The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  Her Majesty’s consul-general in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, acted as Egypt’s de facto governor from 1883 to 1907. Even before that, as controller general of Egypt’s finances, Baring had arranged for one khedive to be replaced by another. To common Egyptians he was known as El Lord and was thought to be behind everything that went on in the country—in reality, he was behind enough. A thoroughly efficient administrator, he installed a British shadow government behind the Egyptian ministries, completely reorganized the army, and with the creation of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium over the Sudan (which lasted from 1899 to 1956) ran a little empire of his own.

  Where Desert Rats Gathered for Cocktails

  “Cairo in the 1940s was the last great assembly-point . . . where imperial legions mingled in their staggering variety. Every kind of imperial uniform was to be spotted in Cairo.... There were kilts and turbans and tarbooshes, slouch hats and jodhpurs. There were Kenyan pioneers, and Indian muleteers, and Australian tank crews, and English gunners, and New Zealand fighter pilots, and South African engineers. There were scholarly staff officers straight from their Oxford colleges, and swaggering extroverts back from secret missions in the Balkans. . . . The whole capital was now in effect a British military base.”

  James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (The Folio Society, 1992), p. 366

  When the Ottomans became a German ally in World War I, Egypt ceased to be an Ottoman territory administered by the British and became a British protectorate. It also became headquarters of the British Arab Bureau, which (as part of British Intelligence in Cairo) helped direct the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. In 1922, Egypt was declared an independent kingdom, though the British kept their military bases in the country, which remained de facto a British protectorate. That proved awfully useful in the Second World War. While the Egyptian government remained officially neutral until February 1945—just in case—Egypt was home to Britain’s Middle East Command, which was responsible for the war in Africa, the Middle East, and Greece.

  Denouement at Suez

  What had started at Suez ended there. In 1951, the Egyptian government revoked its treaty commitments to Britain4 and demanded that all British troops leave Egypt. To prod the British out, the Egyptian government winked at terrorist attacks on the Canal Zone. The Egyptian mob went one better and burned down Shepheard’s Hotel (the great World War II watering hole for Allied officers), the Turf club, and any British enterprise they could find. In 1952, a military coup advanced the nationalist cause further, with Egypt becoming a republic the following year. Facing an unsympathetic Eisenhower administration—with its stridently anti-imperial secretary of state John Foster Dulles—Britain negotiated with Egypt a gradual withdrawal of British troops from the Canal Zone, the last troops to depart in 1956.

  In July 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Canal. Dulles had naïvely supposed Nasser would be a pro-American nationalist, rather than a Communist-leaning one. He was peeved at Nasser’s diplomatic dalliances with the Communist Chinese and the Soviets, and his arms purchases from the Eastern bloc, and in protest cut off American loans for the construction of the Aswan dam—which, ironically, Nasser used as part of his pretext for nationalizing the Canal. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had a better read on Nasser, regarding him as a pharaonic Mussolini.

  Eden believed the Suez Canal had to be placed safely under international control. To achieve this, the British and French governments resolved on a joint strike at Egypt; but inevitable calls for a diplomatic solution, led by the United States, delayed any action. The French, meanwhile, began cooking up an elaborate plot with the Israelis, who would attack Egypt across Sinai, giving the French and British an excuse to interpose themselves between the combatants and secure the Canal Zone.

  The military portion of this Frankish legerdemain went off like a charm—the Israelis charged across Sinai on 29 October 1956; British and French troops occupied the Canal Zone on 5 November. Diplomatically, however, the operation came a cropper. World opinion—including that of the United States—was sharply hostile, and British domestic opinion, bullish immediately after the nationalization, weakened in the intervening months of futile diplomacy and became deeply divided. The supreme irony was that while Britain was calumniated by the rest of the world for protecting the Suez Canal from a petty dictator, the Soviet Union was crushing an Hungarian uprising against Communist tyranny. The Soviet Union and the United States actually allied themselves in condemning Britain, with the United States blocking an International Monetary Fund loan that Britain needed to stop a run on the pound, until the British government agreed to withdraw its troops from Suez. British imperial influence over Egypt was at an end. The myth that America is an anti-imperial power caused the Eisenhower administration to punish America’s friends and reward her enemies.

  Eisenhower later conceded that he had made a mistake at Suez; it weakened the West and strengthened the hand of radical Arab nationalists who would soon topple the pro-Western government of Iraq and stir up trouble throughout the Middle East. Among Nasser’s targets was Lebanon, which he encircled by forming the United Arab Republic with Syria. In 1958, Eisenhower felt compelled to send 14,000 troops and 70 ships to Lebanon after Nasserite Muslims tried to overthrow the pro-Western President Camille Chamoun. Chamoun, unlike Ike, had not condemned the British and French at Suez.

