Imperial Control, Local Knowledge, and Administrators in British Iraq

Sam Dunham, Yale University

To maintain control over territory spanning a diverse range of ethnicities and forms of social and political organization, empires relied on contextual knowledge built over time by local administrators. But these administrators could exploit time and embeddedness to build their own bases of power, challenging central imperial control. How did empires manage the competing imperatives of control over territory and local administrators? Using the case of British rule in Mandatory Iraq in the early 20th century, this paper uses qualitative archival data alongside new geocoded data of imperial administrators to study how imperial powers used appointments to support effective administration while preventing threats to their rule. The dataset includes appointment and biographical information about British and Iraqi administrators at the province, county, and township levels during the British Mandate of Iraq (1921-1932) drawn from British archival records and Arabic-language biographical sources. The paper illustrates how the British-Hashemite imperial state used rotation, or regular movement of administrators from one post to another, as a means to prevent local administrators from amassing power within a particular administrative division. It also finds that the imperial state preserved these administrators’ hard-won local knowledge by rotating them within similar administrative divisions: specifically, divisions that resembled one another in their ethnic makeup and social-political organization. Lastly, exploiting the 1929 global economic downturn, it demonstrates that the imperial power valued loyalty over local knowledge when making appointments during economic and political crises that undermined central control.

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 Presented in Session 39. Nationalist Projects, Transnational Solidarities, Colonial Legacies