Ibn Saud of Najd, British Mandate officials, and the Iraqi government established the terms of the Iraq-Najd boundary in 1922, but the competition for territory in the Arabian Desert started as early as World War I and continued as late as 1932. This paper studies police and military posts along the Iraq-Najd frontier to better understand how British and Arab forces sought to establish or determine de facto and de jure authority over tribal populations before and after the ratification of formal boundary agreements. I use India Office memos, Royal Air Force intelligence files, and Foreign Office maps and correspondences between Ibn Saud and the British and Iraqi governments. These documents show how British and Saudi military outposts and patrol routes were used to control tribal mobility and force the settlement of tribal populations by insinuating themselves into the infrastructure of every-day tribal life, such as caravan routes, oases and wells, or trade depots and caravanserai. In my analysis, I describe how with the passage of time, these military outposts unintentionally became border or police outposts with a different status and role in Iraqi governance and regional politics. These outposts, often founded on short-term security goals and uncoordinated military actions against stateless tribes, became trading pieces during negotiations over the location of the Iraq-Najd boundary. One consequence of this negotiation process was the nationalization of specific tribes as either “Iraqi” or “Najdi” based on their proximity to these military-cum-border posts. In this way, these posts play an integral role in building the Iraqi state, and populating it, during the Mandate era.

Soon after the completion of the occupation of Palestine, the British administration established an Education Department that was to become a central socializing agent in this new colonial order. Subsequently, a new colonial pedagogy was in need, one that could answer the educational challenges related to educating a newly defined community within new borders under a new socio-political order. The new educational administration sought to learn from past pedagogical mistakes, especially from the bitter experiences in Egypt and Iraq, and create a system that cooperated with the local intellectual elite, outlining with them an educational vision for Palestine, one that took into account their culture and history. Nevertheless, this educational colonial dialogue could not answer the burning questions and conflicting views over the future of Palestine, all central to the new syllabus, since those depended on imperial interests and international settlements. This paper will focus on one particular challenge in the colonial syllabus (published by the Education Department in 1921 and 1925), primarily in the geography and history courses, exploring the way in which the vision of a unified independent state in Greater Syria wrote itself into the colonial syllabus. It will address the employment of the spatial and historical delineations in the syllabus that were meant to create a new entity, Palestine. Moreover, through an analysis of textbooks and school journal essays, the paper will present the views and responses of local pedagogues to the colonial syllabus and their own interpretation of and authorship about the vision of Greater Syria. The paper will trace the translation of the political tensions between local pedagogues and colonial educators into an institutionalized syllabus. It shall highlight the educational shortcomings and inconsistencies in this syllabus, which derived from this “colonial pedagogical dialogue” within the political impossibilities of Palestine’s mandate.

This paper argues that the earliest administrations in the Mandate of Transjordan, the colonial predecessor to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, were an extension of the Arab nationalist project that culminated in the 1916 Arab Revolt. The connection, which lasted several years into the Mandate, was embodied by the presence of nationalist figures who played an instrumental role in the administration of the Mandate during its formative years until 1925. Despite the brief connection, however, in its founding mythology, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan often portrays itself as the result of the 1916 Arab Revolt. Symbols and allusions to the Revolt play a prominent role in tracing the foundation of the Kingdom because its dynastic founder, Amir Abdullah, was the middle son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca who publicly launched the Revolt. The rhetorical or public displays of this connection have rightly attracted the attention of critical scholars who have examined their manipulation to bolster a state ideology for the Jordanian Monarch. While the memory of the 1916 Arab Revolt has undoubtedly been a legitimating tool, to entirely discount its actual legacy in forming Transjordan, dismisses the real connections between the two. The ideological underpinnings that led Arabs to support the 1916 Revolt did not simply just end once the Europeans stopped fighting the Ottoman Empire; it evolved to confront European imperialist plans for the post-Ottoman Middle East. Because its formation in 1921 was particularly wrought with ambiguity, Transjordan serves as an important tableau from which to examine the development of the Hashemite-centric Arab nationalist project as it emerged from the Arab Revolt and entered a post-Ottoman Middle East where local and international actors still struggled to determine the fate of the region. By looking at memoirs and personal production of key figures like Amir Abdullah, the tribesmen living in Transjordan, and the Arab nationalist exiles in Transjordan after 1920, we uncover the dramatic collusion and conflict that took place in their struggle to define the future of the region as the European-imposed Mandate system slowly crystallized into the 1920s. By studying this period, we gain a better appreciation of the actual ambiguities of the moment and the possibilities it presented. We look past the European dicta and examine the making of the post-Ottoman states by persons guided by their own ideologies and desires.

By the time French troops withdrew from Syria in 1946, Arab nationalism had become an ideology dominant among differing different sects, classes and regions, and the Arab Revolt of 1916 had come to be seen as a national awakening. Yet recent scholarship covering the thirty years between these two events demonstrates that the adoption of Arab nationalism by Syria’s population was not a linear process, but a fraught, contested one, in which elites were forced to navigate several simultaneously-developing political possibilities. The 1926 elections in Aleppo, an often-overlooked episode during the “Great Syrian Revolt,” illustrate a key moment in this process. The ethnically, linguistically and religiously heterogeneous population of Aleppo received the forces of the Arab Revolt in October 1918, and the nationalist ideology they carried, with deep ambivalence. As the French encroached on the city in 1919, the city’s elites split between support for the French Mandate and an anti-French movement led by the notable Ibrahim Hananu, waged with Turkish support in the name of the “paramount Islamic caliphate.” Forty percent of Aleppo’s voters participated in an election organized by the French in 1923, despite a nationalist boycott. Yet three years later, when the French staged elections for a national constituent assembly in the midst of a revolt in Syria’s south, nationalists succeeded in organizing a boycott among Aleppo’s Muslim residents. Muslim notables, including Hananu, circulated a handbill charging that the vote was a plot to “divide the nation,” while in the view of the American Consul in Aleppo, “The Christians believe that one of the first acts of the assembly will be to vote the separation of Aleppo from Damascus,” and planned to vote accordingly. Thus, the 1926 elections illuminate a moment when Aleppo’s Muslim leadership was enjoining loyalty to “the nation,” while the city’s new Christian middle classes were struggling to articulate a political future in which they would not be marginalized. A close examination of this moment will further our understanding of how once-recalcitrant Aleppo came to adopt the ideology of the Arab Revolt, and the roles that class and sectarian commitments played in that process. This paper will rely on contemporary U.S. State Department cables from Aleppo held at the National Archives in Maryland, as well as British Foreign Office cables and local periodicals from the period. Secondary works by James Gelvin, Keith Watenpaugh, Philip Khoury, Benjamin White and Daniel Neep will also be utilized.