

1919–1921

AFGHANISTAN

INDIA

IRAN

SAUDI ARABIA

Organized

1902–1926

IRAQ

British Mandate

1920–1932

TRANSJORDAN

British Mandate

1920–1948

EGYPT

British Occupation

1882–1914

British Protectorate

1914–1922

PALESTINE

British Mandate

1920–1948

LEBANON & SYRIA

French Mandate

1920–1946

TURKISH REPUBLIC

Ankara

Source: J. Darwin, After

Tamerlane (Penguin Books, 2007)

Map 10 The Middle East after 1918

377 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

the colossal share that Britain took in the partition of Africa brought on

the confrontation the critics had feared. European statesmen, mindful

of the tensions of continental diplomacy, were disinclined to risk much

for ‘light soil’ in Africa, and only France was willing to challenge the

British over Egypt – a challenge that ended in the humiliation of Fashoda

in 1898. The mutual self-interest of the European powers in tranquil-

lising (contemporaries would have said ‘pacifying’) their African pos-

sessions at the lowest cost had all but sterilised the African continent

diplomatically by 1904, the year of the Anglo-French entente. But the

Middle East was a different story.

If Egypt was a salient, the Middle East was a vast arena in the

middle of the world that would have to be held against all comers. Since

antiquity it had been a cockpit of rival imperialisms vying for its trade

and agrarian wealth. It lay open to invasion over land from the north

and east, and by sea from the west and south. There were wide internal

frontiers of desert, marsh and mountain that waged a constant war of

attrition against settled authority in the cultivation zones. Strategically,

it was a quadrilateral. Mastery of the region meant keeping control of

its four great gateways: at the Straits, in North Persia, on the Isthmus

of Suez and round the shores of the Gulf – a task that defeated almost

every conqueror except the Ottomans at the height of their power. Cul-

turally, it was a mosaic of overlapping but impermeable communities,

the residue of successive waves of conquest, conversion and migration

and a reminder of the region’s past as the commercial and intellectual

crossroads of the Old World. In this heartland of Islam, no ruler could

ignore the scribal elite (the ulama) who enjoyed wide popular loyalty,

nor discount the traditions of religious militancy as ﬁerce as any to be

found in Europe. The guardianship of its Holy Places aroused intense

concern among Islamic populations as far away as Senegal and Java.

Economically, it was a region that had once been the junction of global

trade, but had drifted into the relative poverty that intensiﬁed the isola-

tion of its remoter hinterlands. Vulnerable and volatile, it was tempting

to enter but hard to keep. It was small wonder that, while they had

agonised over its strategic fate, no British government since 1800 toyed

more than brieﬂy with the idea of empire in the Middle East.

It was a measure of how far they had been driven from the

old assumptions of imperial defence that British leaders could agree by

mid-1918 that without Middle Eastern supremacy their world-system

would collapse. In the year that followed, British policy was inspired by

378 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

a grand design of which Lord Curzon was the principal architect. A for-

mer Viceroy, Curzon was chairman of the War Cabinet’s Eastern Com-

mittee. His knowledge of the region was unmatched (but not unchal-

lenged) by his ministerial colleagues. He was determined to exploit the

twist of fate that had delivered the Middle East into British hands, for

(or so he thought) it was the region in whose turbulent politics lay

the most important key to imperial safety. ‘You ask’, he lectured the

Eastern Committee, ‘why should England do this? Why should Great

Britain push herself out in these directions? Of course the answer is

obvious – India.’

Protecting India required the exclusion of any other

great power from Southwest Asia. But it did not mean the wholesale

extension of colonial rule. Curzon’s preference was for ‘native states’:

local autonomy for Arabs (and Kurds) modelled on the princely states

in India.