  The Kingdom of Iraq

  British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was dining with Iraq’s King Feisal II and Prime Minister Nuri es-Said when news came that Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal. Nuri told Eden, “You must hit him. You must hit him hard, and you must hit him now.”5 He clearly understood that Nasser posed a threat to the pro-Western states of the Middle East, like British-created Iraq with its British-installed monarchy; but he was also a typical Arab statesman. When Britain finally acted against Nasser, he protested Franco-British aggression.

  From the sixteenth century until it was taken by the British in the First World War, the territory of modern Iraq had been under Ottoman rule. The Turks had divided it into three provinces whose geographical boundaries were ethnic-religious ones, with a Kurdish north, a Shi’ite South, and a Sunni center. When the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany in World War I, the British seized Basra, beginning a Mesopotamia campaign that had its humiliations—especially the siege of Kut (December 1915 to April 1916), where the British lost 30,000 men as casualties, and another 13,000 were taken as prisoners, most of whom didn’t survive the Turkish camps—but ended with British victory.

  The British decided to govern Mesopotamia as a unitary state, and did so under a mandate from the League of Nations. After repressing an initial rebellion, the British ruled indirectly through local elites, mostly Sunnis who were thought to be better educated, more pro-British, and less prone to Islamic extremism than the Shi’ites. Prince Feisal—a political protégé of British officer T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and a Sunni—was put on the throne. In principle Feisal was acceptable to the Shi’ites because he belonged to the Hashemite family, which claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed. He was, nevertheless, an obvious outsider with little reason, besides being favored by the British, to be named king of Iraq.

  The British established Iraq as a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. In 1932, it became an independent state, though the British retained military bases in the country. During the Second World War, Iraq’s Prime Minister Rashid Ali foisted a pro-Nazi military coup against Iraq’s pro-British foreign minister (Nuri es-Said) and Prince Abd al-Ilah (regent for the young King Feisal II). The coup was short-lived. In a swift campaign, the British deposed the pro-Nazi regime and restored the rightful monarch. After the war, Iraq was the initial cornerstone of the Baghdad Pact (1955), which united Britain, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey in an anti-Soviet front in the Near East. In 1958, nationalist military officers launched a pro-Nasserite coup in Iraq. Feisal II, Abd al-Ilah, and Nuri were killed, and Iraq, like Egypt, beca
me a republic (in 1959) and then a dictatorship, and it withdrew from the Baghdad Pact.

  The Power behind the Peacock Throne

  Though Iran was never formally part of the British Empire, the British Navy had patrolled the Persian Gulf since the eighteenth century. At first its mission was to suppress pirates and protect the trade routes to India; later it added the suppression of the slave trade; and as the presence of the Royal Navy grew so did the presence of British diplomatic “residents” who proved highly influential in Gulf ports. In Persia itself, the British dueled with the Russians for influence. In 1901, through superior finance and diplomacy, Britain gained the oil concessions for three-quarters of the country. That became all the more important as the Royal Navy started moving from coal to oil power.

  After the First World War, the British no longer had to worry about the encroachments of czarist Russia. They did, however, confront the far more dangerous subversion of Russian Bolsheviks. British troops were dispatched to keep Persia free from the Bolshevik menace, as Red and White armies battled on Iran’s borders, a Persian Communist Party was formed, and a northern Persian province was annexed by the Soviet Union. To alleviate the strain on the British army, whose troops were needed around the world for postwar policing operations, Major-General Sir Edmund “Tiny” (6’4”, 275 pounds) Ironside came up with precisely the right solution, one suitable for most foreign policy jams: “A military dictatorship would solve all our troubles and let us out of the country without any trouble at all.”6

  To that end, Ironside found a likely lad in Colonel Reza Khan of the Persian Cossack Division. Ironside had no more than picked his man and the act was done. Reza Khan led his Cossacks into the capital and, presto change-o, became prime minister. The coup worked splendidly in terms of relieving British troops from defending Persia—it did rather less well in terms of perpetuating British influence, as Reza Khan saw British advisers as impediments to his absolute authority and dismissed them; the Persian people, nevertheless (like the Egyptians with El Lord), suspected a British hand behind everything.

  In 1925, Reza Khan became king, inaugurating a new dynasty, setting Iran (the name he gave his country) on a modernizing course in the spirit of Kemal Ataturk. In the 1930s, as an anti-British, anti-Soviet autocrat, he sided with the Third Reich, which became Iran’s major trading partner. Nevertheless, he kept Iran officially neutral during the war. That was not good enough for the British. In 1941, the British and the now Allied Soviets demanded the shah boot the Germans out of Iran. When the shah refused, the British and the Soviets booted Reza Shah out of the country. His son was crowned in his place.

