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Modernization, Nation-Building, and Indigeneity in Iraq and the Gulf, 1935-1991

Panel 091, 2018 Annual Meeting

On Friday, November 16 at 4:00 pm

Panel Description
In the middle of the twentieth century, oil-rich states in the broader Gulf region deployed their newfound wealth in an array of modernizing projects. These included the construction of physical infrastructure - such as paved highways, piped water, electricity, and housing - and the transformation of financial networks, social insurance systems, and land tenure. While these projects were couched in the depoliticized language of development, a key impetus was ideological, as elites sought to forge modern subjects as part of a broader project to build national consciousness and expand state control. This panel examines how these ideological and infrastructural processes shaped each other, and how they were imagined, reconfigured, and resisted by a wide variety of actors. While infrastructure and development are often read as top-down impositions of burgeoning oil states, this panel uses a comparative historical approach to highlight the contingency of these processes and their contestation by the region's inhabitants. By employing a historical lens and looking at several countries in the Gulf region together, we also demonstrate that seemingly radical projects of transformation often rested on older conceptualizations and networks of power, and were shaped by fissures that had been present since the pre-oil era. The first paper examines how the economic hinterlands of Gulf cities were reshaped by conceptions of citizenship and belonging, as British financial institutions intentionally redirected credit away from merchants with longstanding links to the Indian Ocean who were considered irredeemably "foreign." The second analyzes how a succession of governments, from the Hashemite monarchy to the Ba'th Party, utilized subsidized housing schemes and slum clearance programs in Baghdad to consolidate pockets of political support while isolating politically troublesome populations. The third examines how a hybrid regime of land and property ownership arose in the emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, where pre-state communal ownership of land and localized claims of indigeneity are still invoked to restrict state power in rural areas. The fourth focuses on the urban interventions of the Iraqi government in Kirkuk from 1968 to the early 1990s, when the Ba'th Party undertook major infrastructural schemes under the pretense of development, which disguised a strategy of ethnic cleansing. Together, the papers draw out similarities and differences in how oil-rich regimes and new institutions deployed infrastructure and development projects to shape social and political outcomes.
Disciplines
History
Participants
Presentations
  • This paper traces how new geographies of credit in the Persian Gulf shaped – and were shaped by – new banking infrastructures, reconfigured political networks, and shifting conceptions of indigeneity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, merchants with links to the Indian subcontinent – particularly Bombay – created a sprawling network of trade and credit within the British imperial system. But starting in the 1940s, as national differences sharpened and British banks aggressively fought to profit from an expected oil boom, the web of trust and credit that had once provided a financial scaffold for imperial rule across the Indian Ocean world was destroyed by many of the very institutions that created it. Lower capital transfer costs, enabled by global credit networks and air transport, increasingly made money more like money – an abstract representation of value – releasing capital from the regional commodity markets and monsoon winds that had linked the Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Intent on expanding their profits from currency exchange and import credits, banks actively encouraged stronger links to Western Europe and the British Empire with themselves as middlemen, reorienting the economic hinterlands of Gulf cities. As new conceptions and legal definitions of nationality gained increasing prominence, British banks increasingly viewed merchants with connections to the Indian subcontinent as transient interlopers capable of abandoning their commitments, and enacted discriminatory policies that systematically excluded them from access to credit. While these merchants sought to participate in new credit networks, repeated rejections forced them to turn to more expensive and less reliable lending systems that existed uneasily alongside the new British banks. These varied expectations, assumptions, biases helped fuel a new class of merchants who benefitted not just from powerful political contacts, but from their ability to make claims to indigeneity and promise that seemed convincing to British financial institutions. The expectations of British bankers regarding who would - and would not - benefit from a regional oil boom thus helped create their own reality, and turned international capital into an enforcement mechanism for narrow and exclusivist conceptualizations of citizenship and belonging. The paper draws on research conducted in English and Arabic across archives in the United Kingdom, India, and Kuwait, and emphasizes memoirs and fine-grained bank records – particularly loan applications – to highlight the importance of quotidian interactions and non-elite actors in shaping broader conceptions of indigeneity, loyalty, and self.