What mattered most was a proper settlement for Turkey and

Persia. Curzon was convinced that Ottoman Turkey must be cut down

to size, to demolish its pre-war status in the Islamic world and destroy

forever the power it had used with such deadly effect against Britain: its

control of the Straits. Denied their old leverage in European diplomacy

(command of the Straits), and restricted to their Anatolian homeland,

the Turks could do little harm. In the case of Persia, against whose dom-

ination by Russia he had warned so vociferously before 1914, Curzon’s

plan was to bind the shah’s government in a treaty that exchanged aid

for inﬂuence. Teheran’s grip would be tightened on its unruly provinces

with British help. The shah’s ministers would defer to British ‘advice’.

The deal would be sweetened by a British loan. To insure against dis-

ruption from the north, a military presence would be maintained in the

Caucasus and Trans-Caspia where post-imperial states were emerging

from the wreck of Tsarism. And, needless to say, the whole vast scope

of Curzon’s plan assumed implicitly that the citadel of Britain’s Middle

Eastern power, her primacy in Egypt, would be even safer and stronger

than before the war.

But Curzon’s grand design was ﬂawed from the outset. It

assumed that the French could be denied what they had been promised

in 1916: control of ‘Syria’ – a loosely deﬁned region extending from the

Lebanon coast to the Persian border. Clemenceau made it plain that

British bad faith in the Middle East would cost it dearly in Europe,

where French cooperation in treaty-making was vital: in September

1919, the British gave way. Curzon had assumed that the collapse of

Tsarism would prevent, or postpone indeﬁnitely, the revival of Russian

379 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

inﬂuence in the Caucasus and Central Asia. By the middle of 1920,

the Red Army had shown that this was a pipe-dream with immediate

repercussions on the Anglo-Persian treaty, as yet unratiﬁed.

The easy

monopoly of great power inﬂuence on which Curzon had counted thus

rapidly dissolved. Even in the spheres under British control, his native

state formula ran into the ground. There was no question of reversing

the Balfour Declaration (its author was a senior member of the Lloyd

George government) with its promise of a Jewish ‘home’. That meant

that in ‘Palestine’ – another ill-deﬁned zone – Arab autonomy would

have to be curtailed to protect the experiment in Jewish colonisation.

Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), military occupation by an

Anglo-Indian army was mutating into a form of government loosely

modelled on an Indian province (not a native state), in which a cadre

of British ofﬁcials began to rule local communities much as they might

have done in the Punjab. Indirect command of the Eurasian crossroads,

cheap, ﬂexible, cooperative, began to vanish like a mirage. But, on the

other hand, there was no question of building a Middle East Raj in the

way that the British had made an Indian empire: with its own army,

administration, ideology and political tradition. Quite apart from the

promise of accountability to an incipient League of Nations – under

the mandate system – any such evolution was completely blocked by

the harsh realities of ﬁnancial control. In the Middle East, the main

cost of such Raj-making would have fallen not on the locals as had

happened in India, but on London and the taxpayers at home. But,

there, the demand for demobilisation and retrenchment grew stronger

every week.

In these conditions, local resistance to foreign rule spread

rapidly across the region. In the Arab lands it was centred on Damascus,

where a pre-war movement had sprung up among the notables against

the growing assertiveness of the Turkish authorities.

Here, the nota-

bles looked forward to an independent ‘Greater Syria’, uniting much

of the Fertile Crescent (including Palestine) in an Arab state of which

the Hashemite prince Feisal would be the nominal head.

French over-

rule and a ‘Jewish commonwealth’ in Palestine were ﬁercely rejected.

As the hope of freedom receded, and the French mandate grew more

certain, the Syrian leaders issued a despairing proclamation of Arab

independence in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. Four months later,

the French army scattered a Syrian militia and occupied Damascus.

In Palestine, where late Ottoman rule had strengthened the position

380 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

of the Arab notables in Jerusalem and extended their inﬂuence on the

countryside,

the prospect of colonial-style rule and sharing power

with a Jewish settlement was even less welcome. A ‘Palestine Arab

Congress’ voted in favour of joining Syria in 1919, there were rumours

of armed resistance and in the spring of 1920 protests against the

Balfour Declaration spilled over into violence against Jews. Worst of all

(from the British point of view) was Iraq. By mid-1920, the occupation

regime was surrounded by enemies. In the Kurdish north, its authority

was fragile. In Baghdad, the Sunni notables, encouraged from Damas-

cus, plotted against rulers who excluded them from power even more

than the Ottomans.

