(Oxford Historical Monographs) Robert S. G. Fletcher - British Imperialism and 'The Tribal Question' - Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in The Middle East, 1919 - 1936-Oxford University Pre

BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND
‘THE TRIBAL QUESTION’

OX F O R D H I S TO R I C A L M O N O G R A P H S
The Oxford Historical Monographs series publishes some of the best
Oxford University doctoral theses on historical topics, especially
those likely to engage the interest of a broad academic readership.
Editors
P. C L AV I N J . D A RW I N L. GOLDMAN
J. INNES D . PA R ROT T S. SMITH
B . WA R D - PE R K I N S J . L . WAT TS
British Imperialism and
‘The Tribal Question’
Desert Administration and Nomadic
Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936
RO B E RT S . G . F L E TC H E R
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Robert S. G. Fletcher 2015
The moral rights of the author‌have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950694
ISBN 978–0–19–872931–0
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Jacket photograph: J. B. Glubb, ‘Mudawara Fort’, Trans-Jordan, 1933.
The National Archives (UK): CO 831/23/13.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For Elsie Gray,
storyteller,
1921–2004
Acknowledgements
Writing this book about deserts has by no means been as lonely as the
subject matter might suggest. So many people have offered advice and
support that I fear I have not the space to thank them all in print. But
some friends and colleagues have been so encouraging that I would like to
take this opportunity to offer them my special thanks.
In the UK the Oxford Centre for Global History, Nuffield College,
Magdalen College, and the University of Exeter have all offered institu-
tional and financial support for the preparation and writing of this book.
I am particularly grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council
for funding my doctoral research. The William Alexander Fleet Fellowship
sent me to Princeton University for a year, transforming the scope of my
work. In Washington, DC, my fellow participants on National History
Center’s International Seminar on Decolonization opened my eyes to a
range of possibilities at just the right time: the Mellon Foundation sup-
ports this excellent programme.
The project would have made little headway without the patience and
advice of many librarians and archivists. Their institutions are listed in the
bibliography, but I am especially grateful to Debbie Usher of St Antony’s
College, Oxford, and John and Virginia Murray of 50 Albemarle Street,
for their particular kindness and expertise. Norman Cameron, Secretary
of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, afforded me invaluable access to the
Society’s uncatalogued records and proceedings. When the work began
I knew little about Claude Scudamore Jarvis, and certainly did not antici-
pate spending so much time in his company. That I ultimately did so owes
much to the forbearance of his grandson, Julian Eagle, who responded to
my cold call with the greatest openness imaginable.
Looking back, I realize now just how much of this project has been
worked out aloud, in conversations, seminar presentations and conference
papers. I am extremely grateful to the many conveners who gave me a
chance to speak, at Oxford, Birmingham, York, Princeton, Rutgers, Halle,
the American University in Cairo, the Institute of Historical Research, and
(in what must have been a real leap of faith, given the subject matter) the
National Maritime Museum. My ideas for a possible book on this topic
first began to crystallize while a student in Oxford with Andy Cohen,
Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Dennis Montgomery, and Rob Upton. Their
companionship has left me with the fondest memories of that time. Rob
has remained a good friend and welcome critic throughout the writing of
viii Acknowledgements
this book. Together with Lawrence Bishop and Chris Bates, he also got me
to the church on time.
As the book took form, I gained much from the encouragement and
advice of colleagues who found time to talk through my ideas and com-
ment on early drafts. Martin Thomas, Roger Louis, Susan Pedersen,
Yoav Alon, James Onley, Benjamin Thomas White, Alexander Morrison,
Andrew Thompson, James Belich, Patricia Clavin, Johann Bussow, Astrid
Meier, Linda Colley, David Cannadine, Michael Collins, Robert Johnson,
Ben Mountford, and Tamson Pietsch have all helped to broaden this pro-
ject’s horizons. At Oxford University Press, John Watts and Stephanie
Ireland were ever the steady hands on the tiller. Above all, I am indebted
to John Darwin for his enthusiasm, insight, and wit. Any mistakes in what
follows are all my own.
My wife, Christine, put up with a great deal during the project’s ges-
tation, endlessly moving home to help me see it through. I owe her my
thanks and my apologies in equal measure. Ozaki Yoma has shown us
both great kindness that we hope, some day, to repay. My families on both
sides of the Atlantic have been much more supportive than I deserve; my
Mum and Dad gave selflessly, as ever. It is testament to the generosity and
understanding of all the people in my life that they won’t mind that—after
all the help they gave—I dedicated this book to someone else.
Exeter
December 2013
Contents
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables xi

List of Abbreviations xii
Introduction: The View from the Frontier 1
PA RT I
1. Asking ‘the Tribal Question’: The Royal Central Asian
Society in the World 19
2. Beating the Bounds: The Growth of British
Desert Administration 67
PA RT I I
3. Running the Corridor 133
4. Making the Desert Bloom? Development, Ideology, and the
Future of the Steppe 183
PA RT I I I
5. ‘Somewhat Light Soil’: The Eclipse of British
Desert Administration 241
Conclusion: Deserts, Nomads, and Empire in
the Interwar World 273
Appendix: Dramatis Personae 285

Bibliography 289
Index 317
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
MAPS
I.1 The Middle East in 1923 5

1.1 The Royal Central Asian Society in the World 26
1.2 ‘The World Island’ 61
2.1 Trans-Desert Communications Routes, 1919–1939 73
3.1 The Desert Corridor, c.1930 154
NB: All maps except 1.2 prepared by the author using MapInfo Professional 10.5.
FIGURES
4.1 ‘Peake’s Garden in the Town of Amman, the Site of a Ruined

Byzantine Church’ 194
4.2 ‘Arab Garden in the Wadi Gedeirah’ 202
4.3 ‘Bedouin Watering Places’ 212
A1 Claude Scudamore Jarvis 285
A2 Frederick Gerard Peake 286
A3 John Bagot Glubb 287
TA B L E S
1.1 RCAS Membership, 1907–1934 25

2.1 Trans-Desert Overland Traffic between Baghdad and Damascus,
1926–1933 76
List of Abbreviations
AIR Air Ministry
BGND Ralph Bagnold papers
BRUN Chisholm Dunbar Brunton papers
CADN Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes
CAC Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge
CNIB Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, Cairo
CO Colonial Office
FBCP Fonds Beyrouth, Cabinet Politique
FDA Frontier Districts Administration (Egypt)
FGP Frederick Gerard Peake papers
FO Foreign Office
GLLD George Lloyd papers
HRPD Harold Richard Patrick Dickson papers
IWM Imperial War Museum Department of Documents, Lambeth
JBG John Bagot Glubb papers
JBG(NA) John Bagot Glubb papers (new acquisition)
JM John Murray archive
JRCAS Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society
LRDG Long Range Desert Group
MECA Middle Eastern Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford
RAF Royal Air Force
RCAS Royal Central Asian Society (from 1901-1931, the Central Asian
Society)
RGS Royal Geographical Society
RSAA Royal Society for Asian Affairs
SJPH St John Philby papers
SSO Special Service Officer
T Treasury
TJDR Monthly Report for the Administration of the Trans-Jordan Deserts
TJFF Trans-Jordan Frontier Force
TNA The National Archives (UK)
WO War Office
Introduction
The View from the Frontier
In the spring of 1920, Claude Scudamore Jarvis took up his new post as
District Commander of Egypt’s Kharga oasis. ‘It was’, he reflected, ‘not
a particularly attractive job.’ Lying in a vast depression in the southern
Libyan Desert, nowhere yet in his career of service had struck him as
‘so starkly horrible’. Its waters were malarial and the surrounding sands
burned. Descending from the escarpment to the oasis floor gave the
awful impression ‘of leaving this world altogether’. His first glimpse of
his new headquarters and home left Jarvis ‘appalled’, and wondering
‘what sort of effect it was having on my unfortunate wife, who had left
England and green fields so recently’. Nonetheless, here was work to
be done:
[I]‌f one accepts service in a desert Administration one must take the rough
with the smooth and expect rather more of the former than the latter; also,
to refuse promotion when it is offered because the post is situated in an unat-
tractive spot is fatal to one’s future, so we went to Kharga.1
Jarvis’ post may have been isolated, but his experience was not unique. In
the years between the two world wars, small groups of British officers were
sent out to try to control the remote desert frontiers and nomadic societies
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. While the twenties
roared, Wall Street crashed, and Europe began to re-arm, they threw them-
selves into desert affairs. They mapped new terrains and patrolled new fron-
tiers, recorded the migrations of nomadic pastoralists and experimented in
desert agriculture. They spent years—even whole careers—attempting to
secure the consent of the nomadic peoples they met. They took up posi-
tions in squat houses, tents, and beau geste forts, in oases, beside aerodromes
1
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 39–41.
2 British Imperialism and ‘The Tribal Question’
and on rolling grazing grounds, from the Western Desert of Egypt to the
Southern Desert of Iraq. In time, they came to style themselves ‘desert
administrators’, working along a ‘desert corridor’ of the British Empire.
This is a less familiar interwar story. From a distance of nearly a cen-
tury, the mere fact of such activity seems remarkable. But it is nonethe-
less central to understanding how Britain’s interwar empire functioned.
Anthropologists have come to consider this interwar encounter a critical
moment for the region’s Bedouin communities. Historians of Britain and
its empire, however, are only beginning to examine its implications. A new
arena of interaction awaits our exploration.
This book pieces together British activity in the deserts of the Middle
East. It examines the careers of men such as Claude Jarvis in light of
a heightened engagement with deserts and nomads worldwide. Officers
based in the region and beyond knew this as ‘the Tribal Question’: an
empire-wide debate over the nature of nomadism, the future of arid envi-
ronments, and the challenges both posed to the perpetuation of British
rule. Between the wars a patchwork of ‘desert administrations’ came into
being, as British officials, Bedouin shaykhs, and nationalist politicians
jostled to influence desert affairs. Techniques of coercion, collaboration,
and control all feature prominently in the chapters below, as we follow
the rise, operation, and fall of British desert administration. But this is
not a purely political story. The task of desert administration was also
an intellectually formative one, and ideas about nomads and dreams of
making the desert bloom were all nourished during this period. These
sometimes survived contact with desert conditions; just as often we catch
them being worn down and remade by the abrasive action of the sands.
The events of this book largely take place around the Syrian Desert,
a vast and arid plain between Sinai, Aleppo, and the head of the Persian
Gulf. At the start of the twentieth century it was home to a number
of powerful Bedouin groups, the ‘Anaza and the Shammar foremost
among them. Its boundaries lie within many states today, and strad-
dled multiple colonial jurisdictions back then. Here, the challenges
faced by Jarvis and his colleagues were as varied as the stakes were
high: many expected the future communications of the British Empire
to pass across its surface. For all this diversity, this book argues for the
merits of examining the phenomenon of British desert administration
in the round, shifting focus, as with a compound microscope, between
different strengths of magnification. Although the following chapters
concentrate on a particular place in time, they are equally concerned
to show how common understandings of deserts and nomads evolved
across the region’s political boundaries, the empire at large, and even
across the globe. The importance of the wider interconnection of
Introduction 3
deserts, nomads, and empires in the interwar world provides a thread

running through our story, and a question to which we will ultimately
return.
Desert administration generated a remarkable record of activ-
ity, and involved a striking commitment of time and resources. But
that record is seldom reflected in established accounts of Britain’s
‘moment’ in the Middle East. Drawn to the commanding heights of
political society in London, Cairo, Jerusalem, Amman, and Baghdad,
we have tended to emphasize the scaling-down of British commit-
ments between the wars, rather than deepening interest in ‘periph-
eral’ societies. The period is synonymous with the ‘crisis of empire’,
as British power was squeezed between the pressures of demobiliza-
tion, financial retrenchment, and rising anti-colonial nationalism.2
In the Middle East, British influence would also have to be squared
with that of a new international organization, the League of Nations.3
As such, the interwar years are widely characterized in terms of ‘a
falling-back of imperial power, carried out in a variety of modes’. 4 In
such histories, British consideration of their nomadic subjects appears
only obliquely, often through examinations of land reform propos-
als.5 While there is no shortage of work on the development of Arab
nationalism in the interwar years, or on the period’s religious, eth-
nic, and dynastic tensions, historical studies of the place of nomadic
societies within the new political landscape are less common.6 Even
histories of Britain’s new Middle Eastern mandates can fail to find
space for desert affairs.
The omission is understandable, if unfortunate. Before 1914 Britain
had a long history of involvement in the Middle East, but it had tended
to be confined to the coastal and riverain towns and cities. For much
of the nineteenth century the fundamental aims of British policy—to
preserve the integrity of the Ottoman domains, restrict Russian and
French influence in the eastern Mediterranean and uphold the maritime
2
The phrase is John Gallagher’s: ‘Nationalisms’. One recent study of the British
mandate for Iraq presents itself as ‘an examination of British colonialism’s dying
days’: Dodge, Inventing Iraq, p. xii. For more on the military dimension of this ‘crisis’,
see Jeffery, British Army.
3
The scholarship on international institutions, and the League in particular, has been
greatly revitalized in recent years. See Pedersen, ‘Mandates System’; Clavin, Securing the
World Economy; Mazower, Governing the World; Rosenberg, ‘Transnational Currents’.
4
Gallagher, Decline, p. 109.
5
Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ‘Transformation’.
6
As Martin Thomas notes: Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’, p. 540. Robert Blecher describes
comparable trends in the historiography of mandatory Syria: Blecher, ‘Desert Medicine’,
p. 253.
routes of empire—required only a limited and littoral presence in the

region itself. Matters were largely left in the hands of the Royal Navy and
the Foreign Office in the west, and the Bombay (later Indian) Marine
and Government of India in the east.7 Beyond their reach, the peoples
and places of the Syrian Desert remained substantially unknown to the
British. The occupation of Egypt in 1882 began an exception of sorts,
but even here the ‘veiled protectorate’ stood largely aloof from desert
affairs, its attention firmly fixed on the Nile Valley, the Suez Canal, and
the Mediterranean coast. European interests (and Europeans themselves)
remained clustered in maritime enclaves or ‘bridgeheads’: Alexandria
stood as an imagined beacon of light on the threshold of a darker hin-
terland.8 A variety of conditions conspired to make the region’s interior
a daunting environment for any prospective empire: its location at the
junction of competing imperial projects; its social and cultural hetero-
geneity, born of successive of waves of migration, trade and conquest;
the aridity and inscrutability of its vast and sparse hinterlands; and the
advantages, in mobility and in military force, of the nomadic populations
beyond the shoreline.9
The First World War shook the hold of some, but not all these condi-
tions. When the dust of war and peace-making settled, Britain had emerged
as the paramount power across a great swathe of the Middle East. This was
an astonishing forward surge in its influence and control. Britain’s major
imperial rivals had been banished from the scene. Its armies had fought
from the Canal to the Tigris in unprecedented numbers, while new tech-
nological capabilities, such as the aircraft and the motor car, raised hopes of
knowing the interior as never before. By the outbreak of the Second World
War a chain of new oilfields was being surveyed, while maps of the region
itself had taken on that patchwork quality so recognizable today (see Map
I.1). Yet predominance brought its own problems. It was only now that
British officialdom came into prolonged contact with the Syrian Desert
for the first time. This remained a challenging environment in which to
operate, with its great distances, harsh climate, low-population density
and powerful and mobile peoples. In many ways, these difficulties belied
the cartographic fiction that the region had been straightforwardly and
decisively partitioned. Among the Bedouin, the war had undermined the
authority of some shaykhs, raised the hopes of others, and given modern
7
Holland, Blue Water Empire; Blyth, Empire of the Raj; Onley, Arabian Frontier; Hoskins,
British Routes.
8
Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead. For the bridgehead concept in imperial history, see
Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians’.
9
The Ottoman Empire equally struggled to dominate its arid hinterlands, as discussed
further in Chapter 2.
T U R K E Y
ALEXANDRETTA
ALEPPO
LEGEND MOSUL
S
CY
PRU S Y R I A
I R
KIRKUK
BRITISH MANDATED
A
TERRITORY
SE
TRIPOLI
N
N
NO
PALMYRA
A N
EA
BEIRUT
BA
AN
LE
FRENCH MANDATED
R
TERRITORY
R
E
HAIFA DAMASCUS
IT D
E RAMADI BAGHDAD
E
M
RUTBAH
STIN
AMMAN
ALEXANDRIA JERUSALEM N S- I R A Q KARBALA
PA L E T RA
KAF NAJAF
AN
EL ARISH
ISMAILIA
D
SINAI
J OR NASIRIYAH
PENINSULA
CAIRO SUEZ (EGYPT)
MA’AN BASRA
AQABA JAUF
K U WA I T
HE
EGYPT
DJ
NEJD
AZ
RE
DS
EA HA'IL
Map I.1 The Middle East in 1923

