Iraq’s history of anti-colonial struggle and resistance is conventionally folded within narratives on the dynamics between military, political, and religious elites and colonial powers. Comparatively, very little attention is given to the negotiations and resistance tactics deployed by Iraq’s subaltern and non-elite groups. This multi-disciplinary panel deliberately shifts scholarly gaze towards the various patterns of negotiation, protest, and resistance that emerged between Iraq’s non-elites and various agents of power, underscoring both, the limitation of state-making and the agency employed by its subjects. As everyday forms of resistance to political and economic power and marginalization emerged in various and creative ways, the state and its stakeholders responded in equally creative modes that either subdued or galvanized resistance. Hegemonizing projects often acted as centrifugal forces that exacerbated political and spatial tensions, which in turn evoked resistance. The study of this aspect of Iraqi history negates the argument that resistance movements emerged during moments of political crisis. Instead, this panel explores the varying definitions of resistance, its relationship to power and agency, its diverse actors, and ultimately, what it can achieve. The papers herein highlight patterns of resistance by showcasing the diversity of mobilized movements, the variety of the modes of resistance employed, as well as the responses it evoked, whether from the state, imperial or private interests. This panel emphasizes the role that resistance played in expanding and restricting the possibilities of the state and its subjects.
In ensuring security, various agents of power deployed hegemonizing projects with the ultimate goal of making Iraq easier to govern. This approach advanced the state’s political and private interests but its costs were often shouldered by Iraq’s already oppressed and marginalized communities. Recognizing the potentialities of the state’s exploitive policies, resistance emerged in creative but vociferous ways. Those impacted boycotted, demonstrated, and went on strike to protest measures that directly impacted their livelihood. Some communities emphasized ritualistic practices that both highlighted their communal identities and acted as a resistance measure. Equally important were the limitations of resistance within these paradigms. Various groups relied on negotiation tactics when protest proved futile. The papers in this panel aim to address these themes by highlighting how resistance emerged amongst Iraq’s multi-confessional communities as they attempted to navigate the various aspects of power dynamics.
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Dr. Sara Farhan
In February of 1935, the students of the Royal Medical College of Baghdad went on strike to protest the Faculty of Medicine’s decision to extend the course requirements from five to six years and to reduce the salaries of resident doctors during their first year of employment in the Health Department, a contract that most students were obliged to take in exchange for state-sponsored education. When the strike lasted weeks, the Faculty of Medicine challenged the students by giving them an ultimatum: should the protestors not return to the classroom within two days, they would face suspension. When a few returned to the college, the administration quickly declared the strike a failure, undermining the remaining protestors. The administration's failure to negotiate with the medical students and address their grievances unintentionally evoked the organization of Iraq’s future doctors early on in their career. The Iraqi Monarchy’s various hegemonic projects depended on these future state-intermediaries. The graduating doctors harboured various visions of what the future of their state should look like. In most cases, these visions countered the Monarchy’s agenda. This paper argues that in failing to negotiate with these students, the state unintentionally fuelled the mobilization of its future professionals against its vulnerabilities.
The February strike coincides with the diffusion of al-Bait University, a short-lived experiment that oversaw the administration of Iraq's various professional schools. The diffusion of Al Bait thwarted cross-colleges student organizations. This paper contends that following the end of al-Bait, the formation of student organizations which included Iraq's various professional schools is correlated to the Faculty of Medicine's failure to negotiate with the striking medical students. Therefore, the February 1935 medical students' strike should not be viewed as a failure, rather as a moment where future state-intermediaries recognized the importance of collective mobilization against policies that negatively impacted their interests. This paper relies on newspaper articles from Baghdad, England, Mandated Palestine, and Egypt. It also draws on archival research conducted at KEW, American University of Beirut, and College Park, as well as on oral interviews, and legal statutes to highlight the magnitude of this short lived strike on the mentalite of the demonstrators, the college’s administrators, and the state.
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Mr. Andrew Alger
My paper seeks to understand how changes in the material living conditions of Baghdad’s citizens from the 1930’s to the 1950’s shaped the content of their political organizing against the monarchical government. Why is it that citizens focused their energies on the rising costs of food and electricity in the early 1930s, but on unjust treaties with Great Britain after the war and into the 1950’s? High grain exports, postwar inflationary pricing, and devastating floods would seem to suggest that citizens living under precarious circumstances continue boycotts and work stoppages aimed at achieving greater food and work security. Instead, during the demonstrations of 1948, 1952, and 1958, they resorted to mass gatherings in front of the nodes of government power, open-air speeches, and sometimes violent confrontations with the police. What transpired to make these Baghdadis take aim at the government itself?
