The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (66 page)

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 cliché had it) of imperial communications, more important 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 independence 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 was almost certainly encouraged by the Egyptian ruler, the Sultan.
⁵⁶
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 perilous 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 confrontation (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 reluctant, 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 naïve 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 weaknesses 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 Christian ‘Greeks’, with whom they fought for control over Asia Minor.
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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. As provincial elites of the Ottoman Empire, they knew little of international 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 different 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.
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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 government was to accept the mandate, Britain's diplomatic supervision and a military presence (in the form of bases), Feisal proved alarmingly obdurate. It took a Kurdish revolt in the north, new signs of Shia unrest, and Feisal's own temporary retirement with political appendicitis (a local 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 Palestine, 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 supervision 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 sufficient. British influence in the Middle East (if it was not to be at prohibitive 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 scenario 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 Mosul, warned the Colonial Office, would mean the collapse of Iraq.
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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’.
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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 Middle 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 influence or expel British interests, whether strategic or economic (like the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's concession in southwest Persia).
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Both Turkey and Persia became buffer states, poised uneasily between Russian power to the north and British to the south.
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But it was enough for British purposes. On the British side, their Middle East policy was governed 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 Milner 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”’.
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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 saddle in front of us or whether they cling on behind and hold us round the waist. The great thing is that the firm seat in the saddle should be ours.’
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The alternative was a troublesome ‘entanglement’ in parochial concerns of no imperial value. Thirdly, that even the cut-down primacy they retained after the dust had settled in 1923 was of vital importance to their imperial system. Indeed, for all the setbacks they had suffered by 1922, the British had gained a real prize. The buffer zone protecting Suez and the Gulf was far wider and deeper than ever before. The costs of guarding it after 1923 were low. Its value as compensation for British weakness in Europe would soon enough be shown.

What is surprising in retrospect is how little interest the British seemed to take (beyond the ‘official mind’) in the new treaty empire they had founded in the Middle East, an empire that now included not only the mandates in Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Palestine, the ‘veiled protectorate’ in Egypt, the real protectorates in the Persian Gulf, and a colony in Aden (still under the Bombay government) but also two new client states in the Nejd and Hedjaz (soon to be forcibly united as Saudi Arabia by Ibn Saud). Part of the reason may lie in the absence of the causes that endeared tropical Africa to press and public: the crusade against slavery and the struggle for souls. Partly it may have been due to the ignorance or antagonism that shaped British views of the Islamic world, only partially (and later) offset by the romantic imagery of T. E. Lawrence.
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But, most of all, the explanation may lie in the hour of its acquisition, a time of introversion and exhaustion when the relief of burdens was the first priority of domestic politics. With no energy to invest and no capital to send, the British connection remained narrow and shallow, the preserve for the most part of diplomats and pashas. There was almost no sympathetic engagement with the nation-building aspirations of the Arab
literati
– the constructive ambivalence that lubricated politics in India and the colonial world – a failure with a long and bitter legacy. In that sense, Britain's ‘moment in the Middle East’
⁶⁶
remained cast in the mould of its first imagining.

The politics of Gandhi

The vast new liability that Britain assumed in the Middle East after 1918 was bound to affect the internal balance of the British world-system. It was fiercely criticised in Britain on grounds of expense. It was a source of anxiety and irritation (as we will see) among Canadian leaders who feared its military implications. But the biggest repercussions were inevitably in India. After all, it was widely assumed that the main burden of defending the new ‘imperial’ interest in the Middle East would fall on India. The Indian taxpayer would foot the bill. Even more controversially, India would have become an accessory to the final liquidation of the Ottoman Empire, the humiliation of the Sultan-Caliph, and the imposition of Christian rule over the Muslim Arabs – a role that many millions of Indian Muslims might be expected to resent. As we have seen, nervousness about Muslim criticism of India's war effort in the Middle East had already led the government of India into the repression against which Gandhi had mobilised so effectively in the Rowlatt
satyagraha
of 1919.