arms and ammunition to all. The desert itself was a source of beguilement,
too, inviting grand plans to remake or transform its expanses, while frus-
trating many a scheme in practice. These issues and many others besides—
from anti-smuggling operations in Sinai and desert development projects
in Trans-Jordan to Bedouin raiding and recruitment in southern Iraq—
were encapsulated by British interest in ‘the Tribal Question’. They have
seldom been explored as such, but form the central problems with which
this book is concerned.
This is not to say that aspects of this history have been completely over-
looked. A small number of scholars have begun to suggest the possibilities
of exploring imperial activity in the region’s desert areas. Collectively, their
work points to the range of undertakings awaiting further investigation,
including frontier regulation, collaboration, intelligence and policing,
tax collection, land reform, sedentarization and public works projects.10
Important as this work has been, it has not made amends for the relative
neglect of the subject. It is still possible to produce books on the British
Middle East which make no reference to desert administration at all, or
which confine discussion of the region’s desert areas to the narrowly legal
and diplomatic question of ‘boundary drawing in the desert’.11 Our gaze
still defaults to the rhythms and personalities of urban politics and diplo-
macy. Such studies of ‘tribal policy’ as we have are often state-centric, view-
ing ‘remote’ desert hinterlands from the perspective of national centres.
Most are also written on the basis of a single national experience.
This is a start, but such national studies can occlude the workings of
wider influences, patterns, and flows.12 Few accounts dwell on the divi-
sions and debates among imperial approaches to the Bedouin, or the
variable, changing nature of policy. Most significantly, we are yet to fully
engage with the ideas behind differing policy proscriptions, or to ask
how knowledge was shaped, transferred, and contested over the period.
Britain’s Tribal Question influenced events in the deserts of the Middle
10
Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’; Perkins, ‘Colonial Administration’; Satia, Spies in Arabia;
Alon, Making of Jordan.
11
For a classic study in this vein, see Wilkinson, Arabia’s Frontiers.
12
Of these, Alon’s is by far the most detailed, though even he may overstate his case, and
overlook important connections, by seeing Britain’s approach to Trans-Jordan’s nomads as
‘unique’. See Alon, Making of Jordan. For a taste of the deeper history that Britain’s desert
presence deserves, consider the treatment received by their mandatory neighbours, the
French. Perhaps benefiting from a more explicit concept of ‘rule by experts’, there is a readi-
ness to view French steppe activity from an imperial perspective, and much excellent work
detailing how networks of influence and exchange informed local ‘tribal policies’. See Burke,
‘Comparative View’; Mizrahi, Genèse; Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’, pp. 547, 551–553; Bayly,
‘French Anthropology’; Pouillon and Rivet, Robert Montagne; Métral, ‘Robert Montagne’;
Trégan, ‘l’Institut Français’.
Introduction 7
East and was influenced by them in turn; this wider, imperial dimension
still awaits exploration.
In recovering the history of British desert administration, this book
touches on a number of pasts: that of Britain’s global empire and of British
visions of the world; the experiences of Bedouin groups across the interwar
Syrian Desert; the origins of the modern nation-states of Egypt, Jordan,
and Iraq. It builds on the historical literatures of all these places and peo-
ples, but because it adopts a different point of view, many familiar features
will appear here in a different perspective, and take on another mean-
ing. In this book I have sought to direct attention away from the urban
seats of power with which we historians are most comfortable and towards
their desert ‘hinterlands’: to take in the view from the frontier. The view
from the frontier offers a corrective to more state-centric studies, in which
‘marginal’ areas receive marginal treatment, or are assumed to conform to
trends readily visible in urban centres. (In an age in which more than half
of us live in cities, empathizing with the inhabitants of very different land-
scapes does not always come easily.) The view from the frontier also avoids
the trap of reading backwards from our present: of privileging the histories
of national projects that were by no means certain of success at the time. It
demands a transnational approach, for British desert administration took
shape across multiple political regimes. Most of all, the view from the
frontier invites us to revisit Britain’s imperial past, and its ‘moment’ in the
Middle East, along a path less travelled.
Placing the Tribal Question front and centre reveals a British fascina-
tion with nomads: a different way of looking at the empire and the world
beyond the familiar lenses of race, class, and gender. In tracing its course,
we discover a wider community of experts circulating and contesting ideas
about deserts and nomads in a rapidly closing world, and an ideology
that put the ‘modes of life’ first. It brings to life an official or bureaucratic
mindset quite different from those that have loomed largest in the past,
and adds to our understanding of the richness, variety, and complexity of
Britain’s relationships with empire. The record of British desert adminis-
tration further challenges received ideas about boundary-making in the
modern Middle East. However much the ‘desert corridor’ was divided by
political boundaries, dynamic flows of people, animals, goods, and prac-
tices worked to mitigate their impact. In place of being remote backwaters,
beyond the calculations of politics, the steppe frontiers of Middle Eastern
states should be reimaged as hubs of rivalry in themselves, their distinct
dynamics impacting like waves upon the polities around them. For the
British, effective control of these desert frontiers became a touchstone of
their wider imperial authority. The view from the frontier reveals a British
Empire expanding into new areas even in the interwar years, offering
evidence—from a most unlikely place—of its ongoing vitality. This was

a particular and dynamic moment in the history of British imperialism,
when techniques of rule, ideas about indigenous societies—even percep-
tions of the world’s deserts themselves—were subject to review.
* * *
Three theoretical frameworks have informed the writing of this book. The
first flows from the revised understandings of pastoral nomadism devel-
oped by anthropologists and political scientists over the last thirty years.
In the 1970s, frameworks of analysis based around ‘the desert against the
sown’ were disputed, and a new concept of nomadism began to emerge.
Nomadic societies, it was now argued, seldom existed in isolated habi-
tats. Instead, the ‘close interplay’ between grazing and cultivation fostered
much more complex relationships.13 Further revisions followed in the
1980s, as typologies equating pastoral nomadism with ‘tribe’ were dis-
credited for failing to consider the variety of ecological contexts in which
tribes could exist. Bedouin economies were now understood as being more
diverse and sophisticated than previously thought, affected by a range of
variables and factors.14 At the same time, tribal structures and systems
were shown to demonstrate a ‘continuing viability’ in the modern world,
and their contributions to state formation were rediscovered.15 As devel-
opment, conservation, and eco-tourism place further pressures on the
region’s arid and semi-arid zones, scholars have continued to revisit the
relationship between nomads and the state—the subject of three special
issues of one anthropological journal within a decade.16
This scholarship challenges many commonplace assumptions about
nomadism, but prompts further questions for historians of empire.
In a sense, an imbalance has developed in the literature. While efforts
to recover nomads’ agency and adaptation have left us with a more
nuanced understanding of nomadic societies, they are too often written
against an undifferentiated ‘state’. When writing about policies towards
nomadic groups, for example, some are reluctant to distinguish between
pre-colonial authorities, a reified ‘colonial state’ and successor nation
states—surely different governments and forms of ‘state’ warrant more
subtle treatment.17 Others, writing from the inverse position, assume
13
Nelson, Desert and the Sown.
14
Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’; Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World;
Khazanov and Wink, Nomads in the Sedentary World; Leder and Streck, Shifts and Drifts.
15
Khoury and Kostiner, ‘Introduction’, p. 19.
16
Salih, ‘Perspectives on Pastoralists’; Klute, ‘Nomads and the State’; Lenhart and
Casmir, ‘Environment’.
17
Emanuel Marx, for example, finds their ‘stereotyped images of the nomads’ to be
essentially identical: Marx, ‘Political Economy’, p. 88.
Introduction 9
nomads themselves to be ‘the ultimate administrative nightmare’.18 As

James Scott has written, ‘the state has always seemed to be the enemy of
“people who move around”, to put it crudely’.19 This may overlook evi-
dence of disagreement over policy formation, emphasizing a consistency
of approach that lies uneasily with the archival record. Political science,
meanwhile, has tended to consider imperial ‘tribal policy’ only insofar as
it casts light on the formation and consolidation of contemporary Middle
Eastern states.20 For the historian of empire, the new understandings of
nomadism provide a reason to revisit the subject, not the final word on
the matter.
A second framework is provided by the revived literature of global fron-
tiers and borderlands.21 For many years, the study of borders foregrounded
legal, diplomatic, and geographical questions about how they were made.
Frederick Jackson Turner spoke of a frontier instead—more a region than
a bureaucratic line—but ‘between savagery and civilization’, in his formu-
lation, and ever heading towards its ‘close’. A new generation of scholars,
in contrast, is more interested in exploring how borderlands have acted as
zones of cultural interpenetration, affecting the lives of those around them.
Coupled with a sense of how power relations play out in these areas, and
are informed by them in turn, frontiers and borderlands are being reposi-
tioned as places where history is made—the beginning, not the end, of the
story. Such an approach is alive to the variety of ways in which different state
actors might engage with ‘peripheral’ zones, and explores the gap between
the rhetoric of ‘closed’ frontiers and the realities of borderland life. By track-
ing the flows between areas on both sides of a border, borderlands cease to
be the fractured ‘margins’ of discrete nation-states, and can be reimagined as
places in themselves, with ‘a more active historical role’.22 To date, most of
these insights have come from studies of early modern Europe, postcolonial
Africa, and the North American continent.23 Historians of the Middle East
stand to profit by bringing this perspective to bear. It also speaks to many of
the concerns of the ‘new’ imperial history as it has developed since the 1990s,
including reservations over the use of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in our models of
18
Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 228. 19
Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 1.
20
Khoury and Kostiner, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
21
For an introduction to this, see Baud and van Schendel, ‘Borderlands’; Donnan and
Wilson, Borders; Citino, ‘Global Frontier’; Wilson and Donnan, Border Identities.
22
Baud and van Schendel, ‘Borderlands’, p. 241.
23
I have found the following studies particularly useful: Nugent and Asiwaju, African
Boundaries; Martínez, Border People; White, Middle Ground; Asiwaju and Adeniyi,
Borderlands in Africa; Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades; van Schendel, ‘Geographies’; Faragher,
Frederick Jackson Turner; Adelman and Aron, ‘Borderlands to Borders’; Scott, Art of Not
Being Governed.
imperial expansion.24 Thinking with new conceptions of frontiers and bor-

derlands may help in recovering ideas and experiences ‘that took other routes
than those shaped by the metropole–colony axis alone’.25
A final framework reflects the ongoing reimagination of Britain’s empire
as a networked entity, constituted by a variety of flows of people, objects,
and ideas. In this understanding of the British world system identities,
outlooks, and administrative practices were not simply exported from the
imperial centre; some were developed in the empire and ‘beamed back’ to
Britain, and others developed ‘across multiple spaces’ through processes
of transposition, translation, comparison, and generalization.26 The result
is a portrait of Britain’s empire that better reflects the ‘chaotic pluralism’
of British society itself (with multiple visions of empire being articulated
at any one time), and which underlines the contingent and incomplete
nature of expansion.27 To make sense of all this, historians have turned to
the task of resurrecting ‘imperial careers’ and reconstructing transnational
networks. One important collection has demonstrated the value of trac-
ing individual life stories to reveal ideas, practices and identities emerging
‘trans-imperially as they moved from one imperial site to another’.28 By
emphasizing the multiple trajectories connecting different imperial sites,
‘imperial careering’ offers a way of ‘unsettling taken-for-granted categories’
and opening new topics for discussion. What role, for example, have such
networks played in creating and consuming knowledge about the regions,
peoples and ‘Questions’ that together made up the British Empire? Why
are some networks more effective than others in the contexts of impe-
rial expansion and rule, and what relationship have they had with more
institutionalized hierarchies and the state? In what circumstances did their
efforts to connect diverse contacts and communities succeed in overcom-
ing social, geographical and political barriers? By plotting how connec-
tions were formed and sundered between sites over time, we may even
uncover new ‘regions’ of activity awaiting our analysis.29
24
For criticism of spatial frameworks in the work of Robinson and Gallagher and Cain
and Hopkins, see Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits’.
25
Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire.
26
Bridge and Fedorowich, British World; Lambert and Lester, ‘Imperial Spaces’, p. 25.
27
Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians’.
28
Lambert and Lester, ‘Imperial Spaces’, p. 2 (emphasis in original). The study of colo-
nial policing took an early lead in this: Anderson and Killingray, Policing. This should also be
seen alongside a wider re-appraisal of the value of historical biography: Nasaw, ‘Historians
and Biography’. Comparable developments exist in the field of historical geography and
have been conducive to the emergence of a ‘new prosopography’ too: Daniels and Nash,
‘Lifepaths’; Keats-Rohan, Prosopography.
29
For the network concept and its implications for historical research, see Lester,
‘Imperial Circuits’; Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, pp. 45–63; Glaisyer,
‘Networking’; Holton, ‘Inclusion’.
Introduction 11
The return of the biographical method—‘the profession’s unloved step-

child’—is by no means without its critics.30 But the study of personal
connections and forms of social organization can provide a window onto
the systems, public worlds, and historical processes in which our sub-
jects took part. It can be especially valuable in tracing the complexities
of the imperial and global past, thereby updating a long-standing inter-
est in institutional history and the workings of the ‘official mind’.31 It
also has much to offer the study of the interwar Middle East. Since the
late 1990s, an international research programme on the comparative his-
tory of the region’s mandates has challenged historians to seek out figures
and communities who ‘bridged the artificial boundaries created by the
mandatory powers’.32 Both Bedouin communities and the local officers
tasked with desert control fit this description. From the Western Desert
of Egypt to the Southern Desert of Iraq, British desert officers had much
in common. Bedouin groups also faced political, ecological, economic,
and technological challenges that cannot be explained by national his-
tories alone. Exploring the histories of both through a framework based
on the mandates can reveal important connections between discrete sites,
but it can also ‘prevent us from seeing the significant commonalities that
existed with other . . . colonial situations during the inter-war period’. The
gauntlet has been laid down to establish how far the British and French
mandates made use of models and assumptions ‘derived from experience
in Algeria, India, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, or further afield’.33 As Peter
Sluglett and Nadine Méouchy remind us, historians of the Middle East
must remain particularly alive to areas of study ill-suited to the concerns
and priorities of national history writing.34
Tracing the careers of Britain’s desert administrators reveals a sphere
of activity that strictly national histories can overlook. The overlapping
careers of three such officials are woven throughout this book; together
they were responsible for a broad arc of desert and steppe. Each became
established as a leading authority on the Bedouin and the problem of
desert administration.
Claude Scudamore Jarvis (1879–1953) we have already met, though
he would make his name in happier times as Governor of the Sinai from
1923 to 1936. Jarvis was an administrator and commentator well known
30
Nasaw, ‘Historians and Biography’.
31
Linda Colley has done much to advance the methodology in this context: Colley,
Elizabeth Marsh. See also: Brown, ‘Life Histories’; Thomas, ‘Boundaries of Biography’;
Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Bickers, Empire Made Me.
32
Two comprehensive volumes have emerged as part of this agenda: Méouchy, France,
Syrie et Liban; Méouchy and Sluglett, Mandates.
33
Khalidi, ‘Concluding Remarks’.
34
Méouchy and Sluglett, ‘General Introduction’, p. 20.
to contemporaries, if less so today.35 Educated with no particular profes-