In the tribal zones of the centre and south, where

much of the war had been fought, the British were resented as the gath-

erers of tax and the breakers of custom. In July, the revolt broke out

in earnest. At the end of the month, Arnold Wilson, the Civil Commis-

sioner, told London that ‘our military weakness is so extreme’ that the

Euphrates valley might have to be abandoned. ‘An Arab state . . . may

yet come to pass but it will be by revolution not by evolution.’

The

British garrison of 35,000 (its bayonet strength) was pinned down,

unable to move beyond the railheads except in a force too small to

be safe.

As their losses rose and costs soared, ministers in London

began a furious debate on whether to pull back to Basra in the south

or withdraw from the country altogether.

For the British, 1920 was a year of crises. With an army that

had shrunk dramatically to its pre-war size of around 200,000 men,

they faced a whole clutch of emergencies: in India, where Gandhi’s

non-cooperation movement was in full swing; in Ireland, against the

IRA; and at home, where the sudden end of the post-war boom brought

a wave of industrial unrest. Nor were their troubles in the Middle East

conﬁned to the Arabs. With its garrisons, camps and aerodromes, and

the Canal, Egypt was the castle-keep of British power, the ‘Clapham

Junction’ (as the clich

e had it) of imperial communications, more impor-

tant than ever with the post-war rise of Japanese sea-power. But, in

March 1919, it too had burst out in revolt. The spark was lit by

the refusal of the British to allow a delegation of Egyptian politicians

(organised into the Wafd or ‘delegation’ party) to appeal for indepen-

dence at the peace conference in Paris and by the arrest of the Wafd

leader, Sa’ad Zaghlul. The revolt of the notables had been triggered by

fear that the British were planning a constitutional ‘reform’ in which

local inﬂuence would be cut down in favour of foreign interests, and

381 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

was almost certainly encouraged by the Egyptian ruler, the Sultan.

Much more alarming was the revolt of the fellahin, embittered by the

burdens and depredations of a war economy, and the violent unrest

in the towns, where the Wafd made common cause with students and

organised labour. In the spring of 1919, the British brieﬂy faced an

insurrection that cut off their communications (sixty-seven rail stations

were destroyed, lines blocked, telegraph wires cut), made travel per-

ilous and brought to mind hideous images of the Indian Mutiny. But,

even when the rural dust had settled, they found themselves bafﬂed

by a political boycott. No Egyptian minister would (or dared) take

ofﬁce without insisting on the promise of independence. The British

could stay on but they would face all the risks of violent confronta-

tion (orchestrated at will by local politicians) and all the costs of an

inﬂated garrison. A fruitless series of negotiations dragged on through

1920 and 1921. As if that were not enough, the early months of 1919

brought warning that the keystone of Curzon’s geostrategic plan – the

careful containment of post-war Turkey – was far from secure. On

19 May 1919, Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) landed at Samsun on the

Black Sea coast to rally Turkish national resistance against the Greeks

and Armenians and their Great Power backers. In little more than a

year, the danger of a great Turkish recovery drove London into a reluc-

tant, and ultimately disastrous, alliance with the Greeks to destroy

Ataturk before he could pull down the ﬂimsy structure of its post-war

imperium.

The scale of resistance was impressive, and at times it induced

something near panic among British leaders. They found themselves

trapped between an inglorious scuttle (throwing away all the gains of

their eastern triumph) and the escalating cost of military occupation –

at a moment when the reduction of their post-war spending had become

extremely urgent. By the end of 1920, their na

ıve conﬁdence in a cheap

and convenient regional primacy had given way to anxiety, impatience

and uncertainty. They were saved in part by the divisions and weak-

nesses of the nationalisms they feared. Signiﬁcantly, the toughest was

Mustapha Kemal’s, forged in the sufferings of wartime Anatolia and

infused with the bitterness between the Muslim ‘Turks’ and the Chris-

tian ‘Greeks’, with whom they fought for control over Asia Minor.