  • This paper will examine the urban interventions of the Iraqi government with a particular focus on Kirkuk from the time of the Ba‘th-led coup in 1968 to the first Gulf War. I find that, during this era, the Ba‘th Party government sought to transform the parts of Kirkuk that conformed the least to its political and ideological aims, using ethnicity—or, in Arabic, qawmiyya—as an indication of one’s loyalty to the state. Consequently, these major infrastructural projects were acts of ethnic cleansing. Soon after taking control of Iraq in 1968, the Ba‘th Party issued decrees gradually bringing many plots of land in Kirkuk under its control that were widely known to be in predominantly non-Arab neighborhoods. The Kurdish and Turkmen inhabitants of those properties were meagerly compensated, then expelled and prevented from purchasing any other property within the province. While this tactic of demographic manipulation in Ba‘th-era Iraq is well known, a less well-known strategy of displacement and coercion was the use of urban development schemes. For instance, the Iraqi government commissioned the building of a large highway interchange through the middle of a dense, overwhelmingly Kurdish residential neighborhood that was recognized as a center of resistance to Saddam Hussein, a project that certainly led to the demolition of many houses. Another focus of these development projects was Kirkuk’s citadel—the city’s ancient core, still continuously inhabited, and known as a stronghold of the remnants of its Ottoman-era Turkish-speaking culture. The citadel’s last remaining inhabitants were forced out on the pretense of preservation of its ruins, though their homes were razed in the process. The schemes conceived and carried out in Kirkuk in the Ba‘th era stand in stark contrast to urban development projects in earlier eras in Iraq, which sought to benefit, or manage, certain citizens on the basis of class rather than through the concept of differing qawmiyyas. For its primary material, this paper relies on comparisons of historical maps of Kirkuk; archival material found in the Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece; and items from local publications, including a bilingual periodical issued by an Iraqi Turkmen organization and a compilation of facsimiles of Ba‘th-era decrees printed in Kirkuk.
  • Dr. Alissa Walter
    This presentation illustrates how a series of Iraqi governments-- from the Hashemites to the Ba'th Party--used urban planning and housing policies to manage politically sensitive populations in Baghdad during the ‘oil boom’ years of 1950-1979. Two housing policies in particular—one targeting rural migrants, the other targeting a growing cadre of public sector workers—are key for understanding the political motivations that transformed Baghdad’s urban landscape during these three pivotal decades. In the first instance, housing settlements were geographically situated and designed by the state to manage, control, and monitor a poor population viewed as politically troublesome and socially destabilizing. The legacy of this policy is today's Sadr City, home to one quarter of Baghdad's population, though the district is geographically marginalized and designed to be cut off from the city center. In the second case, the state turned housing into a new standard benefit to reward the growing ranks of public sector employees who made up the staffs of new government ministries, professional associations, and the officer corps. Strikingly, new neighborhoods were built for each major professional union, creating vocational silos of middle-class Baghdadis in the middle of the capital. The result of these two different housing strategies for managing potential political allies and troublemakers was a new urban landscape in which largely homogenous communities were structurally separated into ‘good’ districts and ‘dangerous’ districts differentiated by vocation, income, and background. Baghdad’s newly-built neighborhoods for rural migrants and public sector employees contained markers of political belonging or exclusion, politicizing housing and making it a new point of negotiation between state and society. This paper draws on the archives of urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis; French, British, and American diplomatic archives; Iraqi maps; and unpublished demographic studies of Baghdad from the 1960s and 1970s.
  • The rapid oil-fueled integration of the Trucial States/United Arab Emirates into the global capitalism in the mid-twentieth century resulted in the formation of new property regimes in the region. This paper considers two overlapping and competing nations of property and indigeneity in the northern UAE, especially Ras al-Khaimah. Prior to the emergence of the state in the mid-20th century, land and property in the UAE and Oman were governed by usufruct, Islamic inheritance laws, and communal identities based on location and extended kinship networks. The distribution of property was in turn linked to seasonal migrations between different ecological zones to ensure a constant supply of resources throughout the year. These patterns gave rise to what was called the dirah, literally the place where one (or one's kinship group) circulates. In this system, land was most often transferred through marriage and inheritance, and in some cases by purchase. When the seven Trucial States formed the United Arab Emirates in 1971, each emirate developed its own laws concerning the ownership of land and property. In some cases, as in oil-rich Abu Dhabi and much of Dubai, the state purchased all land from its owners in the decade after independence. However, this did not happen in Ras al-Khaimah, where three competing forms of ownership coexist: private, collective, and state. Each of these is linked to ideas of indigeneity. Only UAE citizens can privately own land, a reaction to 1960s and 1970s purchases of land by expatriate Arabs that UAE citizens criticized as exploitative and anti-development in late 1970s protests. Categories of "indigenous" and "foreign" developed in part in response to these purchases, resulting in a 1982 law that banned land sales to non-citizens. While land ownership was one means of asserting citizens' control over a key resource, more local notions of indigeneity are regularly invoked to contest the Ras al-Khaimah government's ownership of public lands. Many UAE citizens in the emirate claim collective ownership of land based on longstanding connections dating back to the dirah of the pre-state period. These claims result in extended contestations between the state and citizens (both individuals and extended groups) for control of development, including housing, roads, and industrial projects. In short, land is a key means by which UAE citizens assert their indigeneity against the state and foreigners alike.