sion in mind, he had circumnavigated the world in the merchant marine
by the age of nineteen, before volunteering to fight in the South African
War. After military service in Ireland, Egypt, and Palestine, he was picked
in 1918 for Egypt’s fledgling Frontier Districts Administration, which
brought him into prolonged contact with nomadic societies across the
region until his retirement in 1936. A prolific author and lecturer on
desert administration, he was awarded the prestigious ‘Lawrence of Arabia
Memorial Medal’ by the Royal Central Asian Society in 1938 ‘for develop-
ment of the Sinai’.
Frederick Gerard Peake (1886–1970), the commander of Trans-Jordan’s
Arab Legion from 1924 to 1939, also had considerable interaction with
the Bedouin across his career, and came to allot nomads a specific place
in his conception of human history. Failing to pass into the Royal Navy,
Peake took a commission in the army in 1903, where service in India,
Egypt, the Sudan, and the Levant brought him to Trans-Jordan in 1920.
There, he was charged with coordinating its security forces, and would
remain until his retirement in 1939. He too lectured on the Bedouin and
the future of Trans-Jordan, and wrote widely: his History of Jordan and
its Tribes remains a reference work for Jordanian genealogists.36 In 1940,
Peake received the Society’s Lawrence Medal ‘for services to Trans-Jordan’.
John Bagot Glubb (1897–1986) is today the best known of these
three desert administrators. A military engineer by training, Glubb vol-
unteered for duty in Mesopotamia at the close of the First World War.
He established a reputation for his close work with Iraqi tribes as an RAF
Special Service Officer, and later as a civil administrator. In 1930 he was
transferred to Trans-Jordan to act as Peake’s second-in-command with
a special charge over the nomadic population, work considered so suc-
cessful and important as to make him the first recipient of the Lawrence
Medal, in 1936, ‘for pacification work in the north Arabian desert’. He
succeeded Peake three years later and commanded the Arab Legion until
1956, publishing some twenty-two books on the Middle East and his
career.
Jarvis, Peake, and Glubb are not historical unknowns, but historians
have tended to view them as isolated ‘Great Men’, with little awareness
of the interactions between them, or indeed of the wider community and
field of activity of which they were a part. Their own formulaic, ‘proconsu-
lar’ autobiographies only encourage this, casting themselves as lone agents
35
For the considerable commercial success of his books in British and colonial markets,
see JM: DN24, Jarvis to Murray, 24 Mar. 1938 and 22 Dec. 1938.
36
Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination.
Introduction 13
far from the centres of government.37 This book is wary of such portraits,
and also resists the urge, manifest in some recent scholarship, to deploy
individual desert officers as literary devices on which to hang generaliza-
tions about imperial rule.38 Instead, it embeds these officers within their
proper administrative contexts—the Arab Legion, the Frontier Districts
Administration, and the ranks of Special Service Officers—to uncover
moments of collaboration and exchange, and to register the impact of
their interactions upon policy. By reading these sources ‘against the grain’,
it is possible to get at Bedouin voices too, if more muted and inconstant
than one would like.39
The variety of official sources this involves, across a number of territo-
ries and jurisdictions, is proof enough that the categorization of the colo-
nial archive can obscure wider connections and arenas of activity. There
was no overarching official organization of British activity in the steppe,
and while some officers certainly became recognized as authorities on the
Tribal Question, this is not a study in ‘canonical texts’. Instead, tracing
British approaches to nomadic societies has involved sifting through dif-
fuse official and private materials, reconstructing the shape of British desert
administration, and teasing out the various understandings of nomadism
from officers’ decisions and writings. This task has been made possible by
the existence of a wider point of reference and further source of informa-
tion: the informal forum provided by the Royal Central Asian Society.40
Throughout the interwar years, the Royal Central Asian Society was
exercised by ‘the Tribal Question’, becoming a clearing-house for ques-
tions about nomads and their future on the frontiers of empire. Actively
concerned to promote debate among serving officers and between the gen-
erations, its core activities produced a wealth of material that has been all
37
Most of Jarvis’ books are autobiographical, his Half a Life most explicitly so. Jarvis
also wrote Peake’s biography, drawing heavily upon his unpublished memoirs, now with the
IWM: Jarvis, Arab Command. Glubb’s Arabian Adventures summarizes the author’s years in
Iraq; his Changing Scenes of Life reflects upon his career as a whole.
38
Glubb, for example, has been seen as ‘personifying empire’, embodying a homogenous
‘imperial culture’: Massad, Colonial Effects, p. 111.
39
Using the colonial archive in this way poses many interpretive challenges, but
should not be dismissed out of hand. For an example of what can be achieved, see Cronin,
Subalterns. I have found field intelligence reports, records of tribal disputes and arbitrations,
fragments of reported speech, petitions, queries, and complaints all useful in reconstructing
a Bedouin perspective in the chapters below. For further efforts in this vein, see Büssow,
‘Negotiating the Future’; Alon, ‘Silent Voices’; Fletcher, ‘Amarat’. Although I have also ben-
efitted from reading oral testimonies which earlier scholars have written down, this book is
based on the documentary record rather than interviews with descendants of the Bedouin
communities it features.
40
Royal charter was conferred on the Central Asian Society in 1931, but to avoid confu-
sion I refer to the Royal Central Asian Society (RCAS) throughout.
but neglected by professional historians. Regular news items, lectures, and

debates survive in its Journal. The uncatalogued archive of the Society’s
successor institution holds membership lists, minute books, the delib-
erations of its sub-committees and much else besides. Together with the
private papers and official records discussed above, these materials make
it possible to recreate the Society’s life, work, and scope, recovering ‘the
attitudes and patterns of work’ of an unofficial but imperial institution,
and ‘doing history that is broader and different in focus from older insti-
tutional history’.41 By exploring the careers of men like Jarvis, Peake, and
Glubb with one eye on the Society’s proceedings, it is possible to locate
their work within wider debates on nomads and colonial rule.
* * *
In the end, Jarvis got over his revulsion for Kharga. Over the next two
years he threw himself into the business of desert administration, recruit-
ing police, maintaining roads, fixing sand dunes, and dispensing justice,
often in the face of the perceived indifference of a distant ‘Headquarter
mind’. When an opportunity for transfer came up, he took it, but to
greater responsibilities in Sinai rather than in retreat to the fleshpots. By
the time he retired he had given eighteen years of his life to deserts, a long
time to spend in a form of exile ‘cut off from all the adjuncts of civilization
that the ordinary man enjoys’.42
This book tells the story of the rise of this new type of official, the
desert administrator. It explores the work that men like Jarvis did, their
place in Britain’s world system, and how they themselves made sense of it
all. It connects their careers with the wider attempts of multiple states to
penetrate arid frontiers in the interwar world, as a great belt of desert and
steppe, once outflanked by the maritime revolution, was progressively
encroached upon and pierced. It examines the difficulties administra-
tors experienced in doing this, the distinct regimes that emerged as a
result, and the legacies that have followed. At their heart, all empires are
about promoting certain forms of movement—of goods, ideas, labour,
and resources; of settlers, traders, investment, and troops—while restrict-
ing or curtailing the movements of others. The ideal of managing con-
nectivity in this way, to derive all the benefits and deflect unwanted
consequences, has often proved elusive. The tensions that might ensue
were exhibited vividly in the deserts of the interwar Middle East, where
nomads and imperial officials met at the Clapham Junction of the British
41
Brown, ‘Life Histories’, p. 591.
42
TNA: FO 141/539/1, Jarvis to Director-General, Frontiers Administration, 28 Nov.
1935. All archival references are to TNA unless otherwise specified.
Introduction 15
world system. This book explores what happened when these different
forms of mobility came into contact.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
Part I describes the contours of ‘the Tribal Question’: that heightened inter-
war interest in the world’s desert zones and nomadic peoples. Attention
shifted between locations in response to specific events but found a true
home among the officers and academics of the Royal Central Asian Society.
Chapter 1 examines the composition and activities of this organization,
plotting the key controversies that captured its attention. It reconstructs
the world as it appeared to Society members, discerning a Middle Eastern
‘desert corridor’ within a greater arid zone. By exploring the ideas that
shaped members’ activities, the chapter makes the case for the emergence
between the wars of a lost colonial profession of ‘desert administration’
and an outlook on deserts and nomads that did not always march in step
with that found among the empire’s settler societies.
Chapter 2 then approaches the history of the interwar Middle East with
this wider framework in mind. It accounts for the growth of the bureau-
cratic arrangements and military forces that made up desert administration
in Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, and argues for their centrality in anchor-
ing Britain’s regional presence. From a national perspective, the work of
these ‘marginal’ administrations on desert peripheries may have warranted
little interest. To imperial eyes, however, an emerging ‘desert corridor’ of
communications routes and administrative control assumed far greater
significance. Exploring the growth of British desert administration offers a
different perspective on the interwar histories of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and
Iraq, and complicates long-held views of British imperial decline.
Much of the history of Britain’s presence in the Middle East has been
written as a series of episodes, centred on the political units that became
nation-states. The two chapters in Part II develop the argument that the
‘desert corridor’ still exhibited dynamics of its own. Chapter 3 follows
these flows of people, animals, goods, and practices to uncover a wider
zone of interaction, straddling the boundaries of a number of states. Here,
two different forms of mobility worked to mitigate the impact of the
region’s new international boundaries: imperial route-building on the one
hand, and Bedouin patterns of migration, raiding, and trade on the other.
Seldom examined in tandem, their intersection helped to make the deserts
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf a distinct historical
space. By building on the growing literature on global borderlands, this
chapter approaches the areas on both sides of a border as a single unit of
analysis, offering a new understanding of its inhabitants and administra-

tive officials alike.
Chapter 4 develops this argument further by demonstrating how the
desert corridor became an intellectual arena as well as an administrative
zone, by turns receiving ideas about nomads and offering up solutions to
the wider problem of desert development. If attitudes towards nomads
and practices of desert administration were shuttled across the Middle
East, then institutions such as the Royal Central Asian Society worked to
facilitate exchange and debate on a global scale. Members circulated to
and from London, between sites in the Middle East, and across the world,
keeping abreast of the most recent academic studies of nomadism, debat-
ing best practice and comparing lessons from a wide range of territories.
Exploring these connections casts new light on the ideologies of empire.
British perceptions of the Bedouin were informed by wider ideas about
‘the modes of life’: a given society’s sedentary or nomadic basis, and a win-
dow onto its central ‘essence’ or nature. This chapter takes contemporary
interest in the ‘modes of life’ seriously, recovering another lens through
which British officials sought to make sense of their world.
Part III engages with the growing debate on decolonization. In explor-
ing the pressures mounting against British desert administration in the
later 1930s, it reveals what anti-colonial nationalism and a shifting geo-
political climate actually felt like on the ground. Looking ahead into the
1940s and 1950s, it charts the legacy of this interwar encounter for the
region’s successor states, and suggests how the dynamics of this desert zone
can unsettle conventions in periodization. Typically, historians stress the
devastating impact of boundary-making after the First World War. It was
only towards the end of the 1930s, however, as the working arrangements
between desert officers began to unravel, that desert boundaries ceased to
be quite so porous.
The final chapter explores how British desert administration increas-
ingly came under strain in a transformed international, political and stra-
tegic climate, and helps to recall the conditions that had enabled it in the
first place. It begins the task, continued in the conclusion, of thinking
about what was distinctive, and what more universal, about this interwar
window of increased desert engagement.
PA RT I
1
Asking ‘the Tribal Question’
The Royal Central Asian Society in the World
Many questions assume a very different aspect when viewed from a

different point of view. Ibn Saud’s viewpoint is frequently put before
the world at large, through the instrumentality of Mr Philby in the
London Press . . . The case of the Iraq nomad tribes has, however,
never been given to the world.1
Victory, armistice, and protracted diplomacy brought the British Empire

to its greatest territorial extent. But the sheer diversity of its modes and
arrangements made envisioning the whole increasingly difficult. Within
the Middle East alone, British primacy had come about through mandates,
protectorates, a colony, a condominium, and a succession of bilateral trea-
ties (with shaykhs, kings, and an emir). Few contemporaries—or histori-
ans since—could discern a greater system behind a confusing patchwork
of worldwide commitments. ‘Their imaginations’, sighed H. G. Wells,
‘declined the task.’2
Instead, particular components of British imperialism—its places, pro-
cesses, and ‘Questions’—loomed larger to different groups at different
times, whether the settler dominions, the informal empire of finance, or
the vast strategic realm of the Viceroy of India. Those seeking to recon-
struct the sheer scope of imperial activity can do worse than to follow
where contemporaries led. To track their gaze—squared with an awareness
of the constraints, elisions, and biases at work—is to enrich our collective
understanding of that empire’s complexity.
1
FO 371/13714, Glubb, ‘Policy on the Najd Frontier’, 17 Jan. 1929.
2
Wells, Short History, p. 233.
This chapter argues for one such act of reorientation. It reconstructs

the world-view and activities of a significant but neglected community of
soldiers, scholars, and administrators. Exploring the frames of reference
behind their policy decisions suggests a new ‘region’ of activity passed over
by existing accounts of Britain’s interwar empire.
Central to both tasks is an acknowledgement of the role of a decade of
war and diplomacy in shaking geographical certainties. From 1919, new
‘imperial military geographies’ were rushed into print, as contemporar-
ies struggled to make sense of a transformed postwar world.3 For Lucien
Febvre, whose La terre et l’évolution humaine was substantially rewritten
in this period, the ‘feverish activity’ of war had effected new combinations
between places and men, disrupting ‘the great routes of terrestrial inter-
course’.4 Nowhere was this felt with greater force than in western Asia. As
the Ottomans withdrew from Jerusalem, and with Russia in revolution,
Britain’s ‘entire Buffer system from the Balkans to Baluchistan’ seemed
to be ‘in the melting pot’.5 Wartime technologies further reshaped the
‘geography of communications’.6 On land, a newfound capacity to cross
desert environments amounted to ‘a great revolution in our ideas of trans-
port’ and ‘a new feature of warfare’.7 In the air, officials and entrepreneurs
implored readers to ‘picture the British Empire in terms of time’ and
watch as new services shrunk its dimensions.8 For interwar Britons, keep-
ing up with imperial affairs meant adjusting their ‘angles of vision’.9 It
behoves historians to do likewise.
In the years between the two world wars, the future of the empire’s
frontiers and the management of its nomadic societies stimulated signifi-
cant communities of British opinion. This hardly amounted to a popu-
lar view of empire. But given the tendency to equate this period with
the rise of urban nationalism and cautious imperial retreat, the sustained
engagement with ‘peripheral’ subjects remains remarkable in retrospect.
‘Frontiers’, Lord Curzon had declared in 1907, ‘are . . . the razor’s edge on
which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace’, destined to
become more important ‘as the vacant spaces of the earth are filled up’.10
Twenty years on, frontier regulation and ‘tribal policy’ were still seen as
arbiters of imperial prestige, the basis of British claims to be the successor
3
For example, Cole, Military Geography; Fitzgerald Lee, Military Geography; Salt,
Military Geography.
4
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, pp. 179–181.
5
Yate, ‘Buffer States’, p. 7. 6
Cole, Military Geography, p. 90.
7
Harford, ‘Old Route’, p. 115; Woods, ‘Near East’, p. 83.
8
Brancker, ‘Air Routes’, p. 261.
9
Dobbs, ‘Unifying British Control’, p. 483. 10
Curzon, Frontiers, p. 7.
Asking ‘the Tribal Question’ 21
of Rome.11 For Curzon, ‘Frontier life’ provided ‘kindred travail’ for the
whole Anglo-Saxon race. If the American character was forged ‘on the
trails of the Frontier’, then
on the manifold Frontiers of dominion, now amid the gaunt highlands
of the Indian border, or the eternal snows of the Himalayas, now on the
parched sands of Persia or Arabia . . . in an incessant struggle with nature
and men, has been found a corresponding discipline for the men of our
stock.12
Few frontiers have lived up to this Turnerian vision (historians now
emphasize the multiplicity of political, economic, social, and cultural
forms which frontiers may take), but contemporaries seldom made such
distinctions. For John Glubb, ‘a life of danger and vicissitudes in great
open country will . . . always produce an heroic culture’, so that American
pioneer conditions ‘bore many likenesses to Arab desert life’.13 Across the
1930s, Isaiah Bowman elaborated a global concept of ‘pioneering’, while
Owen Lattimore built his critique of American exceptionalism around the
comparative study of ‘frontiers’.14
In the Middle East, the attention lavished on its ‘frontier’ populations
was not commensurate with their size. Enumerating nomads remains
notoriously difficult, but even the most generous estimates suggest that
the Bedouin loomed larger in the minds of many officials than they did
on the steppe.15 Lord Dufferin initially estimated 400,000 Bedouin in
Egypt in 1883, but confessed this ‘probably exaggerated’.16 A military
report in 1926 put the nomadic population at a quarter of that figure,
with 22,000 in the Sinai Peninsula.17 Even this, however, was little more
than a guess.18 The Egyptian census of 1917 could offer no reliable fig-
ure for the Bedouin ‘owing to their unwillingness to submit’ to being
counted, while Bedouin around Beersheba also refused to co-operate, so
that matters were little clearer in the new mandates.19 Britain’s Resident
in Trans-Jordan supposed some 50,000 people were fully nomadic, ‘on
the assumption that the total population is 300,000’.20 In neighbouring
11
Chamier, ‘Air Control’, p. 407; Bryce, Studies, i, pp. 68–71; Fawcett, Frontiers, p. 38.
12
Curzon, Frontiers, pp. 55–56.
13
Glubb, Story, pp. 147–149. See further MECA: JBG (NA) 1, Glubb, ‘Rise and
Decline of Empires’ (n.d.).
14
Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore’, pp. 768, 780.
15
For some of these difficulties, see Amiran, ‘Population’, pp. 247–252.
16
FO 78/3566, ‘General Report on the Reorganisation of Egypt’, 6 Feb. 1883.
17
WO 33/1085, ‘Military Report on Egypt, 1926’, p. 167.
18
As Jarvis conceded: Yesterday, p. 3.
19
Government of Egypt, The Census of Egypt, 1917 (2 vols, Cairo, 1920-21), ii, p. xx–xxi.
20
CO 831/8/5, H. Cox, ‘Administration of Trans-Jordan for the year 1929’.
Iraq, nomads may have formed as little as 5 per cent of the population
by the time the first systematic count was attempted.21 Today, while the
romantic image of the nomad thrives in fiction, tourism and advertising,
there are perhaps 2.8 million nomads in the Arab world itself—some 1
per cent of its population.22
Historians have tended to follow the implications of these numbers,
concentrating their efforts on more populous urban centres and coastal
and riverain communities. Yet for groups of interested Britons, the
nature and future of nomads lay at the heart of their vision of empire.
Straddling international boundaries in an increasingly ‘closed’ world,
the control of these mobile populations became a precondition of suc-
cessful foreign policy. It was only in the 1930s, John Glubb believed,
that the ‘political influence’ of the Bedouin had ceased to be ‘out of all
proportion to their numbers’.23 Indeed, the depth of this engagement
would later breed a certain defensiveness among those trying to build
new relationships in the region. ‘British Arabists’, Sir James Craig was at
pains to emphasize,
are often accused of having a love affair with the Arabs . . . In particular it
is alleged that they’re all in love with the desert. That may have been true of
some people in the old days. It has not been true in my working lifetime.
I have never been on a camel in my life.24
This chapter delineates the spatial and temporal contours of a
heightened interest in nomadic societies and frontier control. It begins
by introducing the Royal Central Asian Society (RCAS), a remarkable
community that developed to address a pressing ‘Tribal Question’.
By exploring its membership and their interests, this chapter makes a
case for its importance in understanding the conduct of tribal policy
on the ground—recovering a lost colonial profession, rediscovering
an ideological outlook, and discerning a new sphere of activity within
the interwar British empire. Craig may well have cared little for the
desert, and never been on a camel in his life. But his words unwit-
tingly echoed those of a predecessor in the region, who offered a very
different perspective. ‘I am much keener on camels than on cars’, this
21
This in 1952: Awad, ‘Settlement’, p. 48.
22
Within the UK alone, Nomad is the brand-name of innumerable clothing lines, an
online data storage service, a chain of travel stores and vaccination clinics, and a luxury
mens’ shampoo. Cole’s 2003 calculation of 2.8 million is based on the estimated number
of practising steppe livestock-rearers: Cole, ‘Where Have the Bedouin Gone?’, p. 261. The
figure of 1% would appear to have been broadly stable since the late 1980s: Gardner and
Marx, ‘Employment’, p. 21.
23
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, pp. 28–29.
24
Cited in Butt, Lion in the Sand, p. 11.
authority told the Society, ‘and have never been on an aeroplane in

my life.’25
With global reach and a commitment to topicality, the records of the
RCAS can be daunting in scope. Wherever possible, this chapter draws
attention to the activities of Jarvis, Peake, and Glubb as an aid to naviga-
tion, casting light on how the Society operated, and what it sought to do.
ASKING ‘ THE TRIBAL QUESTION’:

T H E RC A S , 1 9 0 1 – 1 9 4 5
The Royal Central Asian Society was founded in 1901 in the shadow
of the Great Game. From the first, it resolved to consider ‘Central
Asian questions . . . in all their bearings—political as well as economic
or scientific’.26 While the Society’s regional focus would change, its
commitment to frank discussion of politics—then barred at the Royal
Geographical and Royal Asiatic Societies—remained a defining char-
acteristic.27 In 1907 it made its first formal intervention over the pro-
posed Anglo-Russian Convention, petitioning the Foreign Secretary to
uphold British interests ‘on the direct road’ to India. A decade later it
looked aghast at the fate of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force,
and called on members to make their influence felt.28 ‘With few parts
of Asia on which some member could not speak from experience’, the
Society’s ‘practical value’ was paramount, its deliberations never purely
notional.29 As President, Lord Curzon (1918–1925) spoke with pride of
a Society ‘not only to read papers’ but to ‘train men and inspire men . . .
to support the interests of our Empire’.30 Beyond its own rank and file,
perceptions of the Society as deeply implicated in imperial politics per-
sisted into the Second World War. It was at a Society meeting in March
1940 that Udham Singh—a victim of Jallianwala Bagh—shot and killed
Sir Michael O’Dwyer.31
25
Holt, ‘Journeys’, p. 187.
26
RSAA: Minute Book 1: C. Tupp, ‘Inception and Progress of the Central Asian
Society’, 10 Mar. 1908.
27
This chapter challenges recent claims that the RGS became the key repository of
Central Asian ‘intelligence’: O’Hara, Heffernan and Endfield, ‘Halford Mackinder’, p. 92.
28
RSAA: Minute Book 1: 16 July 1907; Yate, ‘Buffer States’, pp. 11–12.
29
Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 218.
30
Anon., ‘Annual Dinner’, 1920. The Society’s Presidents in our period were: George
Curzon (1918–1925), William Robert Wellesley Peel (1925–1930), Edmund Allenby
(1930–1936), George Lloyd (1936–1941), William Malcolm Hailey (1941–1947) and
Archibald Wavell (1947–1950). For a complete list of office holders, see Leach, Strolling
About, pp. 199–203.
31
‘The Trial of Udham Singh’, The Times, 6 June 1940.
The cooling of Anglo-Russian tensions had caused interest in the

Society to flag by 1913.32 But the profound geostrategic consequences of
the war—the assertion of British primacy over a ‘great salient in the mid-
dle of the world’—had transformed relationships in the Middle East.33
The Society shifted in response to this ‘new era’, and moved to become
its institutional expression. Recruiting those brought to the Middle East
since the outbreak of war, membership rates took off: from 120 in 1913 to
1,800 by 1939.34 Lectures, articles, notes and debates—even the composi-
tion of the Society library—now reflected this ‘advance into [the] Middle
Eastern stage’.35 By 1928, the Society’s remit was redrawn as ‘that great tri-
angle . . . based on Constantinople, Cairo and Calcutta from which have
been produced . . . the great religions of the world’.36 ‘Arabia’, observed
Philby, was now ‘the pièce de resistance [of ] a Society which owes its incep-
tion to Russian bogeys.’37
Despite the wealth of its activities and records, the Society has been
neglected beyond in-house chroniclers. As Peter Clark has observed, much
of the writing on British clubs and societies has been stuck in a ‘hagi-
ographical’, Victorian mode. In this case it has also lacked a broader ana-
lytical framework, reducing the Society’s activities to ‘a genuine love affair’
with the region.38 Yet recovering its activities provides a fresh perspective
on Britain’s ‘new empire’ in the Middle East. These new responsibili-
ties may not have fired the popular imagination, but engagement at the
Society was pronounced and sustained, and the particular characteristics
of the membership merit its place in any study of imperialism on the
region’s desert frontiers.
Membership lists read like a Who’s Who of the British colonial
world: from statesmen and diplomats such as Miles Lampson, Henry
Dobbs, Alec Kirkbride, Kinahan Cornwallis, Percy Cox, Arnold Wilson,
and Ronald Storrs, to explorers, soldiers and district officials like Bertram
Thomas, Stephen Longrigg, Harold Ingrams, and, of course, Claude Jarvis,
Frederick Peake, and John Glubb. Airmen, scholars and desert surveyors
were all equally at home. Members did not conform to a single type, but
there were certain commonalities which the Society sought to satisfy, and
32
RSAA: Minute Book 2: 9 June 1913.
33
Darwin, Empire Project, pp. 315–319.
34
Yate, ‘Nineteenth Anniversary Meeting’, p. 107; Sykes, ‘Founding and Progress’,
pp. 5–8. Membership peaked after the Second World War, fell off in the 1960s, and has
never fully recovered.
35
Yate, ‘Report for 1920–21’, pp. 188–191. Much of the library was destroyed by an
incendiary bomb in the war, but a surviving catalog from 1935 shows that the Middle East
had become the single largest subject area: RSAA: Library List, 1935.
36
Anon., ‘Annual Dinner’, 1928, p. 447. 37
Philby, ‘Survey’, p. 468.
38
Clark, British Clubs; Leach, Strolling About, p. xxiii.
Table 1.1. RCAS Membership, 1907–1934
1907 1914 1918 1920 1924 1930 1934
Members 107 127 133 180 761 1,293 1,465

Overseas 27 59 53 65 376 700 690
Military 32 46 48 58 380 593 609
patterns and connections which influenced the conduct of administration

on the ground.
Most immediately striking is the high percentage of members on service
overseas. Such mobility, and members’ demand for current news from
across the empire, had been anticipated at an early stage.39 Analysis of cor-
respondence addresses suggests that between one-third and one-half of all
members were overseas at any given time in the interwar period, though
the use of forwarding addresses means that the true ratio may have been far
higher (Table 1.1). By 1948, 88 per cent were thought to have ‘first-hand
knowledge of one or other Asiatic country’, the Middle East providing
the largest number, and most in military or government service.40 Society
membership was global by 1934, but also corresponded with the Eurasian
arid zone, and was most concentrated in the empire’s ‘strategic corridor’
between the Mediterranean Sea and the North-West Frontier of India (see
Map 1.1).
The distinctive mobility of a membership that circulated to and from
London, through the hubs of Cairo, Baghdad and Bombay and later-
ally between sites around the world, made written material central to
its operation as a network. Historians have demonstrated a growing
impatience with ‘idealist’ generalizations about networks, and demand
closer examination of ‘the material life of knowledge’: the specific means
by which members learned of one another’s activity and engaged in
debate.41 Central to Society’s fabric was the publication and dissemina-
tion of its Journal. With so many members overseas, the Society’s ‘exist-
ence . . . depends very largely upon the Journal and the lectures which
it publishes’, a commitment backed by expenditure.42 Incidental papers
appeared from 1904, but in 1914 the Society committed to distribut-
ing its journal to all members worldwide (for a comparatively modest
£1 annual membership fee) three or four times a year, despite spiraling
39
RSAA: Minute Book 1: Tupp, ‘Inception and Progress’.
40
RSAA: Medal Box 2/6: Meeting of Council, 24 Nov. 1948.
41
Drayton, ‘Maritime Networks’.
42
Yate, ‘Nineteenth Anniversary Meeting’, p. 107. The Journal was normally the Society’s
single largest expense: RSAA: Minute Book No. 4, Receipts and Expenditure.
Map 1.1 The Royal Central Asian Society in the World
Sources: The RCAS membership lists; L Febvre, ‘Regions of the Nomads: Deserts and Steppes of Asia and Africa’ (1932).
postwar printing costs.43 This is not to dismiss the personal dimension

of gatherings in London. St John Philby’s wife, Dora, by keeping up
appearances at Society lectures during her husband’s prolonged absences
in the Hedjaz, enabled him to ‘re-enter the swim immediately he reached
London’.44 But the Society was primarily a written world, existing as
much in the pages of its publications, and in the responses of its far-flung
readers and contributors, as in its Mayfair office. ‘Our Journal ’, the
Committee reflected, ‘is our only “show-piece” ’, there being no other
way to impress on a global audience ‘that this is a first-rate Society’.45
With time, it also became a memory-bank from which to interpret cur-
rent events.46
This did not simply take the form of reporting activities in the
‘metropole’ for the benefit of readers on the ‘periphery’. The Journal
relied for its copy on overseas members actively submitting items and
articles, responding to discussions and providing lectures when on
leave in London. Lecture discussions were printed in full—unlike at
the RGS—and were continued by overseas members in the correspond-
ence pages.47 From 1921, book reviews were a further expression of
this function. In the process, the Society helped sustain connections
between disparate parts of the empire, fostering exchange and debate
across the formal, bilateral channels, and beyond the London axis,
of Whitehall communications. Local Honorary Secretaries in Cairo,
Jerusalem, Baghdad, Bahrain, and Peshawar, for example, helped
‘recruit desirable members and suggest lecturers and subjects’, while the
circulation of members’ correspondence addresses further encouraged
direct communication.48 The Royal Central Asian Society provides a
working example of that much theorized space between metropole and
periphery. Under the umbrella of its Journal, ideas and practices were
shared between locations within and without the formal empire—and
beyond imperial frameworks altogether—especially when a particular
‘problem’ captured its imagination.
One consequence of the centrality of written material to Society debates
was the premium set upon the ability to write well. Some took to this bet-
ter than others. Peake, whose views on desert administration and nomadic
societies lost ground over the period, confessed ‘writing . . . an unfamiliar
43
Yate, ‘Nineteenth Anniversary Meeting’, p. 107. RGS membership, in point of con-
trast, was £4 a year.
44
Monroe, Philby, p. 147. 45
RSAA: Minute Book 4, 29 July 1931.
46
See, for example, Chamier, ‘Air Control’, p. 414.
47
RGS Proceedings were redacted to remove overtly political references.
48
RSAA: Minute Book 5, 5 May 1936.
medium for a man trained in arms’.49 Despite Jarvis’ intervention on

his behalf with John Murray—a house with strong connections to the
Society—Peake appears to have lacked confidence in his memoirs, which
remained unpublished.50 Asked in 1979 about his relationship with Peake,
Glubb revealingly answered in terms of his superior’s skills as a writer:
Unfortunately, his disability was that he only wrote with great difficulty. I
don’t mean to say he was illiterate, but he didn’t take to writing copiously,
and so he never could get across his views to senior people. But he was full of
courage and enterprise.51
Glubb had no such difficulty. His detailed reports set him apart as a junior
officer in the field. An ‘admirable’ administrative survey of the Southern
Desert of Iraq was considered for wider publication, brought him to the
attention of higher authorities, and helped secure recommendations for
service in Trans-Jordan.52 There, his carefully crafted monthly reports,
prefaced with attractive desert photographs, became a vehicle for articu-
lating a vision of desert administration far ahead of Peake’s. For officers
serving in frontier outposts—where wireless telegraphy and telephones
were only gradually being introduced—the written report, intelligence
summary, tribal genealogy, and route survey remained the basis of official
communication. Such offerings were readily reproduced in the Journal,
occasionally with the use of pseudonyms. As such, writing served ‘partly
to assist myself in thinking and partly as a means of comparing ideas with
my brother officers in the Arab countries’.53 But with both the Society and
frontier administration functioning primarily through and for the literate,
those most obviously excluded were Britain’s nomadic subjects themselves.
An equally striking characteristic of the membership was its military
background. As James Bryce had found among the British in India, ‘an
atmosphere of gunpowder’ hung over Society deliberations.54 Again this
49
Peake, St Boswells. ‘It is a pity that [Peake’s] memoranda are so badly expressed’,
observed the Foreign Office. ‘Their style does not do justice to their matter’: FO 371/13754,
G. W. Rendel minute, 22 Oct. 1929.
50
JM: DN 24 ‘Desert and Delta’, Murray to Jarvis, 15 July 1946. John Murray IV had
been one of the eleven founding members of the Society. Meetings in its first two decades
took place at 22 Albemarle Street, a stone’s throw from the publisher’s iconic address. Jarvis
attended Society lectures and events with Jock Murray (VI) in the 1930s, and provided him
with a list of members to whom forthcoming books were advertised: DN 24, ‘Desert and
Delta’, Murray to Jarvis, 31 Aug. 1938. Francis Younghusband was godfather to the present
John Murray (VII)’s sister; John recently addressed the RSAA on their historic connections
with the family business: Murray, ‘Asia from the Doorstep’; private information (2007).
51
IWM: Glubb, John Bagot [IWM interview], Reel 3.
52
CO 730/168/8, Rendel to Hall, 22 May 1931.
53
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb to Kirkbride, 4 Mar. 1944.
54
Bryce, Studies, i, p. 12.
is, if anything, under-represented in the membership lists, where military

rank was not always recorded (see Table 1.1). In part, the cordite in the air
was the legacy of a recruitment drive undertaken in the aftermath of war,
but it also reflected the common belief that ‘the ideal Frontier officer’ was
a soldier, not a civilian.55 Borrowing a term from the Indian frontier, where
two-thirds of political officers were drawn from the Army, Sir Aurel Stein
felt that only ‘such “military politicals” . . . as Colonel Peake’ could man-
age the ‘Arab nomad mentality’, for which ‘a strong hand is still needed’.56
The result was a blurring of civil and military authority in the positions
occupied by many members, a characteristic common to frontier policing
across the empire. Reflecting the mosaic nature of British influence in
the Middle East, many of the Society’s military members were seconded
to foreign governments (standard practice in Egypt’s Frontier Districts
Administration), accepted commissions in foreign security forces (as had
Peake in Trans-Jordan), or employed on contract as advisors (as was Glubb
in Iraq from 1926 to 1930).
Service in isolated posts was another feature of the membership.
Lectures on advances in imperial communications were directed at ‘men
administering vast tracts of territory . . . cut off by hundreds of miles
geographically and months in point of time from civilisation’.57 Purple
prose aside, the wide latitude, breadth of duties and ‘lonely responsibility’
faced by many members placed them in the loose tradition of indirect
rule.58 This was seldom made explicit, but members in diverse territories
broadly identified with ‘ “the Sandeman policy” or “Indirect Rule” (as it is
called in Africa), or what you will’.59 For those in more isolated postings,
printed matter could be a literary lifeline. The Farafra oasis, a stop on
Jarvis’s district tours in the early 1920s, was accessible only by a ten-day
camel ride from Kharga.60 New Special Service Officers, many of whom
joined the Society, were warned that it was ‘common . . . to begin by dis-
liking [the] work and heartily wishing to get back to ordinary duty’. Only
perseverance rewarded ‘a great measure of independence’, ‘variety of expe-
rience’, and the chance to be ‘away in the “blue” for weeks on end’.61 The
physical and emotional toll of such conditions—Jarvis warned of ‘desert
cafard’—was outweighed by the desire to avoid the uncertainties of life in
postwar Britain. Glubb volunteered for service in Iraq ‘to get off the bar-
racks at Chatham’.62 Drawn into frontier work by the war, others found
55
Curzon, Frontiers, p. 57.
56
Cunningham, ‘Reforms’, pp. 100–101; Peake, ‘Trans-Jordan’, p. 394.
57
Acland, ‘Communications’, p. 107.
58
Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, pp. 233–234. 59
Bruce, Waziristan, p. vii.
60
Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 84. 61
Anon., ‘Role of Special Service Officers’.
62
IWM: John Glubb (interview), Reel 1.
the prospect of returning to regular duty ‘disheartening’: ‘I cannot bear