In the Arab lands it was a different story. The notables in Damascus,

Baghdad and Jerusalem had no common programme. In Baghdad and

Jerusalem they wanted their own state, not one ruled from Damascus.

382 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

As provincial elites of the Ottoman Empire, they knew little of inter-

national politics and depended upon the Hashemite princes, Feisal and

Abdullah, as their intermediaries with the imperial powers. Socially,

they were deeply conservative and recoiled from the risks of popular

politics. They were hobbled by religious and ethnic divisions: there was

little chance of the Sunni notables of Baghdad making common cause

with the Shia rebels along the Euphrates, still less with the Kurds in

the north. In Egypt, the same theme of division was played out in dif-

ferent ways. There too the Wafdist leaders (drawn largely from the

landowning class) refrained from encouraging a further round of the

rural violence that had shocked the British in 1919. But the real check

to a uniﬁed movement was the power of the court and the dynasty.

The sultan (soon to be the king) was as keen as the Wafd to reduce

the overweening power the British had assumed over Egypt. But he

was equally keen that the beneﬁciaries of a British retreat should not

be the Wafd, whose open purpose was to reduce the monarchy to

a constitutional ﬁgurehead. His inﬂuence was mobilised to frustrate

the unity that might have forced the British into the concessions that

Zaghlul had demanded from them: full diplomatic freedom abroad and

the withdrawal of the British garrison from Cairo and Alexandria to a

cantonment near the Canal. Factional politics in Egypt between court

and country and within the Wafd itself produced a stalemate. No group

would or could sign a treaty with the British. But nor would the British

give up their control of Egypt’s external relations, their role as ‘trustee’

of foreign interests in the country, or their political grip on Egypt’s own

colony, the Sudan.

From mid-1921 onwards, the British traced a tortuous path

towards compromise. In Iraq, Churchill (who as Colonial Secretary had

assumed responsibility for Britain’s two Arab mandates) found in Feisal

a ruler-in-waiting (he had been driven out of Syria) who was acceptable

to the Sunni notables in Baghdad, and a seemingly reliable ally against

the threatened reﬂux of Turkish inﬂuence. After an ‘election’ in which

ofﬁcial inﬂuence was thrown openly on his side and his main local rival

was unceremoniously deported, he was declared the choice of the Iraqi

people. But, when it came to the treaty by which the new Iraq govern-

ment was to accept the mandate, Britain’s diplomatic supervision and a

military presence (in the form of bases), Feisal proved alarmingly obdu-

rate. It took a Kurdish revolt in the north, new signs of Shia unrest, and

Feisal’s own temporary retirement with political appendicitis (a local

383 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

variant of the diplomatic cold) before the anti-treaty party in Baghdad

was repressed and an agreement endorsing the mandate and Britain’s

supervisory rights was eventually signed in October 1922. In Pales-

tine, Arab resentment was partially appeased by amputating its eastern

zone as a separate mandate of Trans-Jordan and installing Abdullah,

Feisal’s elder brother, there as king; and by conceding, through the

creation of the Supreme Muslim Council, that Palestine proper would

be ruled on a communal, not a unitary, basis. The Council became

the instrument through which the Jerusalem notables would exert their

inﬂuence over the Arab population. In Egypt, the logjam was eventually

broken by the British High Commissioner, Lord Allenby, the victor of

Megiddo. Allenby scrapped the treaty that London had demanded from

the Egyptian politicians, and declared unilaterally that Egypt was now

‘independent’. The protectorate of 1914 was terminated. British super-

vision would be conﬁned henceforth to Egyptian diplomacy (it would

have to ‘conform’ to Britain’s), the safety of foreign nationals (some

250,000, mainly Greeks, who enjoyed extra-territorial privileges) and

the Sudan. With the ambiguous, and perhaps disingenuous, promise

that the Residency would no longer interfere in local politics, an uneasy

calm descended upon Anglo-Egyptian relations.

