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The Kingdom of Iraq under British Administration, or Mandatory Iraq (), was created in 1921, following the 1920 Iraqi Revolution against the proposed British Mandate of Mesopotamia, and enacted via the 1922 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty and a 1924 undertaking by the United Kingdom to the League of Nations to fulfil the role as Mandatory Power.Wright, Quincy. "The Government of Iraq". The American Political Science Review, vol. 20, no. 4, 1926, pp. 743–769. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1945423. Accessed 21 January 2020 See original documents here
Faisal ibn Husayn, who had been proclaimed King of Syria by a Syrian National Congress in Damascus in March 1920, was ejected by the French in July of the same year. Faisal was then granted by the British the territory of Iraq, to rule it as a kingdom, with the British Royal Air Force (RAF) retaining certain military control, but de facto, the territory remained under British administration until 1932. Ethnicity, State Formation, and Conscription in Postcolonial Iraq: The Case of the Yazidi Kurds of Jabal Sinjar. JSTOR [2]
The civil government of postwar Iraq was headed originally by the High Commissioner, Percy Cox, and his deputy, Colonel Arnold Wilson. British after the capture and killing of a British officer in Najaf failed to restore order. The British occupiers faced the growing strength of the nationalists, who continued to resist against the British authority. British administration had yet to be established in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Although often thought to have been invented by the British after World War I, Iraq had long existed as a distinct region under the Ottoman Empire, encompassing the provinces of Mosul vilayet, Baghdad vilayet, and Basra vilayet and officially referred to as 'Ottoman Iraq'.
In 1850, a request to establish a provincial council (meclis-i kebîr) in Shahrizor was denied by the Sublime Porte, which noted that Shahrizor, although a separate province, was considered part of the Iraq Region and could therefore not establish a provincial council before the capital, Baghdad. In 1879, Mosul governor Feyzi Pasha referred to the Mosul Vilayet’s inclusion in the Hıtta-i Irakiyye in a telegram seeking tax relief, indicating the term was used in practice to describe a unified administrative space. This sense of territorial cohesion extended into imperial economic planning: a 1902 Ottoman railway concession contract described the project as intended “for the purpose of increasing the prosperity, development, wealth, and trade of Imperial Anatolia and of Iraq” (Turkish: Anadolu-yı Şâhâne ile hatta: Irak’ın tezyîd-i ma‘mûriyet ve terakkî-i servet ve ticâreti zımnında). The document listed Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra among the Iraqi cities through which the railway would pass, reflecting Iraq's intended integration into the Ottoman imperial economy.
The Grand Mujtahid of Karbala, Imam Shirazi, and his son, Mirza Muhammad Riza, began to organize the insurgent effort. Shirazi then issued a ruling, and he called for a resistance against the British. By July 1920, Mosul was in rebellion against British rule, and the armed resistance moved south down the Euphrates River valley. The southern tribes, who cherished their long-held political autonomy, needed little inducement to join in the fray. They did not cooperate in an organized effort against the British, however, which limited the effect of the revolt.
The Iraqi revolt of 1920 was a watershed event in contemporary Iraqi history. For the first time, Sunnis and Shias, tribes and cities, were brought together in a common effort. In the opinion of Hanna Batatu, author of a seminal work on Iraq, the building of a nation-state in Iraq depended upon two major factors: the integration of Shias and Sunnis into the new body politic and the successful resolution of the age-old conflicts between the tribes and the riverine cities and among the tribes themselves over the food-producing flatlands of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The 1920 rebellion brought these groups together, if only briefly; this constituted an important first step in the long and arduous process of forging a nation-state out of Iraq's conflict-ridden social structure. The Assyrian Levies, a military force under British command, participated in the Kirkuk Massacre of 1924 of Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen. (See of 1933)
On 1 October 1922, the Royal Air Force (RAF) elements stationed in Iraq were reorganized into the RAF Iraq Command, which came about partially as a result of the 1920 revolt. This new command was primarily designed to suppress any threats to the Hashemite monarchy. Air control was considered by the British government as a more cost-effective method of controlling large areas of territory than land forces, an idea that was heavily promoted by RAF officer Hugh Trenchard. During the 1920s and 30s, the RAF Iraq Command participated in the suppression of numerous protests and revolts against the Hashemite monarchy. Overseas commands: Iraq, India and the Far East, section "RAF Iraq." In: Air of authority: A history of RAF organization. Retrieved 2015-06-20.Hazelton, Fran 1989. "Iraq to 1963" in CARDRI, "Saddam’s Iraq: Revolution or Reaction?" London 1989. p3 Historian Elie Kedourie noted that "the North of as a whole had to be coerced into by the Royal Air Force." When the Kurdish leader Sheikh Mahmud launched an armed rebellion, the British used the newly established Iraqi army to suppress the revolt, but that proved ineffective. The British then resorted to deploying the RAF, which suppressed the revolt. In the same period, rebellions by the Shia in the South were also suppressed by the RAF.