the thought of life in India and the humdrum existence of an ordinary
Indian Infantry Regiment, having . . . been away in Political for the last
eight years’.63
Isolation, indirect rule, and obscured civil and military authority had
two further implications for members’ outlooks on empire. The first was a
marked tendency to champion the position of the frontier official in mat-
ters of policy. Lying between metropole and periphery, the Society offered
a platform for critiquing policy arising both from London and from spe-
cific colonial governments. Thus an anonymous note in the Journal for
1930 (probably written by Glubb) criticized the Iraq Government for fail-
ing to nurture its desert administration, thereby inviting frontier unrest.64
A thinly veiled contempt for ‘the Headquarter mind’ also ran through
Jarvis’ publications (and did not pass unnoticed).65 By asserting the per-
spective of local frontier officials, and connecting their concerns with
comparable experiences on other frontiers, members attempted to secure
support for their policies in specific locations. Chapters 2 and 5 explore
how far they succeeded.
Secondly, viewing empire through that ‘atmosphere of gunpow-
der’ meant members were less interested in trade and profit, or even
balancing revenue and expenditure, and more prepared to expect
imperial subsidy for the costs of administration.66 They were, as John
Cell might have put it, ‘gentlemen first, capitalists (if at all) a dis-
tant second’.67 The ‘choice’, of course, between developing strategic
routes and advancing commerce was often essentially false, but there
remains something uneconomic about these imperialists. Proposals for
a Haifa–Baghdad railway, for example, were broadly welcomed even
though (a critic observed) ‘it avoids populations and consequent prof-
its and instead strikes a course across the open desert’.68 The Society
equally approved of government subsidies for air routes in Asia to
uphold ‘British prestige’ and ‘tighten up the bonds of Empire’.69 In its
first surviving annual report, Egypt’s Frontiers Administration thought
63
MECA: SJPH, 2/3/1/5, Dickson to Philby, 31 July 1923. For Peake’s anxieties about
a potential return to regular duty in England, see SJPH 4/2/17, Stepping Stones in Jordan,
chapter 16, p. 13.
64
Anon., ‘Iraq-Nejd Frontier’, p. 91.
65
FO 141/539/1, W. Smart minute, 10 Dec. 1935.
66
‘That finance [for tribal policy] is difficult to provide and that there is no prospect of
a percentage return . . . is a ready argument but a poor one’: Byrt, ‘North-West Frontier’,
p. 285.
67
Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, pp. 242–243.
68
Hamilton, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Road’, pp. 232–233.
69
Brancker, ‘Air Routes’.
improved communications, a ‘Bedouin Industries’ programme, and

the special character of administration in desert conditions more than
justified an eye-watering budget deficit. As a Residency hand min-
uted, the Administration conferred ‘great benefits on the people of the
Desert’ but ‘fails, however, in the somewhat important point of the
collection of revenue’.70
Finally, the Society acted as an important interface between schol-
arship and administration, and recognizing the fact provides a cor-
rective to existing historiography. Much of the work concerned with
the connections between academic research and policy-making in the
interwar mandates has focused on French institutions and practice, per-
haps reflecting a more explicit concept of ‘rule by experts’.71 The Royal
Central Asian Society operated as a comparable British organization.
The Great War had been ‘the first in which academics, as a group, had
an impact on policy making’, and the Society offered a forum condu-
cive to sustaining their influence.72 As the extent of British responsi-
bilities in the Middle East became clear, the Society moved to build
contacts with those discussing ‘Asiatic problems’ at Oxford, Cambridge,
and Edinburgh, recruiting a number into its ranks.73 Lectures tied in
with recent publications, as with that on trusteeship and the Mandate
concept by Norman Bentwich, for example.74 Sir Aurel Stein, H. A.
R. Gibb, R. A. Nicholson, D. G. Hogarth, and Owen Lattimore were all
active in the Society between the wars.
But there was more to this dialogue than a list of scholarly mem-
bers suggests. The interwar period was one ‘in which the boundary
between academia and the wider world of social opinion was not nearly
so sharply defined as it is today’, with ‘deep implications for politics,
policy and popular attitudes’.75 Just as Robert Montagne leaned on the
work of French tribal control officers to develop his concept of la civili-
sation du désert, so anthropologist William Shanklin used Glubb’s defi-
nitions in undertaking fieldwork on the Ruwala.76 This engagement
spilled beyond the confines of the RCAS. Peake’s suggestions guided
the first Field Museum Expedition to the Near East, and Glubb offered
his services ‘in the way of topography’ to the RGS.77 Jarvis’ theories on
70
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘FDA Annual Report 1921’; Foreign Office note, 8 Oct.
1922, on MacDonnell to Cairo Residency, 25 Sept. 1922.
71
See the chapters by Métral, Trégan and Blecher in: Méouchy and Sluglett, Mandates.
72
Blouet, Halford Mackinder, p. 160.
73
Yate, ‘Nineteenth Anniversary Meeting’, p. 107.
74
Bentwich, ‘Mandates’. 75
Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore’, p. 765.
76
Shanklin, ‘Anthropology of the Ruwala’.
77
SJPH 2/3/1/6, Glubb to Philby, 17 Aug. 1926; Peake, History of Trans-Jordan, p. vii.
the path of the Exodus caught the attention of Rudyard Kipling, and
appeared in Antiquity and the Palestine Exploration Quarterly. Scholars
of all backgrounds remained dependent on access afforded by the mili-
tary.78 But scholarship could be an active influence on administration
in turn. Shanklin’s findings furthered Glubb’s belief in the gulf sepa-
rating nomads from settlers; Glubb’s own quasi-anthropological study,
presented to the Society in 1935, was reproduced verbatim in an offi-
cial wartime Handbook.79 This did not amount to an ‘applied anthro-
pology unit’ (as at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs), nor did
it quite reach the bar set by the Sudan Notes and Records. Suspicion that
scholarship meant ‘pedantry in administration’ persisted.80 But the
‘practical value’ of the Society’s deliberations was never far from mind.
Restoring the Royal Central Asian Society to view, therefore, enriches
our understanding of Britain’s interwar empire in a number of ways.
Histories of the Middle East often treat British officers as isolated actors
(or as an homogenous group), and foreground the perspective of a single
nation-state. Books still appear reducing British imperialism to a pageant
of worthies, or a gallery of villains.81 Frustration with this image ‘of a soli-
tary British officer, doing it all himself ’ has led to efforts to reconstruct
local networks of collaboration.82 Recovering the Society’s activities marks
a comparable effort to interrogate the interactions between officers, and
their role in informing policy. The Society’s firm commitment to politics
made it an unofficial but imperial institution, operating across the formal
channels and sources on which historians have tended to rely. It became a
forum of debate and an arbiter of authority, where scholarly research could
be squared with direct administration. Members may have represented a
number of individual departments, services, and territories, but personal
connections and networks of written material cut across these radial lines.
Crucially, members’ mobility encouraged the connection of comparable
issues and ‘problems’ between diverse sites, forming altogether new ideas
and practices. As such, the Society does not merely warrant a mention in
discrete studies of colonial territories. Its very preoccupation with certain
issues demands their reappraisal from an imperial, rather than a national
78
Archaeologists the Horsfields, for example, relied on the logistical support and protec-
tion of the Arab Legion: Horsfield, ‘Journey to Kilwa’.
79
Glubb, Mixture of Races; Glubb, Handbook. Glubb’s own efforts in this vein were later
published by the Field Museum: Glubb, ‘Sulubba’.
80
Anon., review of Pioneers of Progress, p. 114.
81
For recent examples of this approach: McLoughlin, Sea of Knowledge; Ure, Search of
Nomads.
82
Onley, Arabian Frontier, p. 48.
perspective. No issue captured its attention more than the Tribal Question.
It is to this that we now turn.
* * *
The Tribal Question concerned the nature of nomadic societies, the prob-
lems posed by their administration, and their future on the arid frontiers
of the British Empire and beyond. It exercised the Society for most of
the interwar years. ‘Never in the known history of the world’, the Society
reflected in 1943, ‘have tribal questions been studied so conscientiously
and with such knowledge as during the past twenty years’.83 What con-
temporaries understood by this, however, varied enormously over time
and space. It involved the academic disciplines of ethnography, philology,
archaeology, and geology; military questions of recruitment, disarmament,
and ‘tribal warfare’; and administrative concerns for tribal law, frontier
policing, imperial communications, and colonial development. Its gaze
was drawn by specific instances of unrest, migration, repression, and revolt
in a bewildering range of territories and jurisdictions. Plotting a course
through these events helps draw out a number of common concerns.
The First World War had broadened the scope of imperial ‘tribal prob-
lems’. From the Western Desert of Egypt to the North-West Frontier, offic-
ers feared tribes were better armed than ever before, be it by gun-running
in the Persian Gulf or the legacy of Anglo-Turkish competition for allies.84
Peace-making and boundary commissions further raised awareness of
‘arrangements for the regulation of nomadic affairs’. ‘The geographical
basis of a grazing society’, the Society duly recorded, had been addressed in
the Treaty of Kars (1921), the Angora accord (1921) and Treaty (1926), the
Anglo-French protocol between the Sudan and French Equatorial Africa
(1924) and the Italo-Egyptian accord (1925).85 As such, no single location
dominated the Society’s Tribal Question. Events on the ground, the flu-
ency with which members brought them to attention, and the extent to
which broader themes could be drawn out meant that areas could be by
turns the recipients of ideas and the originators of practice.
In the immediate postwar years, the Tribal Question was shaped by
fears of revolution and religious revival. Disappointed that Siberia had not
succeeded in ‘pressing forward to crush Bolshevism’, the Society consid-
ered the consequences for India’s northern frontiers.86 Because Mongols
and Tibetans were linked by ‘the same nomadic instincts’, argued Charles
83
Hamilton, ‘Social Organization’, p. 142.
84
Cole, Military Geography, pp. 277–278.
85
Anon., ‘Nejd Boundary’, p. 207.
86
Bell, Soviet influence among the former provided ‘ample means . . . for
pushing their influence in Tibet’.87 Further east, unrest in republican
China prompted the formation of a Burma Frontier Service in 1923, and
the dispatch from 1925 of annual expeditions into the Naga hills.88 In
North Africa, Mohammed Idris’ ascendancy over the Senussi and the trav-
els of Rosita Forbes led to a fresh appreciation of the Senussi’s prospects
in the ongoing conflict with Italy, and the implications for British rule in
Egypt.89 Most strikingly, Ibn Saud’s Wahhabist revival assumed ‘grave, if
not alarming, dimensions’, forcing revisions to British tribal policy across
the Middle East.90
Treaty-making and unrest in the new League of Nations mandates
helped fix attention on the Middle East (as did the erudition of those
members active here).91 With Iraq’s northern frontier undefined before
1926, some advised a ‘forward policy’ for Kurdistan ‘closely analagous to
that in the North-West Frontier of India’.92 Bedouin unrest in the Jezira
and the ‘Adwan rebellion in Trans-Jordan prompted wider debate over
government’s role in balancing ‘the desert and the sown’.93 In Persia, Reza
Shah Pahlavi’s attempts to curb nomad autonomy, the release of the land-
mark film Grass and proximity to ‘the greatest oil field in the world’ also
made the Bakhtiari subjects of interest.94
On the North-West Frontier, a string of crises and debates punctuated
the interwar years, from the occupation of Razmak after 1920, through
political agitation and the Round Table Conferences, to fresh revolt in
Waziristan in 1936. In general, the period was one of heightened engage-
ment in tribal affairs, bracketed by Curzon’s modified close border policy
before 1914 and the Government of Pakistan’s reversion to this from
1947.95 The new Modified Forward Policy ‘transformed the limited prob-
lem of border defence into a broader and more complicated political,
economic and military problem of tribal control’, and given the scale of
the resources this involved, it has been tempting to consider the Indian
frontier as ‘without parallel in other parts of the Empire’.96 If comparable
challenges are detected elsewhere, then it is often assumed that ‘Indian
87
Bell, ‘North-Eastern Frontier’.
88
Haward, ‘India’s Defence’, p. 113; Lethbridge, ‘Burma Military Police’, p. 439.
89
Forbes, ‘Senussi’. 90
Vickery, review of Heart of Arabia, p. 78.
91
Percy Cox thought it ‘phenomenal’ that of the ‘comparatively small company’ of offic-
ers sent to Arabia in 1914–1918 ‘so many . . . should have proved to possess the inspira-
tion and marked literary talent . . . [of ] Philby, Lawrence, Eldon Rutter, and . . . Bertram
Thomas’: Cox, review of Arabia Felix, p. 321.
92
Sheppard, ‘Mesopotamian Problem’, p. 22.
93
McCallum, ‘French in Syria’; Philby, ‘Transjordan’.
94
Wilson, ‘Bakhtiaris’. 95
Beattie, Imperial Frontier.
96
Moreman, ‘Watch and Ward’, pp. 141–142.
e xamples . . . resonated throughout British colonial security policy’.97 Yet

it is easier to assert the ‘wider influence’ of the Indian experience than to
trace its operation on the ground. At the Society, plenty of other moments
of crisis and reform competed for attention.
Between 1928 and 1930, raiding on the Iraq–Nejd frontier and the
Ikhwan Revolt returned the Bedouin to the centre of the Tribal Question.
Reflecting the inconsistencies of British policy itself, the Society was split
as it attempted to fix blame for the recent escalation. St John Philby and
John Glubb debated Ibn Saud’s sedentarization schemes.98 Disagreement
over the extent of government responsibility for the desert, the viability of
permanent desert administration, and the appropriate response to a resurgent
Wahhabism continued as the timeline for Iraqi independence was revised.99
Drought across Northern Arabia in the early 1930s prompted a series of arti-
cles and lectures on the future of nomadic pastoralism itself, revealing the role
of the Society, and the environment, in stimulating contentious debate.100
By the mid-1930s, the Society was increasingly concerned for the fate
of nomads in an era of international conflict in East Asia.101 With Japanese
influence permeating Inner Mongolia, Owen Lattimore warned that
Mongol tribes might be driven into the arms of the Soviet Union.102 The
fate of the Assyrians, however, and escalating tension in Palestine now
came to preoccupy the Society, causing interest to ebb away from purely
nomadic affairs.103 The Tribal Question had its heyday between 1919 and
1936, but could still command attention even in the depths of global war.
In 1943, with the empire standing ‘at the parting of the ways’, the Journal’s
editors thought a re-examination of ‘colonial and tribal questions’ more
necessary than ever before.104
Asking the Tribal Question, therefore, involved familiarity with a vast
array of territories, peoples and events. But it was still thought possible to
argue on a truly global scale over policies ‘equally applicable to every tribes-
man, whether Baluch, Pathan, Arab, Kurd or African’.105 What themes
and common issues held members’ interest, and enabled them to do so?
The first was a recurrent concern for communications routes and their
centrality to imperial survival. This ran across our period, from an early
97
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, p. 47. For the classic statement of the importance
of India to the practice—even existence—of imperialism elsewhere, see Robinson and
Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians.
98
Glubb, review of Arabia of the Wahhabis; Philby, ‘Survey’.
99
Al-Askari, ‘Five Years’ Progress’; Main, ‘Iraq: a Note’, p. 430.
100
For example: Jarvis, ‘Desert Beduin’. 101
Lindgren, ‘Reindeer Tungus’.
102
Lattimore, ‘Eclipse’, p. 432. 103
RSAA: Minute Book 5, 21 Apr. 1937.
104
Hamilton, ‘Social Organisation’, p. 142.
105
Bruce, ‘Sandeman Policy’, p. 60.
fear of Russian railways, to the emerging potential of wartime trans-

