The topic of this investigation is the social history of Iraqi military recruitment in the Middle Euphrates region of southern Iraq in the early 1920s. In April 1920, the League of Nations awarded Great Britain a mandate to rule Iraq. Coupled with the devastating impacts of the First World War and British occupation in the region since 1914, the mandate produced a massive political upheaval and armed rebellion in the Middle Euphrates during the summer of 1920. The British defeated the rebellion with a massive force of air power and armies from British India, but were convinced that their model of rule in Iraq was no longer possible. This brought about the formation of an Iraqi nation-state with an Arab monarchy, a constitution, and a treaty legitimizing British authority over Iraqi political affairs. Great Britain installed a centralized government in Baghdad composed of Sunni Ottoman-trained military officials. However, both the new Iraqi government and the British had little popular support throughout the countryside. Because of this, Great Britain was apprehensive of another rebellion, and created a national Iraqi army corps in January 1921 to help enforce the authority of the central government. British officials and members of the Iraqi government spearheaded the army, which opened recruitment centers in southern Iraq in June 1921. The army’s first recruits, predominantly lower-class Shi’is, previously lacked adequate means for social mobility in Iraqi society due to a neglectful Ottoman regime and the destructive impacts of WWI and British occupation on local society. Military service represented a new means for individual survival and social mobility. Yet, initial compensation for military service was inadequate, and potential recruits in the Middle Euphrates faced pressure from local, prominent Shi’i clerics who contested the legitimacy of the nascent Iraqi state. Further, that new recruits were subordinated to a governing elite with extensive military experience, a working history with the British, and a confessional allegiance that awarded them greater social mobility under Ottoman rule, made the process of uniting Iraq’s regions and dissimilar communities through an infant national institution both challenging and contradictory. Utilizing primary sources, this essay studies how, in its infancy, military recruitment impacted patterns of every-day life in the Middle Euphrates, and how the Middle Euphrates responded to recruitment efforts. In doing so, the essay aims to provide a more complex micro-historical analysis than prevalent narratives of British colonial history and Iraqi national formation.

The life of French General Henri Gouraud (1867-1946) spanned over two centuries and three major conflicts between France and Germany. The exceptional military and political career of this highly decorated commander of World War I is emblematic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century French history. Gouraud’s successive postings and the lengthy periods that he served away from the Métropole perfectly illustrates the nature of French Colonialism in both Africa and the Middle East. The twenty years that Henri Gouraud spent (between 1894 and 1914) in the recently ‘acquired’ colonies and protectorates of Sudan, Mauritania, Tchad and Morocco were characteristic of how France employed its soldiers not only as its celebrated bâtisseurs d'empire, empire builders, but also as its colonial administrators who were then charged to spread la mission civilisatrice de la France, the civilizing mission of France. This paper will investigate General Gouraud’s career and utilize French archives held in the Ministère des affaires étrangères (MAE) and the Service historique de la défense (SHD) located in Paris and Vincennes. This paper will elaborate why France planned to fulfill its imperial ambitions in the Middle East during the Great War by accepting to divide the region (formally ruled by the Ottoman Empire) with Britain through the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, and how after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, it swiftly occupied Lebanon and Syria with the official approval of the League of Nations’ mandate. This study will present a sweeping narrative of the early years of French occupation in Lebanon and Syria, and detail how colonial rule in the Levant was markedly different from the Maghreb. This paper will not only focus on military and political events that occurred from 1919 onward, but also on the administration of the mandate, especially within the vital religious, social and cultural spheres. Gouraud’s time in Damascus provides a better understanding of the ‘divide to rule’ strategy that France implemented to control Lebanon and Syria. The three years that Gouraud spent as the Haut-Commissaire de la République in Syria and Lebanon, reflected French colonial rule and how it firstly re-arranged both countries in the small states of Aleppo, Damascus, the Greater Lebanon, the Jabal Druze and secondly, the way it primarily favored the Lebanese Christian minority at the expense of the Muslim majority with grievous consequences that sadly reverberated well after the end of World War II, when the French ultimately departed the region.

The imposition of the League of Nations Mandate system in the former Ottoman Arab provinces brought about significant change in an era already enveloped in uncertainty. In the early 1920s, European colonial administrators replaced Ottoman bureaucrats, and the sovereignty of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul was eliminated, by new borders and hastily negotiated treaties. Despite this, there are significant continuities between late Ottoman and mandate Syria. Using Ottoman, French, British, and League of Nations archives, this paper reconstructs the persistence of Ottoman modes of citizenship practice in mandate-era Syria. It argues that various late-Ottoman reforms and laws aimed at defining who was and who was not an Ottoman were in fact attempts to codify an already developed form of citizenship practice for an international and domestic audience. I draw distinct connections between late Ottoman reforms and citizenship practice in the mandates through a detailed study of the style and purpose of petitions from both periods, and analyze laws and reforms aimed at defining the rights and responsibilities of Ottoman and mandate-era Syrians. I also examine mandate-era regulations that attempted to define, and redefine, Syrians’ rights under a neo-colonial regime to argue that part of the French civilizing mission in Syria after World War I required an aggressive campaign to subvert any existing notions of Ottoman modernity, especially regarding individual and collective engagement with the state. This involved a systematic attack on traditional Ottoman institutions, which by the early twentieth century already resembled modern notions of political and social modernity. Ottoman subjects engaged freely with Istanbul, despite social status and geographic location. French and Mandate officials, on the other hand, saw this practice as a nuisance and sought to stifle the voices of the former Ottoman population through a series of increasingly stringent procedural rules regarding the petitioning and the mandate’s citizenship regime. Thus, a system that was once available to anyone within the Ottoman realm was slowly transformed into an increasingly burdensome process that relied heavily on new political boundaries to prevent large-scale opposition. Syrian frustrations with the restrictions on their engagement with the state are reflected in countless petitions found in League of Nations, British, and French archival collections. The modernity that the French sought to cultivate in Syria following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire already existed, and eventually manifest itself as a counter to French claims that Syria was not yet ready to stand on its own.