The British decision at the Cairo Conference to establish an indigenous Iraqi army was significant. In Iraq, as in most of the developing world, the military establishment has been the best organized institution in an otherwise weak political system. Thus, while Iraq's body politic crumbled under immense political and economic pressure throughout the monarchic period, the military gained increasing power and influence; moreover, because the officers in the new army were by necessity Sunnis who had served under the Ottomans, while the lower ranks were predominantly filled by Shia tribal elements, Sunni dominance in the military was preserved.
With the signing of the 1930 Treaty and the settling of the Mosul Question, Iraqi politics took on a new dynamic. The emerging class of Sunni and Shia landowning tribal sheikhs vied for positions of power with wealthy and prestigious urban-based Sunni families and with Ottoman-trained army officers and bureaucrats. Because Iraq's newly established political institutions were the creation of a foreign power, and because the concept of democratic government had no precedent in Iraqi history, the politicians in Baghdad lacked legitimacy and never developed deeply rooted constituencies. Thus, despite a constitution and an elected assembly, Iraqi politics was more a shifting alliance of important personalities and cliques than a democracy in the Western sense. The absence of broadly based political institutions inhibited the early nationalist movement's ability to make deep inroads into Iraq's diverse social structure.
The Mandatory administration continued to operate until 1932.Ongsotto et.al. Asian History Module-based Learning Ii' 2003 Ed. p69. [4]
In 1936 and 1937 various protests and revolts broke out against the Iraqi government, with the main issues centering around agrarian issues and conscription into the armed forces. These were suppressed by the Iraqi government with assistance from the RAF Iraq Command, with Kedourie writing that the "killing, it seems, was indiscriminate, and old men, women and children were the victims." An armed revolt which broke out in 1937 over agrarian issues and conscription was also "put down with the help of indiscriminate aerial bombing." During these disturbances, Shia religious leaders were expelled from Iraq due to being Persians. Kedourie describes the monarchy as despotic, with a record "full of bloodshed, treason and rapine" and "however pitiful its end we may know that it was implicit in its beginning."
In his assessment of the British mandate and the Iraqi monarchy, historians Kanan Makiya considers the British mandate and its institutions more as "agents of modernisation" than colonialism:
Kedourie's judgement, however, is different:
If Makiya is referring to economic development in his account of the British modernising legacy in Iraq, an authoritative study demonstrates that Iraq's productivity in agriculture, the most important sector at the time, in fact declined from 275 kg per acre in 1920 to an average of 238 kg per acre between 1953 and 1958.M.S. Hasan. 1970. The Role of Foreign Trade in the Economic Development of Iraq, 1864–1964: A Study in the Growth of a Dependent Economy, in M.A. Cook, ed., Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, London. p352
Under the British mandate a new ruling class of 'government shaikhs' was created. "Many of them the, reported Major Pulley to the British commissioner in Baghdad in 1920, "were small men of no account until we made them powerful and rich." The Civil Commissioner Wilson reported on his part that the Shaikhs "were in most cases directly dependent on the civil administration for the positions they held; realising that their positions entailed corresponding obligations, they co-operated actively with the political officers."India Office LP & S, 10/4722/18/1920/8/6305, in Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, p277
In a dispatch by a British official to London in 1928, there was a description of how the electoral system worked: the government's provincial governors were in fact election agents who drew up lists of those to be elected and of those who would do the electing. Elections to "the chamber of deputies and appointments to the senate," comments Keeourie, "were an additional weapon in the hands of the government wherewith the better to control the country."
Beginning in 1923, British and Iraqi negotiators held acrimonious discussions over the new oil concession. The major obstacle was Iraq's insistence on a 20 percent equity participation in the company; this figure had been included in the original TPC concession to the Turks and had been agreed upon at Sanremo for the Iraqis. In the end, despite strong nationalist sentiments against the concession agreement, the Iraqi negotiators acquiesced to it. The League of Nations was soon to vote on the disposition of Mosul, and the Iraqis feared that, without British support, Iraq would lose the area to Turkey. In March 1925, an agreement was concluded that contained none of the Iraqi demands. The TPC, now renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), was granted a full and complete concession for a period of seventy-five years. Iraq: A Country Study, Helen Chapin Metz, in Iraq: Issues, Historical Background, Bibliography, ed. Leon M. Jefferies, Nova Publishers, 2003, page 146
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