  After the war, Britain and the United States were both wary of Communist designs on Iran, but for the British the bigger problem became Iranian nationalism. In 1951, the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain’s biggest foreign asset; the British withdrew in a huff, and Iranian oil production plummeted. The Truman administration was unsympathetic to British demands for action against Iran, but by 1953 the newly elected Eisenhower administration was alarmed by British reports that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq—who was already governing under extended and dictatorial “emergency powers”—was leaning towards the Communists. The CIA agreed to cooperate with British Intelligence to remove him—and had plenty of allies in Iran, including the shah whom Prime Minister Winston Churchill advised had a duty as a constitutional monarch to act against Mossadeq’s tyranny. The shah, after much nail-biting, issued a decree calling for Mossadeq’s dismissal, and a royalist coup ensued, installing a new prime minister to apparent popular delight (though perhaps CIA “walking around money” helped in this regard). The shah told the American mastermind of the coup, Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson), “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!” To which Roosevelt graciously noted, “He meant me and the two countries—Great Britain and the United States—I was representing. We were all heroes.”7 Thanks to him, Iran was a Western ally for the next quarter century.

  Between Two Ancient Peoples: Arabia and Palestine

  What is now Saudi Arabia was never a British colony, but it owes its existence to the British Empire—specifically to the contest between T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Harry St. John Philby (father of future spy and traitor Kim Philby). Both men were British officers involved in leading the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War. Lawrence was the advocate of the guardians of Mecca, the Hashemites; Philby (and the British government in India) thought the virile Wahhabi tribesmen of Ibn Saud were the better bet. In that wager Philby was right, but Philby was also something of a traitor, as he helped Saudi Arabia’s oil concessions go to America rather than Britain (Standard Oil of California paid him a retainer) and he converted to Islam, apparently not from any ardent religious belief but because of the doors it might open for him in Arabia.

  The Hashemites—chased out of Arabia by Ibn Saud’s raiders—became British-backed monarchs in Mesopotamia and (more successfully) Transjordan, to which Britain was tied purely by bonds of sentiment, because Transjordan had little strategic value at all. The British were also bound by conflicting loyalties—they had led the Arabs in a revolt against the Ottomans and they had pledged, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Palestine, like Jordan, had no natural resources—though it had the strategic advantage of fronting the Mediterranean—but to Britons raised on the Bible it was freighted with mystical associations (as was Greece to classically educated English gentlemen). David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, neither one notably religious, supported the creation of a Zionist Palestine, which became the state of Israel.

  We Built It, We Pumped It, We Own It

  “It was British enterprise, skill and effort which discovered oil under the soil of Persia, which has got the oil out, which has built the refinery, which has developed markets for Persian oil in 30 or 40 countries, with wharves, storage tanks and pumps, road and rail tanks and other distribution facilities, and also an immense fleet of tankers. This was done at a time when there was no easy outlet for Persian oil in competition with the vastly greater American oil industry. None of these things would or could have been done by the Persian government or the Persian people.”

  Sir Donald Ferguson, Permanent Undersecretary, Ministry of Fuel and Power, rejecting Iranian claims on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, quoted in William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 731

  It was, however, a thankless task, as it sparked enmity from the Arabs—who were moved to enmity rather easily, and who throughout the 1930s kept Palestine in a state of turbulent, low-grade guerrilla war. The British suppressed the rebellious Arabs with the de facto assistance of the Haganah, a Jewish self-defense force, and the more radical, underground Irgun, which was not overly scrupulous about its targets. In 1939 the British government pulled back from the Balfour Declaration—over the protests of Lloyd George and Churchill—with a White Paper that proposed slapping limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The desired outcome, according to the White Paper, was that within ten years Palestine would become an independent, non-confessional state shared between Arabs and Jews. The spirit of British compromise was not, however, widely appreciated in this part of the world—with both Zionists and Arabs, albeit for different reasons, rejecting the White Paper. During the Second World War, the Zionists joined the British in the fight against Hitler, while the Arabs were rather more divided. If they were under British arms, they supported their British officers; but Arab sentiment, whipped up by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, trended naturally towards National Socialism.

  The Balfour Declaration

  “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothi
ng shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

  British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour in a letter to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917

  After the War, Palestine was a hornet’s nest for the British, who were only too happy to be rid of it. They were targeted by both Arab and Zionist terrorists; the former renewing their revolt, the latter angry at restrictions on Jewish immigration.8 The day before the expiration of the British mandate9 and the partition of the country into separate Jewish and Arab states (which the Zionists accepted and the Arabs did not), Israel declared independence, only to be almost immediately attacked by its Arab neighbors. British officers serving in the Arab Legion were put in the awkward position of securing the West Bank for Jordan. Jordan, the most moderate of the Arab states, gained ground in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and so did Israel, which won a decisive victory and secured more defensible borders. Britain officially recognized Israel as an independent state on 29 January 1949, four days after Israel’s first general elections.

  Adventures in Aden

  The British Empire in Arabia lasted longest in the Gulf States of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States, Oman, and Aden, all of which fell under the influence of the British East India Company by the late eighteenth century. Officially, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar owed their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire (Bahrain was also claimed by Persia), but in reality they functioned more as British protectorates, where the British touch was light and the sheiks and emirs loyal.