These compromises were necessary for regional tranquillity

(and a reduction of Britain’s military burden), but they were not suf-

ﬁcient. British inﬂuence in the Middle East (if it was not to be at pro-

hibitive cost) still turned on a settlement of the Turkish question. A

resurgent and nationalist Turkey, in control of the Straits, bent on

recovering its old Arab provinces, and enjoying the open support of

Russia and the covert sympathy of France: this was the nightmare sce-

nario that had led Curzon and Lloyd George to back the onslaught

of the Greeks on the Kemalist forces in Anatolia. In September 1922,

when the Greeks were routed, the nightmare seemed close to reality.

At Chanak, on the Straits, a shooting war between British and Turks

was only averted by the promise of a conference. When it convened

at Lausanne, Curzon (who had survived the fall of the Lloyd George

coalition in October after the Conservative rebellion occasioned in part

by the costs and risks of its eastern policy) faced the Turkish demand

for the restoration of the Straits, Istanbul and Thrace, and the return

of the Mosul vilayet, the northern and predominantly Kurdish third of

Iraq. Worse still, while Turkish claims were backed by Russia, Curzon

gained little help from France. It was a critical moment. To give up

384 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Mosul, warned the Colonial Ofﬁce, would mean the collapse of Iraq.

But, without peace with the Turks, the cost of its defence would be

unacceptably high. To give back control over the Straits would hand

Turkey the lever for the demolition of any Middle East settlement. Yet

Curzon’s hand was stronger than it looked. The Turks were reluctant to

ﬁght their way into Gallipoli and Thrace, and nervous of embracing the

old enemy to the north. After seven months of diplomacy, prolonged

by the deafness, sometimes feigned, of the Turkish delegate, the treaty

of Lausanne was signed. The Turks regained Eastern Thrace, and full

control over Istanbul and Asia Minor. In return, they agreed that the

Straits should be permanently open and their shores demilitarised, a

concession that turned the Black Sea (in the bitter phrase of a Russian

delegate) into ‘an English lake’.

But their real concession was to agree

to reserve the dispute over Mosul for arbitration, a vital breathing space

for the fragile mandate. It was a turning point.

In the end, geopolitics had been the decisive factor in the Mid-

dle East peace. By 1921, Russian power had revived enough to make

coercing Turkey impossible and to ruin Curzon’s hopes of imposing his

semi-protectorate in Persia. But not enough to dissuade the two ‘strong

men’ who came to power there from seeking an accommodation with

Britain. Reza Pasha in Persia, like Kemal in Turkey, could exploit the

new balance of power to restore the independence that had seemed all

but lost in 1919. But he was not strong enough to exclude British inﬂu-

ence or expel British interests, whether strategic or economic (like the

Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s concession in southwest Persia).

Both

Turkey and Persia became buffer states, poised uneasily between Rus-

sian power to the north and British to the south.

But it was enough for

British purposes. On the British side, their Middle East policy was gov-

erned by three powerful assumptions. First, that local leaders, Egyptian

or Arab, were too realistic to expect a ‘real’ freedom and that, shrewdly

managed, the ‘amour propre’ of local nationalisms would not conﬂict

with their imperial interests. It is quite possible, remarked Lord Mil-

ner hopefully, during his abortive attempt at an Egyptian settlement,

‘that what we mean by “Protectorate” is not really incompatible with

what they mean by “Independence”’.

Secondly, that British objects

were best obtained by indirect methods and informal control. ‘These

Eastern peoples with whom we have to ride pillion’, said Curzon with

viceregal condescension, ‘have different seats from Europeans, and it

does not seem to me to matter very much whether we put them on the