RICE UNIVERSITY States of Legitimacy: The British Left, Iraqi Nationalism, and the 'Spirit of Internationalism,' 1914-1932 by David Patrick Getman A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy ApPROVED, THESIS COMMITIEE: Martin Wiene Mary Gibbs Professor History a M lSI, Arab-American~~ Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies, Professor History Ptkf. ~ pdter C. Cal.dwell, Samuel G. McMann, Professor History BettyJOSeI)h,8~ Professor English HOUSTON, TEXAS MAY 2011 Abstract 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 iii British imperial rule in Iraq and realize the idea of national sovereignty as the capstone of international law, to the detriment of imperial legitimacy globally. This study, I believe, demonstrates how transnational approaches can provide us with a richer understanding of the role of popular nationalism in the birth of the international world in the early twentieth century. This dissertation is dedicated to my loving wife, Stephanie DiCapua Getman. Table of Contents Title Page Abstract 11 Dedication IV Introduction 1 Chapter 1: A 'Contest of Mobilization' 19 Chapter 2: Resisting the 'Philosophy of Expropriation' 65 Chapter 3: The Collapse of Legitimacy 114 Chapter 4: The Problem of the Peace 172 Chapter 5: A Potemkin State? The Early Influence 235 of the British and Iraqi Press on the Anglo-Iraqi Nation Making Project Chapter 6: Defining the Instruments of the Iraqi Government 308 in the Shadow of the 'Mosul Question.' Chapter 7: Complete Independence? 383 Bibliography 434 1 Introduction In August of 1914, British subjects from every corner of the Empire 'rushed to the colours' in support of Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's defensive war for the 'rights of small nations' against the forces of global domination.! Despite Asquith's repeated assurances that the British government had no territorial ambitions of its own in entering the fray, however, by 1920, with four ofthe world's great imperial powers left shattered by the war, British territorial influence would expand to include nearly a quarter of the globe. Moreover, within a few years of the armistice, British troops would be asked to turn their arms on nationalist risings, largely inspired by the very principles Asquith had asked them to go to war to uphold, in Ireland, Egypt, India and the newly conquered territory of Iraq. The discrepancy between the promise of self-determination the war seemed to herald and the persistence or even the introduction of British rule in its wake was not lost on subject peoples who, in many cases, had fought shoulder to shoulder with British forces in what they believed was a war for their own national liberation.2 Girded by a common sense of hope and betrayal, nationalist movements under British administrations throughout the Empire and beyond struggled into the interwar period to force the British government into conformity with the internationalist principles the war had been fought to defend and the League of Nations had been erected to codify and protect? The sense of betrayed loyalties and nationalist aspirations was not limited, however, to the imperial periphery alone. 1 The First World War was by far the most popular war in British national and imperial history. For a discussion of the domestic support for the war, see David Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm/or War. 1914-1916 (London; New York: Frank Cass, 2005). For a discussion of the Commonwealth's involvement, see W. David McIntyre, The Commonwealth 0/ Nations: Origins and Impact. 1869-1971, vol. 9, Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 181-183. For a discussion of the extensive involvement of Indian troops, see Hugh Tinker, "India in the First World War and After," Journal o/Contemporary History 3, no. 4 (1968): 89-107. 2 Erez Manela has offered perhaps the most complete discussion of the hopes for self-determination in occupied territories and their disappointment in Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins 0/ Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 For an influential discussion of nationalist movements in the British Empire after the First World War as a general problem for British imperial policy makers, see John Gallagher, "Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919-1922," Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 355-368. 2 From the hour of its outbreak, a handful of opponents to entering the Great War from the Labour and Liberal camps decried Asquith's explanations for the war as a gross deception designed to veil the fact that British imperial interests had, in fact, been the mainspring of the conflict. Moreover, if permitted to do so, the British government would surely use the settlement of the war to ensure its own global dominance in its wake.4 Even as the Asquith administration was preparing the diplomatic and administrative framework for Britain's postwar 'Empire in the East' in the fall of 1914, the politicians and propagandists writing for the Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party, the' sister centers of dissent' during the war, were laying the groundwork for a popular movement in Britain to fully democratize, root and branch, not only the British political system, but the entire inter-imperial system of European oligarchy from metropoles to periphery beginning with the British Empire. As the persistence of British imperial rule through to the 1960's attests, neither of the related zeitgeists of anti-colonial nationalism in the 'east' or anti-imperial internationalism in the 'west' would fully achieve the ends the grassroots activists responsible for generating them had envisioned. Nevertheless, over the course of the war and into the interwar period, organized opposition to the return to imperial 'business as usual' emanating primarily out of the Labour movement in Britain, the "classical centres of disaffection" in Ireland, India, and Egypt,5 and the ambiguously defined region of British-occupied Iraq posed a collective problem for British policy makers, if not a conspiratorial network of dissent, that threatened to undermine not only the security of British administrations abroad, but the principle of 'imperial democracy' itself as a legitimate form of government in the postwar world.6 Although this dissertation does not 4 The most complete overview of organized British opposition to the First World War is Keith Robbins' The Abolition of War: The "Peace Movement" in Britain, 1914-1919 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976). A more detailed examination of the foremost political opponents to the Asquith and Lloyd George administrations during the war emanating out of the Labour and Liberal Parties can be found in Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Sally Harris, Out of Control: British Foreign Policy and the Union of Democratic Control, 1914-1918 (Hull]: University of Hull Press, 1996); Helena Maria Swanwick, Builders of Peace: Being Ten Years' History of the Union of Democratic Control (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1973); and Robert Edward Dowse, Left in the Centre; the Independent Labour Party, 1893-1940 (London: Longmans, 1966). 5 The words are John Gallagher's, Gallagher, "Nationalisms," p. 355. 6 For a rare discussion of official conspiracy thinking about domestic and imperial anti-colonial nationalist movements in the British government, see John Fisher, "Major Norman Bray and Eastern Unrest in the 3 argue for the existence of an international or even an intra-imperial conspiracy to take down the British Empire, it does attempt to illustrate how anti-colonial nationalism in the metropole and periphery of the British Empire acted collectively on British imperial policy making and to argue the benefits of a transnational approach to the study of both as a unified category of inquiry. For the 'dissenting left' in Britain, the postwar persistence of imperial domination in the possessions of Ireland, India, and Egypt and the introduction of it in Iraq were the greatest evidence that Britain herself was the true imperial hegemon behind the Great War for global domination.