port technologies, and the capacity of Great Britain and her rivals to
project power across arid frontiers was closely monitored. Numerous
lectures and articles were given over to describing routes past, present, and
future, and their implications for imperial unity and security.106 Stewart
Newcombe called on members to pioneer a desert motor route between
Cairo, Aqaba, Jauf, and Ramadi: a ‘useful alternative motor road—if you
can dodge Ibn Saud’.107 Desert railways from Libya to Karachi were com-
pared, debated, and proposed: four separate surveys of one route were each
led by Society members.108 Air routes were also ‘of close interest to every
member’, given the difficulties of movement over the rugged, arid environ-
ments in its remit.109
Route-making and tribal policy were inextricably linked, as we shall
see up close in Chapter 2. Road-building was a key component of the
Modified Forward Policy on the North-West Frontier, but its reformative
potential amongst ‘tribesmen’ was discussed much more widely, and often
with reference to Marshal Wade’s Highland campaigns two centuries ear-
lier. ‘The road’, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu explained,
means troops easily moved. Troops mean protection for property. Property
means trading. Trading means civilization. Civilization means the turning of
the sword into the ploughshare. These sequences are historic, natural, and
inevitable.110
Officers in the Middle East also equated improvements in mechanized
transport with a tighter grasp on nomad affairs.111 Even aviation routes
had implications for tribal control, reflecting the potential, and the
limitations, of this interwar technology. But communications was
only one of a host of related issues explored at the Society: in many
ways, its interests become ours for the rest of this book. Route reports
led on to more general discussions of the practicalities of arid travel,
and the technicalities of improving vehicle durability and range.112
Policing methods were compared between the Sudan, Trans-Jordan,
Iraq, and the North-West Frontier—there were even efforts to distil a
global ‘Air Control of Frontiers’.113 Debates over desert development
were equally ambitious, while specific incidents of desert warfare led to
106
For example: Woods, ‘Near East’, p. 83.
107
Keeling, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Railway’, p. 389.
108
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, p. 64; Holt, ‘Journeys’, p. 187; Keeling, ‘Haifa-Baghdad
Railway’, p. 388.
109
Burchall, ‘Air Route’, p. 3.
110
Douglas-Scott-Montagu, ‘North West Frontier’, p. 143.
111
Jarvis, ‘Sinai’, p. 46. 112
For example: Anon., ‘Overland Motor Route’.
113
Howell, ‘Some Problems’, p. 197; Chamier, ‘Air Control’.
wider reflections on the centrality of water management in defence and

attack. How nomads lived and fought was of scholarly and practical
interest to the Society.114
Behind it all, however, lay a debate over the form of administration best
suited to ‘nomadic conditions’. One member neatly summarized ‘the Tribal
Question’ as being between ‘leaving the tribes to manage their affairs by
tribal methods’ on the one hand, and ‘endowing the border districts with
complicated administrative machinery’ on the other.115 Another put it
more succinctly, calling for ‘more Sandemans and fewer . . . Macaulays’.116
This was enmeshed in the ‘old controversy between the close border policy
of the Punjab and the more liberal tribal policy of Baluchistan’, but offic-
ers beyond the North-West Frontier remained sensitive to the charge of
‘civilising the desert’.117 For others, in contrast, ‘the advantages of admin-
istration’ of towns and villages ‘as against those of the nomad’ were ‘obvi-
ous’, and sedentarization a welcome programme.118 In searching for past
precedents to support these varied interpretations, members ensured their
arguments were conducted with depth as well as breadth.
The interwar climate was conducive to this debate. Political unrest and
financial crisis in the immediate postwar years set a premium upon flexi-
bility, reconfiguring imperial relationships to ensure that essential interests
were upheld. This was not an empire in retreat, as we shall see in Chapter
2, but many local officials were open to rethinking approaches to frontier
zones and their populations. Over the course of discussion, the idea began
to emerge that received axioms about nomads were no longer appropriate.
This observation is significant in itself. Scholars often talk as if there is
a shared, static ‘state administrative view’ of handling nomads, or assume
that nomads must be ‘the ultimate administrative nightmare’.119 In this,
the policies of settler colonies and developmentalist states have been
allowed to stand in for all. Those asking the Tribal Question, however,
demonstrated far greater ambivalence.
Typically, British perceptions of nomads were framed by European
notions of a scalar ordering of society, moving from hunting-gathering,
through pastoralism, to agriculture, commerce, and industry. In this
teleological sequence of social forms, nomadism and agriculture were
yardsticks, connoting disparities in ‘civilization’. This was prejudice with
114
Jarvis, ‘Three Deserts’, p. 543; Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’, p. 553; Glubb, ‘Bedouins
of Northern Iraq’.
115
Barton, ‘Law and Order’, p. 8. 116
Anon., review of Pioneers of Progress.
117
Haward, ‘India’s Defence’, p. 115; Jacob, ‘Waziristan’, p. 253; Anon., ‘Iraq-Nejd
Frontier’, p. 90.
118
Vickery, review of The Heart of Arabia, p. 78.
119
Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 228.
pedigree: since antiquity, the social order of nomads—those ‘eaters of flesh

and drinkers of milk’—had been presented as ‘the barbaric negative’ of
an ‘exemplary centre’, the polis.120 On the internal frontiers of ‘the First
English Empire’, and again in Ireland, it was on the basis of mobile pasto-
ralism that the line between ‘sweet civility’ and ‘barbarous rudeness’ was
drawn.121 Because the presence of agriculture had long been considered
a prerequisite for recognition of property rights in land, those without it
were ‘unsettled’, ‘fickle’ and ‘violent’: ‘wanderers’ passing over the land,
incapable of forming a more consequential, civil society.
In the modern British experience, this view of nomads was most con-
sistently expounded by white settler communities in the ‘Neo-Europes’.122
This was because, above all else, perceptions of nomadism have proven
inextricable from the degree of pressure on land. During the settlement
of North America, John Locke’s contention that only land mixed with
labour—cultivated land—could be considered Property had helped turn
prejudice into an unofficial ideology. Those branded ‘nomads’ had left the
land uncultivated; their ‘waste’ was an offence against the common Law of
Nature, which the industrious must put to right. This should not be dis-
missed as a mere smoke-screen for expropriation: antipathy to ‘waste’ was
genuine and ran deep.123 But it nonetheless became central to rationalizing
indigenous displacement, particularly during the explosion of settler pop-
ulations between 1830 and 1890. Comparable ideas remained widespread
into the twentieth century, as Canada’s wartime Greater Production Effort
programme and 1919 Soldier Settlement Act show.124 In our period, it
continued to colour colonial visions of nomads across sub-Saharan Africa.
Across the settler communities of the British world, land so dominated
ideas about nomadism as to shut out alternative approaches.
At the Society, however, there was thinking-room to question some of
these certainties. The settler presence was slender in the areas under its
purview, and the resultant approaches to nomads more diverse. There was
no systemic imperial drive to dispossess Middle Eastern nomads of their
semi-arid grazing lands, or to concentrate them as an indigenous labour
force. ‘McNeill’s law’ of pathogenic advantage did not apply on these Old
World frontiers, and the language of ‘Vanishing Races’, commonly heard
120
Shaw, ‘Eaters of Flesh’, pp. 5–13; Noyes, ‘Nomadic Landscapes’, p. 199; Wolf,
‘Perilous Ideas’, p. 2.
121
Davies, First English Empire. See also: Canny, ‘Ideology of English Colonization’.
122
Anne Curthoys has suggested how British ‘knowledge’ of those perceived as nomads
was shared between settlers in Australia, Cape Colony, and New Zealand in the nineteenth
century: Curthoys, ‘Indigenous Subjects’, p. 90.
123
Banner, Possessing the Pacific, p. 88.
124
Winegard, ‘All the King’s Men’, pp. 243, 260.
in the Neo-Europes, was at least open to debate here.125 Nor were many
of the ideas associated with ‘state-building’ approaches to nomads—rapid
sedentarization to increase taxable economic activity, or to prevent loss of
manpower through ‘flight’—necessarily resonant amongst colonial desert
officers. Concepts of nomadism framed by ‘a model of progressively solidi-
fying frontier areas whose destiny was the nation-state’ were necessarily
more meaningful to national governments than to imperial officers.126
While settlement schemes in Palestine did lead to more familiar views
of nomads, and some Society members came to share in these too, many
still disassociated themselves from these ideas.127 The absence of a con-
sistent settler voice is the last defining feature of Britain’s interwar Tribal
Question, setting it apart from French possessions, practices, and ideas in
North Africa.128
This, then, was a community deeply interested in the nature and future
of nomadic societies. A string of events between the wars provided an
imperative need and the evidential basis with which to pursue of a range of
concerns. We must now explore how asking ‘the Tribal Question’ changed
the Society itself, and why historians of Britain and the Middle East should
take notice.
‘ N E V E R B E F O R E H AV E T R I B A L P RO B L E M S
I M P I N G E D W I T H G R E AT E R F O RC E ’ : T H E RC A S
I N T H E I N T E RWA R WO R L D
The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a budding professionalism within Britain’s

Colonial Service. As administration became more technical and complex,
specialist officials were increasingly prepared to prescribe ‘generally appli-
cable policies’ for broad regions of the world.129 One Colonial Service
prosopography finds 1920 and 1928 to be ‘boom’ years for recruiting
agricultural, medical, forestry, veterinary, survey, and other scientific per-
sonnel.130 Specialist Advisers to the Colonial Office followed, in medicine
125
For analysis of the connection between indigenous demography and colonial ideol-
ogy, see Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings.
126
Noyes, ‘Nomadic Landscapes’, p. 199.
127
Jarvis’ advocacy of Jewish agricultural settlement in the Negev was, as we’ll see in
Chapter 4, ‘in the eyes of some people . . . the rankest form of heresy’: Jarvis, ‘Empty
Quarter’, p. 668.
128
Patricia Lorcin, for example, has explored how interwar French settlers in Algeria
made agriculture the lynchpin of their ‘Latin’ identity, justifying colonial rule over ‘indo-
lent’ Arabs: Lorcin, ‘Rome and France’.
129
Hyam, ‘Bureaucracy’, p. 257. 130
Kirk-Greene, Colonial Service, p. viii.
(1926), fisheries (1928), agriculture (1929), and animal health (1930).

By the late 1930s it was the files of these ‘subject’ departments that were
‘becoming increasingly the focus of business’.131
The RCAS and the emergent field of ‘desert administration’ deserve to
be included in the same frame, as a missing colonial profession, an over-
looked component of a broader interwar story. The great surge in Society
membership coincided with this specialist turn. Interest in deserts and
desiccation intersected with the ongoing maturation of professional for-
estry, just as comparable quasi-academic societies such as the Geographical
Association also grew rapidly and ‘went international’.132
Yet unlike empire’s foresters, ‘desert administration’ could neither draw
on a clear administrative cadre, nor rely on the backing of a government
institution. Making the case for this colonial profession requires a different
methodological approach. Noting the multiplicity and un-coordination
of imperial land-use policies in the 1860s, Richard Grove has observed
how the Royal Geographical Society acted to plug the gap, ‘fulfilling a
centralising role’ and transferring ideas between disparate territories.133
Sixty years on, the RCAS performed a similar function. As Peter Clark
has shown, colonial societies and voluntary associations thrived when thin
regimes attempted to operate in complex environments.134 The postwar
advance into unfamiliar desert areas generated both new information and
a pressing need for its analysis, but lacked a formal ‘centre of calculation’.
With a global membership, circulating between a range of arid environ-
ments and committed to providing information of ‘practical value’, the
Society developed in response. Doing so transformed its scope, signifi-
cance, and profile.
In fulfilling this ‘centralising role’, the Society offered a counter-
point to the inter-departmental and service rivalry so often observed
in the British Middle East. Administrators inherited a wartime leg-
acy of ‘disorderly’, ‘increasingly contradictory’ and even ‘polarised’
policy-making.135 Indeed, reconstructing desert administration is
greatly complicated by the lack of a regular career structure, the intel-
lectual baggage of officers’ prior postings and the web of transfers,
secondments and short contracts that kept personnel in motion. Yet
local desert officers were acutely aware of the potential for friction, and
actively sought a means of sharing approaches and reconciling disputes
131
Hyam, ‘Bureaucracy’, pp. 257–258.
132
Butlin, ‘Historical Geographies’, p. 166.
133
Grove, ‘Discourse of Desiccation’, pp. 36–52.
134
Clark, British Clubs, p. 403.
135
Blyth, Empire of the Raj, p. 140; Killingray and Omissi, Guardians, p. 9.
across departments and boundaries. Since its inception, the Society had
aspired to operate as a hub of expertise and policy, for without a ‘rec-
ognised place of meeting or means of communication with each other’
valuable experience would be lost.136 In 1935, the Council confirmed
its mission as being ‘to maintain in England a central institution for the
collection, provision, maintenance and diffusion of information and
knowledge’ relating to the areas under its remit.137 Historians are right
to note that no British security service in the Arab world possessed
‘quite the same esprit de corps as the French Service de Renseignements, or
quite the same numerical strength as the Sûréte’.138 But by shifting our
attention away from formal institutions, we can see that the Society did
much to fill the gap.
Officers and members who collaborated in the field often reviewed each
other’s work in the Journal. They closely monitored the varied attempts at
Middle Eastern administrative reorganization, egging on further projects.
In 1920, William Ormsby-Gore used a Society address to call for ‘a new
service’ for ‘our new Arabic-speaking empire’, and the Society acted as
an advocate for such a service well into the 1940s.139 When one mem-
ber sought to devise a tribal settlement programme for the North-West
Frontier, he appealed to the Society and its institutional memory of tribal
affairs.140 Another looked forward to the day when officers experienced in
‘tribal areas’ from across the empire could serve in a ‘unified’, ‘interchange-
able’ service, enacting ‘Lord Lugard’s gospel of indirect rule’ on a truly
global scale.141 But between the wars, and in lieu of this catholic tribal
service, officers made do with the RCAS.142
Its centralizing function operated in a number of ways. For those new
to desert areas, it compensated for inexperience. Scrambling to respond
to revolt on the lower Euphrates, the War Office dispatched 350 offic-
ers to Iraq without interview, and with no prior knowledge of the
136
Cited in Leach, Strolling About, p. 5. See also RSAA: Minute Book 1: Tupp, ‘Inception
and Progress’.
137
RSAA: Minute Book, 23 July 1935.
138
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, p. 36.
139
Ormsby-Gore, ‘Organisation’. See also: Dobbs, ‘Unifying British Control’. In 1945
one member suggested that the Eighth Army—the ‘Desert Rats’—could provide a corps of
administrators for the Middle East: Jackson, ‘Aspects of the War’.
140
Byrt, ‘North-West Frontier’, p. 286.
141
Anon., ‘Frontier Problem’. See also: Noel, ‘Wanted’.
142
The issue concerned our three desert administrators too. Glubb corresponded with
Douglas Newbold in the Sudan on establishing a regular ‘Middle East Service’: MECA: JBG
214/5, Newbold to Glubb, 27 June 1944. Jarvis, reviewing Robin Maugham’s Nomad
(1947) for the Society, praised a wartime scheme to train young Britons ‘for administra-
tive posts in Arab lands’, but wondered aloud where they would find work in the postwar
world: Jarvis, review of Nomad.
region required.143 The records left by Special Service Officers attest to

the steep learning-curve they faced. In Egypt, an expanding Frontiers
Administration tried to recruit men with relevant military experience,
though many were less sure in their roles as civil administrators (Jarvis
later admitted that he ‘knew nothing about desert administration’ when
sent to his first posting).144 For those inclined to learn, the Society was
an important forum. It aimed to promote discussion between territories
and across the generations. Members visiting London ‘fresh from their
most recent triumphs’ gave lectures chaired by former Governors, High
Commissioners, and regional Service chiefs.145 Outgoing administra-
tors might nominate their successors as members.146 Local Honorary
Secretaries were those who had ‘proved their value as members’ but who
were also unlikely to be transferred soon, providing the continuity needed
to tie together this protracted imperial network.147 As membership accel-
erated in the immediate postwar years, the Society welcomed a ‘younger
generation’ to its ranks, and printed occasional bibliographies to get mem-
bers up to speed.148 Tribal policy and desert administration were simply
too important and complex to be left to the British electoral cycle.149
The Society, then, formed a very different kind of network from that
which has commanded attention in recent years. It fell outside the ‘distinc-
tive pattern of associational activity in the Anglophone world’ based on
port cities and administrative towns, and predicated on urbanization, local
presses, and public sociability.150 Its composition, too, differed from the
missionaries, humanitarians, settlers and scientists that have loomed larg-
est in efforts to recover the ‘British World’. Instead, it suggests how a net-
worked approach can provide fresh light on that least fashionable branch
of imperial history: administration itself. The Society’s membership was
confined to no single jurisdiction or branch of government, yet came to
see itself as a discrete community of interests, making claims to particular
forms of expertise across the vast area under its remit. Recruitment pro-
cesses tell us much about a group’s relative professionalism, and applicants
to the RCAS, nominated by two existing members, supplied a written
143
IWM: Glubb (interview), Reel 1.
144
FO 141/436/5, Hunter to Fraser, 4 June 1921; Jarvis, ‘Three Deserts’, p. 544.
145
RSAA: Minute Book 1: Tupp, ‘Inception and Progress’.
146
As did Jarvis in the Sinai: RSAA: Minute Book 5: 6 Oct. 1936.
147
RSAA: Minute Book 5: 5 May 1936.
148
149
‘The Parliamentary system in England’, Glubb complained, ‘makes it almost impos-
sible for a British Government to handle the Middle East . . . [I]‌f we had 25 or 30 really
first class British officials, we could carry on’: MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb to Newbold, 8
July 1944.
150
Clark, British Clubs, p. 388.
statement of their suitability.151 The grant of a royal charter, adoption of a

