The Great War campaign in Mesopotamia began as a small, Government of India operation for the defence of Indian frontiers and British interests in the Persian Gulf. However, once at the Gulf, Indian Army Force D began to advance rapidly north along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a characteristic effort to shore up what it already held. Baghdad quickly became its object, not least because its fabled past ensured that everyone at home had heard of it: ‘It was the Arabian nights’. To Britons the campaign might have remained a picturesque subplot of the war’s grand narrative, but for a monumental failure in the midst of its surge upriver: a reverse at Ctesiphon forced the troops under General Charles Townshend to retreat to Kut, where they were besieged through the winter of 1915–16. After more than 20,000 troops were lost in botched rescue attempts, 9,000 soldiers and thousands of non-combatants surrendered to the Turks in April 1916 — ‘the British Army’s greatest humiliation in the First World War’, and that too in ‘the one theatre of the war where we

Developing iraq : britain, india and the redemption of empire and technology in the first world war

The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919

This dissertation is a transnational history of twentieth-century anti-colonial nationalism. It focuses specifically on the connections between the dissenting British left and Iraqi nationalists during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on extensive archival research in English and Arabic of official and unofficial sources in London and Syria, I show how British and Iraqi anti-colonial activists simultaneously sought to democratize British imperial policy-making in the metropole and periphery of the Empire. From its early hours, Liberal and Labour leaders opposed to the First World War campaigned tirelessly for an internationalist settlement without annexations as the only guarantee of lasting peace for the postwar world. Colonial 'national awakenings' in Egypt, India, and Iraq, they argued, both challenged the legitimacy of British 'imperial democracy' and heralded a new era of international democracy deserving British support. Iraq was, for them, a test case for a nobler approach to maintaining international security through nurturing, rather than subjugating, national sovereignty. The British government's unwillingness to relinquish Iraq after the war was taken as evidence of its unfitness to govern free peoples either at home or abroad. Through my research, I am able to show how the so-called 'extreme nationalist' editors of Iraq's daily press followed the development of these arguments globally and adapted them in their attempt to reorient the development of their state around Iraqi national interests. Playing upon the sensitivity of British administrators to domestic and international public opinion, Iraqi nationalists were able to keep the development of their political institutions on a far more democratic course than either the British or Arab elite desired. Thus I show how British and Iraqi figures created a network of dissent that sought to undermine the foundations of

States of Legitimacy: The British Left, Iraqi Nationalism,and the 'Spirit of Internationalism,' 1914-1932

The overwhelming majority of studies of the relationship between the British government and private industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are, in reality, merely studies of the government's policy towards industry. The attitude of private industry towards the government has been almost entirely neglected, and this has inevitably led to a distorted understanding of the relationship as a whole. It is, for example, hardly ever made explicit in the extensive literature on the growth of state intervention in the British economy that in the decades before 1914 the assault on laissez-faire was pardy led by private industry itself. This development was most noticeable overseas, where the British government became involved in commerce and trade largely in response to requests for diplomatic support from British firms faced with growing competition from continental and American commercial interests, often supported by their respective governments.

The British Government and the Oil Companies 1912–1924: the Search for an Oil Policy

Great Britain and Germany's Lost Colonies, 1914-1919

An expeditionary force of the Indian Army landed in Turkish territory at the head of the Persian Gulf almost immediately upon the declaration of war by Britain against Turkey on 5 November 1914. After winning some minor engagements against Turkish forces, it marched into Basra, the chief town of southern Mesopotamia, on the 23rd. The subsequent course of the campaign in Mesopotamia included a number of setbacks for the British. The principal city, Baghdad, was not captured until after nearly two and a half years of fighting, and the chief northern city, Mosul, not indeed until after an armistice had been signed with Turkey. Even so, by the time hostilities ceased, large areas in the south had been under continuous British occupation for four years and the possibility of further advance was throughout the war present in the minds of British leaders, whether in London, Simla or Mesopotamia itself. Against this background of military conquest and a pre-war diplomacy among the European powers, excluding Russia, in which Mesopotamia had been marked out as the British sphere if Turkey was partitioned, it is unsurprising that the political future of the country should have been much discussed within British official circles. War aims went through several phases whose study contributes to understanding of British aims in the war as a whole.

V. H. Rothwell

Papers

V. Mesopotamia in British War Aims, 1914–1918