Using archival materials and the Arabic-language press, I argue that changes in urban infrastructure reconfigured laborers’ and professionals’ expectations for what protest could achieve. The state of transportation networks around Baghdad at the start of the monarchy encouraged acts of civil disobedience that targeted small, but portentous government incursions against the status quo. By the postwar period, the selective development of urban infrastructure had enabled the different types of protest that would eventually succeed in overthrowing the monarchy. Government officials and the purveyors of capital, however, continued to address the issue of shortages of food, work, and household amenities according to the old city paradigm, i.e. with targeted interventions in the ownership of utilities and relief efforts for flood victims. Thus it was not only the case that conditions were ripe for calling for an end to monarchy and British meddling, but also that the Iraqi government's own attempts at targeted interventions made more modest forms of protest suspect in the eyes of the city’s most beleaguered citizens and their allies.
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Dr. Annie Greene
In autumn 1889, several Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish leaders had been arrested following an incident of intercommunal violence, which itself had been sparked by the burial of the chief rabbi ‘Abdullah Somekh at a shrine compound venerated by both Muslims and Jews outside the city-center. The raging cholera epidemic and state-imposed quarantine had prevented his burial inside the inter muros Jewish cemetery. To alleviate the situation by seeking out help and justice, Baghdadi Jewish community members petitioned the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and publicized the events in the press consumed by the European Jewish diaspora.
In this paper, I argue that the Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community’s mobilization of support should be examined both within Ottoman channels and within confessional diasporic networks. In a moment of crisis, the Jewish community utilized its diasporic network for help when the Ottoman system of justice and idea of Ottomanism appeared to fail, thus, acting as both Ottomans and Jews and perceiving their identity as such. While it was within Ottoman state protocol to manage such local crises such as riots, Ottoman authorities were displeased with foreign intervention and negative foreign press, especially after the implementation of the Tanzimat reforms and the strengthening of Ottomanism as a civic ideology and legal-national identity. This paper demonstrates how the burial of the Baghdadi chief rabbi and the subsequent communications concerning the violence and arrests exhibit a non-dominant community navigating the limits of Ottomanism. Moreover, this paper shows how when this community felt threatened, it exercised its entitlement to justice as Ottoman on an imperial level, and as Jewish on an international level.
To examine the story of an Ottoman community utilizing its global diasporic networks and both pushing the limits of and working within the traditions of the Ottoman state, I investigate sources from the Ottoman Archives Interior Ministry collections, British consulate records, the Alliance Israélite Universelle records, and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) press. The multilingualism of these sources, as well as their wide geographical spread, point to the self-inclusion and connectivity of the leaders of the Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community during the late-nineteenth century.
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Mr. Ali Hammoudi
This paper will detail the legal and labour history of the oil fields in the provincial city of Kirkuk in Hashemite Iraq. It begins by describing how International and transnational law shaped the imperial spaces and semi-colonial enclaves of the oil frontier in Iraq, revealing its detrimental effects on the working classes. It then shows how the oil workers of the British-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company in Kirkuk and its surrounding areas, organized against the constraints of the legal structures of imperialism, which were embedded in the international legal instrument of the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty and the transnational law of oil concessions. The paper details how the Gawurbaghi strike of 1946 was violently suppressed by the local police in complicity with the company and the British Embassy. The anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle of the oil workers and their union at specific points in space and time eventually forced the company to reassess their labour arrangements. However, as the company and British records show, although the company’s ultimate response shifted its approach to one of social development, it attempted to impose a specific ideology and alternative institution of trade unionism to co-op the labour movement. This paper relies on records from Kew, IPC at the BP Archive, and communist pamphlets. It demonstrates how law and its structures played a significant role in the social production of the spaces of the Iraqi oil frontier on the one hand; while on the other, shows how the oil workers used this unique spatiality in their strategy and tactics to assert their own vision of an alternative social and legal order as was evident from the legendary K3 pumping-station strike of 1948.