coat of arms, and inauguration of a Golden Book to preserve a record for
a distant centenary all demonstrate the Society’s tendency to consciously
consider itself an ‘elite’.152
The various desert administrations in which members served were also in
the process of projecting themselves as professional undertakings. Egypt’s
Frontiers Administration, for example, was an institution in transition in
the 1920s, wavering between a cult of the amateur and the elevation of the
expert. Jarvis felt he owed his promotion to his shooting as much as his
administrative record, but also maintained that desert work was a special-
ism to which straightforward soldiers were not suited. ‘The gentle art of
administering a semi-civilized race’, he wrote, ‘is not learnt in a day’; by
1937, it was felt that six months’ desert experience was necessary to take
up such a post.153 This parallels developments amidst French méharistes in
Syria, where Albert de Boucheman also recognized that studying nomads
formed ‘une obligation professionelle’.154 Over the course of the period,
the term ‘desert administration’ (often capitalized) became an increasingly
familiar shorthand for sets of responsibilities, challenges, and solutions.
Glubb, for example, drafted a ‘Handbook of Desert Administration’ in his
final years in Iraq, setting out ‘General Principles’ for the edification of his
colleagues.155 The term embraced a wide range of duties, recalling the con-
centration of powers afforded to Britain’s desert officers, but was regularly
deployed nonetheless. Jarvis set out some guidelines:
One must endeavour to see things from an Arab standpoint and to take an
interest in the things that interest them. An ability to use a shot-gun or rifle
is a great asset, and a thorough knowledge of the desert fur and feather com-
mands respect. One must also be able to do a long day on a camel without
fatigue, and one secret of Lawrence’s great popularity was his ability . . . to
tire out the most hardened desert camel rider.156
Exploring how disagreement and debate was managed at the RCAS
provides a further index of its professionalism. The connections sus-
tained by the Society went far beyond the personal: this was a genuine
151
Too few remain to attempt a prosopography, but occasional examples survive. Glubb’s
application, for example, was supported by Philby, at a time when their relationship was less
adversarial: MECA: JBG 203/2, Philby to Glubb, 30 Sept. 1925.
152
Sykes, ‘Founding and Progress’. The centenary took place in 2001, but the Golden
Book had been destroyed with the library during the Blitz.
153
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 13, 56; FO 141/534/16, W. Smart, ‘Egyptianisation of the
Frontier Governorships’, 20 Jan. 1937.
154
Boucheman, ‘Sédentarisation’, p. 141.
155
MECA: JBG 203/1, Glubb, ‘Handbook of Desert Administration’ (n.d.).
156
Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 19–20.
forum, not a consensual old boys’ network. In 1929, Arnold Wilson

chastized St John Philby for toning down his true opinion of Ibn
Saud: ‘in such matters, we want not less, but more, controversy’.157 The
same could not be said of Wilson himself, who robustly defended his
administrative record in a series of Society lectures and Journal articles.
Glubb also used the pages of the Journal to cast doubt on Ibn Saud’s
character, and to try to change British policy towards the Amir.158
Anonymous contributions could herald heated exchanges. When
things went wrong, or disaster was narrowly averted, representatives of
differing imperial services rushed to assign responsibility and blame.159
Nonetheless, there were important limits to debate, which help deline-
ate the group’s boundaries. Following complaints in 1936, the Council
moved to ensure that the Journal hereafter contain no ‘strictures on
Eastern states’ which might be considered damaging ‘in the opinion of
British members abroad’.160
Asking the Tribal Question also changed the Society’s points of refer-
ence. As members sought information on the peoples under their charge,
they moved away from superficial travel narratives—‘those all-too com-
mon books on the East, written as the result of a six weeks’ conducted
tour’—and demanded more detailed studies.161 When these were not
available, they made comparisons and drew parallels. The concepts and
vocabulary that made this possible are explored below, but one final obser-
vation should be made at this stage.
Historians have tended to assume the primacy of the North-West
Frontier as the fons et origo of imperial ‘tribal policy’.162 But the Society’s
record warns against any simple ‘Indian transplant’ hypothesis. Here,
Indian ‘precedent’ was invoked more than it was emulated, and for a vari-
ety of reasons. By the interwar years, India was no longer the only size-
able territory in which British administrators ruled a large non-European
population—Egypt itself, as well as colonies in Africa, offered alternate
‘showpieces’ of administration.163 Many desert officers were without per-
sonal experience of Indian government, arguably the ultimate mechanism
by which influence was spread. There was, at any rate, no clear ‘lesson’ to
draw from Indian experience, and the lack of a single ‘model’ contrib-
uted to the uneven development of desert administration on the ground.
157
Philby, ‘Survey’, p. 480. 158
Glubb, review of Arabia of the Wahhabis.
159
For example, over the capacity of Trans-Jordan’s forces to prevent Bedouin raiding, or
the extent of ‘desert-mindedness’ among British troops in Egypt: Jarvis, ‘Correspondence’;
Sinclair, ‘Correspondence’.
160
RSAA: Minute Book 5: 2 June 1936. 161
Jarvis, Back Garden, p. 1.
162
For example: Moreman, ‘Watch and Ward’, p. 153; Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, p. 47.
163
Owen, ‘Lord Cromer’, p. 109; Chamberlain, ‘Lord Cromer’, p. 65.
Some members openly advised against importing Indian administrative

‘traditions’ to the Middle East, and called for ‘new Arabian traditions’ for
protecting the region from Bedouin and Kurdish tribes (and ‘new men’ to
do so).164 If Arnold Wilson and his Indian background were prominent in
the early 1920s, they were offset by former members of the Arab Bureau,
an alternate ‘archive of instruction’.165 When the Round Table Conference
proposed repealing sections of India’s Frontier Crimes Regulations,
one opponent even hoped that frontier experiences elsewhere would be
brought to bear on tribal policy in India itself.166 A study of frontier policy
in Waziristan drew on Jarvis’ Yesterday and To-Day in Sinai, George Lloyd’s
Egypt Since Cromer, Bertram Thomas’ Alarms and Excursions in Arabia,
and Arnold Wilson’s memoirs to make suggestions based on ‘the charac-
teristics of . . . warrior-tribes all over the world’.167 Assuming Indian pre-
dominance, in short, may obscure more than it reveals. The Society came
to be a crucial arena for developing ideas across disparate territories, but
tracing the specific transit of practices reminds us of how selectively this
was done. It was not the conduit of self-evident Indian solutions. It was a
creative space in itself.
* * *
If ‘desert administration’ was fast becoming an unofficial colonial profes-
sion, what were its shared models and reference points, its vocabulary and
units of analysis, its heroes and its villains?
In 1935, the Society sought to answer such questions directly by insti-
tuting an award to celebrate members’ achievements: the Lawrence of
Arabia Memorial Medal. The idea of an award to recognize imperial ser-
vice was first floated in 1923, and finally realized in the wave of popular
reaction to Lawrence’s untimely death.168 In 1935, an appeal for donations
was launched in the Journal and The Times, a sub-committee established to
judge candidates, and Eric Kennington commissioned to design a medal.
The following year Glubb became its first recipient ‘for pacification of the
North Arabian desert’.
The records of the ‘Memorial Medal Committee’ provide a window
onto how the Society conferred authority and promoted policy. It explic-
itly sought to recognize ‘officers in charge of desert areas, or in command of
local levies’, as well as explorers, writers, ‘pioneers of trade routes’, archae-
ologists, and anthropologists.169 A later rubric added that recognition was
164
Ormsby-Gore, ‘Organisation’, pp. 95–96, 105.
165
The phrase is Paula Mohs’; see Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, pp. 50–51.
166
Bruce, ‘Sandeman Policy’, p. 61. 167
Bruce, Waziristan, p. vii.
168
Leach, Strolling About, p. 171. 169
RSAA: Golden Book.
especially due ‘where a primitive people has been helped to a better way
of life’.170 Early recipients strongly reflect this emphasis on work in arid
climates and among nomadic societies. After recognizing Glubb for ‘the
creation of order in the nomad territory of Northern Arabia’, recipients
included Charles Bell for his work in Tibet and Mongolia (1937), Jarvis
‘for the development of the Sinai’ (1938), Harold and Doreen Ingrams ‘for
ending the blood feuds of the Hadhramaut’ (1939), Peake in 1940 (nar-
rowly beating the desert explorer Ralph Bagnold), C. E. Corry ‘for work
among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq’ (1941), and Mildred Cable for explora-
tion of the Gobi desert (1942).171 Candidates were those ‘who were either
in the field or who have recently returned from it’. Indeed, the link with
practical administration and imperial interests was so strong that in more
recent years the Society’s successor institution struggled to confer the
award.172
The medal helped encapsulate the Society’s core interests and reinforce
its claim to represent a specific branch of imperial activity. The Society,
Jarvis wrote on receipt of the medal, ‘represents all the greatest and most
experienced soldiers and officers who have served in Asia’.173 But it also
helped to set the boundaries of this emerging profession. After the Second
World War the Committee were keen to recognize Philby for his explo-
ration and publications, but Kinahan Cornwallis objected to his recent
defeatism and former criticism of mandatory policy; in 1937 members
walked out of one of his RCAS addresses after a particularly hectoring dis-
play.174 The offer was withdrawn, and Philby never received the award.175
Later, the same Committee dismissed Arnold Toynbee as a suitable recipi-
ent, ‘his attitudes’ being ‘controversial rather than constructive’.176
The decision to grant the award to Glubb ahead of Peake, despite the
latter’s seniority, was also meant to emphasize that this was a professional
accomplishment, not a sinecure.177 Nominations were sought from com-
manding officers, senior officials and diplomats serving overseas: in 1938,
170
RSAA: Medal Box 2/3, ‘Note on the Lawrence Memorial Medal’ (n.d.).
171
Bagnold was considered ‘for exploration in the Egyptian deserts’ and for his contri-
butions to mechanized desert travel: RSAA: Medal Box 2/6, ‘Considerations for Lawrence
Medal, 1939’ (n.d.); RSAA: Golden Book.
172
RSAA: Medal Box 1, M.E. Yapp, ‘Memorandum on the Medals’, 7 Oct. 1975.
173
RSAA: Minute Book 5, 26 Apr. 1938, enclosing Jarvis to Sykes, 30 Apr. 1938.
174
Monroe, Philby, pp. 138, 207. At the height of the Ikhwan revolt, Glubb described
Philby as Ibn Saud’s ‘ill-informed but vociferous parrot’: AIR 23/46, Glubb to Cornwallis,
‘Monthly Administration Report for the Southern Desert Area, December 1928’.
175
RSAA: Medal Box 2, Philby Correspondence, minutes 12 Mar. 1953.
176
RSAA: Medal Box 2/4, ‘Sykes and Lawrence Medals, summary of replies received’
(n.d., 1962).
177
RSAA: Medal Box 1, Lloyd to Kennedy, 1 May 1940.
the Foreign Office commented on Jarvis’ suitability.178 The following

year, Jarvis himself recommended Peake not simply for his contribution
to Trans-Jordan’s public security, but also for his steps towards develop-
ing the desert.179 The Medal thus gave sanction to the breadth of duties
undertaken by Britain’s desert administrators, and contrasts with a recent
tendency to consider these men primarily, or even exclusively, as ‘intelli-
gence officers’.180 This was not necessarily how they saw themselves.181 The
first surviving annual report of Egypt’s Frontiers Administration described
how its officers undertook police, military and judicial work, public heath
supervision, tax collection, route maintenance, and public works pro-
jects: ‘in short, all the duties which hitherto . . . had been perfunctorily dis-
charged by the various Departments [of the Government of Egypt]’. This
was a remarkable concentration of powers.182 ‘I am not merely charged
with administrative duties’, Jarvis explained,
but have been also . . . a builder of houses, bridges and dams; an agricul-
turalist, stock-breeder and apiarist; a Customs official and Inspector of
Education; a police officer and a judge, and it is this extraordinary variety
which has made the job so fascinating.183
Rudyard Kipling agreed, after reading a copy of Jarvis’ first book. It was
‘uncommon good’ stuff, he reassured the younger author, but wanted
more of the ‘ “administering justice under a palm tree” stories’—the kind
of autonomous paternalism that India’s Civilians struggled to practise
these days.184 Intelligence work was certainly important (it looms large in
Chapter 3), but there was much here that an older generation of District
Officers would have recognized. As with so much else in Britain’s interwar
empire, desert administration stood at a juncture.
Conferring the Lawrence Medal provided the Society with a means
to establish ‘authorities’ and promote forms of action ‘in an increasingly
standardized and safety-first age’.185 But it also looked to the past. With
detailed census and population studies pending for much of the 1920s,
the Society played an important role in promoting the works of Richard
Burton, William Palgrave, and Charles Doughty as experts on the deserts
178
RSAA: Medal Box 1, ‘Confidential’, 6 Feb. 1939; Foreign Office Registers of
Correspondence, ‘Jarvis, C. S., Major’, 1938.
179
RSAA: Medal Box 1, Jarvis to Sykes, 16 Jan. 1939.
180
For example, Satia, Spies in Arabia; Thomas, Empires of Intelligence.
181
For Jarvis’ estimation of his own work, see Three Deserts, pp. 15, 47, 78.
182
FO 141/799/5, ‘Frontier Districts Annual Report 1921’, 21 Dec. 1921.
183
Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 124.
184
University of Sussex Library: Rudyard Kipling papers 16/14, Kipling to Jarvis, (n.d.
Sept. 1931).
185
RSAA: Medal Box 1: The Times, 30 May 1935.
of the Middle East. Through the pages of the Journal, their collective
Victorian conviction that ‘the English “knew the Arabs” as no one else did’
was extended into the twentieth century.186 Acknowledging these authori-
ties became the price of admission to Society debates. For commentators,
the highest accolade was being ranked alongside ‘those famous travel-
lers, Burton, Doughty, Gertrude Bell, and others’.187 Befitting a mem-
bership more familiar with Woolwich and Sandhurst than Oxford and
Cambridge, these English vernacular texts stood in for the Greco-Roman
classics that formed the intellectual landscape of an earlier generation of
Egyptian administrators.188 In this pantheon of Greats, Doughty stood
as primus inter pares. Glubb ‘devoured the works of the explorers of
Arabia’, was ‘determined to imitate them’, and arranged for the famous
1921 edition of Arabia Deserta to be sent out to Iraq. Peake, drawing on
Doughty’s book for a 1928 memorandum on Wahhabism, claimed that
an Englishman familiar with it knew more about the Bedouin than any
town-bred Arab.189 A review of a new edition of Arabia Deserta for the
Journal thought it incredible that any member would not already be famil-
iar with the work.190 The suitability of these Victorian classics for practical
administration, however, will be explored in Part II.
Bridging an older genre of travel literature and a newer interest in
practical administration, the Society looked thoroughly for precedents,
models, and heroes. Given the importance of the Memorial Medal, it is
tempting to see Lawrence himself in this light. Certainly, one member
who had read ‘Colonel Lawrence’s manuscript’, at that time unpublished
and lying with the Bodleian, thought him ‘a master, whose knowledge of
everything relating to the Arabs is profound’.191 In-house histories also
assume that the Society’s connections with Lawrence were ‘binding’.192
But for much of the period, members were in fact loathe to bracket them-
selves with Lawrence and his legend. Wilson, as part of his campaign
against the Arab Bureau, savaged Revolt in the Desert in a review for the
Journal, attacking Lawrence’s ‘vanity’, ‘conscious artistry’ and ‘intellectual
snobbery’.193 Jarvis thought Seven Pillars of Wisdom too enraptured with
the Bedouin, affording them a ‘dignity’ their conduct seldom deserved.194
186
Tidrick, Heart-Beguiling Araby, p. 159.
187
Rutter, ‘Damascus to Hail’, p. 61.
188
Reid, ‘Cromer and the Classics’, pp. 3, 7.
189
IWM: FGP 11, Peake, ‘Brief History of the Wahhabi Movement’ (n.d. Mar. 1928);
Royle, Glubb Pasha, p. 93; Glubb, Story, p. 37.
190
Anon., review of Passages from Arabia Deserta, p. 590.
191
Anon., ‘Colonel Lawrence’s Manuscript’.
192
Leach, Strolling About, p. 172. 193
Wilson, review of Revolt in the Desert.
194
For some, Lawrence was synonymous with the ‘golden sovereigns’ paid to
secure Bedouin participation in the Arab Revolt, a by-word for an expensive,
indecent and ultimately damaging policy.195 Officers in all areas remained
extremely sensitive to the related charge of tribal ‘blackmail’ well into the
1930s.196 Lawrence’s experience of the Bedouin, moreover, had been largely
limited to the disturbed conditions of war—he never accompanied them
on a regular seasonal migration. For all these reasons, rehabilitation at the
Society awaited his death, ‘for death alone can strip such a figure clean’.197
Indeed, for much of our period, Lawrence was more widely deployed as
a symbol of amateurism, alongside the image of the Bedouin propagated by
E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919), and the Rudolph Valentino film of the same
name (1921). These became an interwar phenomenon, giving rise to the
‘desert romance’ genre, but provoked a strong critical reaction from sectors of
British society. The Rothermere and Beaverbrook presses, for example, saw in
these highly sensualized fictions ‘a threat to the ideals of Western manhood’;
for the Society, distancing itself from ‘ “sheek” stuff or ravings on desert sun-
sets’ was a further marker of its professionalism.198 ‘One really wants to be
an American journalist to describe desert scenery’, Jarvis sneered at Lowell
Thomas. Only the amateur thought the Bedouin ‘a hero of romance and a
ladykiller’.199
Robert Sandeman provided a readier point of reference. A veteran of the
Mutiny, Chief Commissioner of Baluchistan and advocate of the Forward
Policy, Sandeman (1835–1892) achieved a level of fame and recognition in
the interwar years even greater than he had had in life. Periodicals ran features
on the life of ‘Sandy’, his work with Marri and Bugti Baluch tribes, and the
meaning of his ‘humane imperialist’ and ‘hearts and minds’ policies.200 The
Society adopted Sandeman as an unofficial figurehead, hosting a luncheon
on the centenary of his birth. As a man he was lauded for his ‘fine physique’
and ‘imperturbably genial’ manner to Europeans and ‘Asiatics’ alike. As the
archetypal frontier officer his combination of finding employment for tribes-
men, using local levies and consolidating the jirga (tribal council) became
distilled as ‘the Sandeman system’ of tribal ‘self-government’.201 By the 1920s,
195
Main, ‘Iraq: a Note’, p. 428.
196
See, for instance: FO 905/18, Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1935.
197
Anon., review of T. E. Lawrence by his Friends.
198
Melman, Women, pp. 89–104; Ingrams, review of Three Deserts, p. 695.
199
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 109–110, 154–155. ‘I think’, he added privately, ‘my
books are unpopular in America because I tell the stark truth and . . . this does not fit in
with American ideas of sheeks and Orientals generally’: JM: DN24, Jarvis to Murray, 9
Dec. 1938.
200
For one example among many: Shabnam, ‘Sandeman’. The latter phrase, revived after
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is in fact Sandeman’s.
201
Bruce, ‘Tribal Problems’.
the growing belief that the key tenets of this ‘system’ could meet the upsurge
in ‘tribal problems’ across the globe made familiarity with Sandeman’s work
of ‘very present and practical interest’.202 Sandeman, most agreed, had ‘ideas
a good deal in advance of his times’.203
Sandeman’s work helped provide a framework for drawing comparisons
between ‘native policies’ in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. But
there was more to this turn to the past than simply adoration and emula-
tion. Citing Sandeman became so frequent precisely because it was unclear
what his legacy had been. Officers invoked his name in a bid to confer
legitimacy on a range of conflicting policies, originating in disparate loca-
tions.204 In the wake of the occupation of Razmak, for example, some
emphasized road-building as ‘one of the principal points’ of Sandeman’s
policy, while others held the preservation of ‘tribal organisation’ and
encouragement of welfare to be its central feature.205 One officer’s indict-
ment of the ‘system’ was understood by another as ‘unwittingly’ proving its
suitability: even officers familiar with the same frontier could disagree over
what that ‘system’ actually was.206 When unrest returned to Waziristan in
1936, members were unsure whether it was a result of ‘Sandemanization’,
or because the ‘system’ had not been carried far enough.207 Such confusion
was not helped by the fact that Sandeman himself had left little in the way
of publications or memoirs, leaving commentators to work over a range of
biographies and other second-hand accounts.208 Again, this should warn
against exaggerating the power of Indian examples or ‘precedents’ over the
rest of the empire without exploring exactly how they were transmitted
and enacted. In his monthly report for March 1935, Glubb advised ‘tak-
ing a leaf from Sandeman’s book’, but only emphasized those elements of
policy in line with his own, and only after reading of the Society’s birthday
luncheon.209 As Roger Owen found in his study of Lord Cromer, the idea
of ‘British achievements in India’ exerted a power over administrators that
led them to invoke Indian precedent even when its actual impact was more
ephemeral.210
The Memorial Medal and its recipients, the great Arabian travel-
lers, Lawrence, Sandeman, and The Sheik—all these helped define what
202
Bruce, ‘Tribal Problems’, p. 226. 203
204
In contrast, Thomas describes British officers as straightforwardly ‘quoting with
approval the precepts of tribal policing laid down by Sir Robert Sandeman’: Empires of
Intelligence, p. 52.
205
Douglas-Scott-Montagu, ‘Influence of Communications’, p. 250.
206
Bruce, review of Problem of the North-West Frontier.
207
Bruce, Waziristan.
208
Notably: Tucker, Sandeman; Thornton, Sandeman; Ram, Sandeman.
209
FO 905/18: Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1935.
210
Owen, ‘Lord Cromer’, p. 112.
Pierre Bourdieu called the professional ‘field’ of the RCAS and its Tribal
Question: the ‘specific rules of the game, specific stakes, rewards and signs
of authority’.211 So too did the vocabulary, categories and units of analy-
sis it deployed. For local officers, identifying ‘tangible, meaningful units’
within their jurisdictions was as important for morale as for administra-
tion: it helped reduce bewildering peoples and places to something alto-
gether more manageable.212 It was also a precondition for comparing and
translating policies across the globe. Victorian statesmen, Roger Owen
observed, could only imagine ‘that the problems of government were very
much alike everywhere’ when a common unit of analysis—in his case, the
‘peasant’—had been found.213 For desert administrators and Society mem-
bers, the category of ‘nomad’—often lazily blurred with that of ‘tribe’—
was key to allowing them to think and act in specific ways.
These terms reverberated in officers’ correspondence and Society publi-
cations, taking on an increasingly theorized aspect. An assumed common
‘nomadism’ allowed contemporaries to compare current Bedouin prac-
tice with an imagined Israelite past, and to use the history of the Arabs
(‘a nomad people’) to cast light on the Mongol future.214 Officers and
commentators, by dividing populations into the ‘social categories’ of
‘nomads, semi-nomads and settled communities’, believed they had iden-
tified the essential commonalities between disparate ethnicities and peo-
ples.215 Much as the Indian Civil Service had made ‘the village’ its domain,
‘nomads’ and ‘nomad country’ became the Society’s responsibility. And
like the Indian ‘village’, these terms became ‘an omnipresent reality’, uti-
lized by officials in the present and dominant in discussing the past.216
This outlook was widespread: even imperial military geographies, sur-
veying only the most pertinent features of British dominion, took care to
identify ‘nomadic’ populations because of the assumed consequences for
‘frontier policy’.217 ‘Nomadism’ quickly became an ideal-typical concep-
tualization, an assertion that all ‘nomads’ had similar societies, making
‘nomad’ a universal unit of imperial administration. As Glubb explained in
the Journal, types of culture had been ‘more or less common to all nomadic
people in history’, distinguished by a ‘love of war for the sake of glory, lav-
ish generosity and improvidence, and a romantic attitude to women’.218
By the 1930s officers regularly referred to ‘the tribal organization’ and ‘the
211
See Keats-Rohan, Prosopography, p. 21.
212
As John Cell found in Africa: Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, pp. 245, 249–250.
213
Owen, ‘Lord Cromer’, p. 110. See further: Buchan, ‘Subjecting the Natives’.
214
Jarvis, ‘Sinai: special reference’, pp. 93–94; Lattimore, ‘Wickedness’.
215
Epstein, ‘Al Jezireh’, p. 77. 216
Dewey, ‘Images’, pp. 291, 293.
217
For example: Fitzgerald Lee, Military Geography, p. 163.
218
Glubb, ‘Relations’, p. 414.
tribal system’ without further explanation.219 In this sense, debating the

‘Sandeman system’ was also an argument about the universality of ‘nomad’
and ‘tribal’ conditions, only lightly tethered to the North-West Frontier.
Exploding ‘invented traditions’ and problematizing the concept of ‘tribe’
has long been a feature of scholarship on empire. In this instance, how-
ever, it seems less important to attempt an agreed definition of ‘nomad’ or
‘tribe’ than to examine the origins, assumptions, and implications of their
use. This is still lacking in much discussion of the relationship between
nomads and the state. Historians and anthropologists alike have been slow
in appreciating that the policies formulated towards nomadic societies ‘are
not independent of the perceptions of the “experts” ’ behind them.220
One prominent feature of interwar discussions of ‘nomads’ and ‘tribes’
was the conflation of the two terms. Officers’ typologies tended to assume
that all tribesmen were nomadic pastoralists. Indeed, the notion of ‘tribe’
as ‘the political dimension of pastoral nomadism’ remains ‘strongly
entrenched’ in much academic and bureaucratic thinking about the
Middle East.221 References to ‘Bedouins’ and ‘Arabs’ were equally hap-
hazard. ‘I always think of [Sinai Bedouin]’, Jarvis explained, ‘indiscrimi-
nately as Arabs or Beduins, and when I use the word “Arab” I am not
thinking of educated people . . . but of the true nomad’.222 The resulting
confusion quickly becomes apparent when attempting to follow discus-
sions of ‘Bedouin’ petitions at the Cairo Residency: struggling to dis-
tinguish nomadic from settled ‘Bedouin’, estimates of their population
ranged from 300,000 to two million.223 In Iraq, one survey started with
the premise that ‘the Arab population is nomadic’, except for those liv-
ing ‘in the river and watercourse basins’.224 Glubb felt the need to make
a plea for clarity, for ‘many Europeans are apt to refer to any tribesmen as
a “buddoo” ’. Even here, however, his suggested definition of nomadism
(based on camel-herding, ‘pure-bred’ tribes) was profoundly ahistorical,
shutting out the possibility of change over time and the agency of Bedouin
themselves.225
Equally pronounced was the conviction that, at a fundamental level,
all the empire’s subjects could be divided between ‘the desert and the
219
‘Such an audience as this knows all about the tribal problem and can reel off the fac-
tors in it’: Howell, ‘Some Problems’, p. 191.
220
Ndagala, ‘Pastoralists’, p. 62. The concept of bounded rationality has been useful in
preparing this section: Offer, First World War.
221
Tapper, ‘Anthropologists’, p. 54. 222
Jarvis, ‘Yesterday’, p. 119.
223
FO 141/514/5, E. Allenby, ‘Letter to the Beduins’, 15 Jan. 1923; FO 141/514/5,
Jennings-Bramley to Henderson, 1 Aug. 1926; FO 371/19081, Foreign Office minutes, 27
Dec. 1935, 31 Dec. 1935.
224
Sheppard, ‘Mesopotamia Problem’, p. 15.
225
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, p. 13.
sown’. However well-worn the dichotomy between pastoralists and

non-pastoralists may appear today, the phrase, popularized by Gertrude
Bell’s travelogue of 1907, became an unofficial shorthand for the peoples
and problems of the empire at large. ‘The desert and the sown’ were locked
in ‘remorseless’ conflict; they were ‘a race apart’.226 Peake reduced the his-
tory of Trans-Jordan to ‘two thousand years . . . of the conflict between the
Desert and the Sown’.227 Glubb, too, thought this basic schema ‘useful’ for
historians and administrators alike.228 Lucien Febvre, more reflective than
most, complained of his colleagues’ fondness for this framework:
To take two extreme cases, that of the Norman peasant of to-day, for instance,
and that of the Bedouin following his wandering cattle in Arabia, is a cheap
method of contrasting two ways of life and declaring them radically antago-
nistic. But to build up a theory on this basis, and to reduce all history to the
so-called ‘eternal combat between the nomad and the settler’, is childish.229
In doing so, officers had more in common with Hull and The Sheik than
they would have cared to admit.230 As a framework, it predominated even
where the exact phrase was not used: talk of ‘hard lands’ and ‘fertile valleys’
led to much the same conclusions. In 1937, Glubb addressed the Society
on how in Asia and Africa ‘the two professions’ of ‘stockbreeder’ and ‘agri-
culturalist’ had never come together, thereby producing ‘entirely different
characters and entirely different communities, often at bitter enmity’.231
This differed little from Emerson’s observation a century before that ‘in
the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the
two antagonist facts’.232 What had changed, however, was the power of
interwar commentators, as officers of the colonial state, to act on the basis
of their assumptions.
These ideas were problematic, but were they straightforwardly
‘invented’?233 On closer inspection, notions of ‘the desert and the sown’
interacted with indigenous discursive patterns and administrative arrange-
ments which appeared to lend them credence, although tracing the transfer
of influence remains difficult. In the Middle East, Ibn Khaldûn had been
the pre-eminent theorist of nomad-state relations: his fourteenth-century
Muqaddimah constructed an elaborate history around the cyclical con-
quest of ‘sedentary civilization’ by ‘desert civilization’. This would seem an
obvious point of intersection with the premise of Britain’s Tribal Question,
but there is surprisingly little evidence that desert officers were familiar
226
Philby, review of History of the Arabs, p. 105; Rutter, ‘Holy Cities’, p. 204.
227
Peake, History, p. 94. 228
Glubb, review of The Arabs, p. 505.
229
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, p. 293. 230
Melman, Women, p. 101.
231
Glubb, ‘Arab Chivalry’, p. 5. 232
Emerson, ‘History’.
233
As implied by Dodge, Inventing Iraq, pp. 63–81; and Massad, Colonial Effects, p. 160.
with this work.234 Jarvis, for his part, did refer to Ibn Khaldûn’s cyclial
view of history as being ‘particularly true of Trans-Jordan, where many
of the settled villagers of the present time are the descendants of some
great fighting tribe in the past’.235 Most desert officers, however, made
little recourse to the rich print culture of the Islamic world, where they
would have found, at any rate, relatively little on the non-literate histories
of nomadic tribes.236
More influential, perhaps, were officers’ daily encounters with the dis-
cursive opposition of bedu and hadhar, a specifically Arab cultural tradi-
tion that was adopted by administrators. Harold Dickson, for example,
made use of the terms in forming policy advice on smuggling, musabilah,
and sanctions against the Mutair.237 Officers’ broader sensitivity to indig-
enous prejudices, too, may have led them to imagine a wider gulf between
‘desert’ and ‘sown’ than really existed. Many Bedouin genealogies adopt an
oppositional character and denigrate settled life, and while these should be
understood as highly flexible, instrumental means of making and breaking
alliances, British officers may have taken them in a static, determinist fash-
ion.238 Alec Seath Kirkbride was one of many struck by ‘the depth of the
gulf of dislike and misunderstanding which separates the town-dwelling
Arab from his nomadic kinsman’.239 As Chapter 3 explores, this colonial
trope had a political dimension. But it also seems likely that, as Riccardo
Bocco has found for the 1950s, the divide opposing Western experts and
Bedouin populations was mirrored in the gulf ‘separating the Arab intel-
ligentsia from the rural people of their own countries’, so that the ‘the
prejudices of both [were] mutually reinforcing’.240
Nor can we discount the Ottoman legacy. In administration, the
Ottoman state categorized some mobile populations on the basis of their
ethnicity, cutting across the confessional lines of the millet system. In ide-
ology, the Hamidian regime had ‘dipped into a whole grab bag of con-
cepts’ in its ‘drive for modernity’, blending Ibn Khaldûnian and mission
civilisatrice ideas about nomads. Late in the nineteenth century, these were
projected into the empire’s Arab territories with newfound vigour, embod-
ied in the capsule phrase that Bedouins ‘live in a state of nomadism and
234
Translated into French in 1852, there remained no complete English translation
until the 1950s, although passages appeared in a 1922 anthology. French sociologist
Robert Montagne certainly drew on the Muqaddimah, but it is unclear how far this reso-
nated among other soldier-scholars of the Bedouin: Pouillon and Rivet, Robert Montagne;
Rosenthal, Muqaddimah, p. xxviii.
235
Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 60. 236
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, p. 180.
237
AIR 23/53, Dickson to Barrett, 17 June 1929.
238
Bamyeh, ‘Pre-Islamic Arabia’; Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, pp. 44–45.
239
Kirkbride, Crackle of Thorns, p. 62. 240
Bocco, ‘Settlement’, p. 302–303.
savagery’.241 It is quite possible that these stock ideas shaped the outlooks
of incoming British officers in turn. Peake, whose hostility to the Bedouin
was perhaps the most implacable of our desert officers, recruited heavily
among former Turkish police sergeants, viewing them as guardians of ‘the
sown’ against predatory nomads. For those with an eye to a more distant,
Pharonic past, the long feud between Set and Osiris appeared to reaffirm
the conflict of the desert and the sown in mythological form.242 British
desert officers certainly exaggerated the conflict between nomadic and sed-
entary populations, but their misconceptions were fed in part by markers
of identity and foils of self-definition employed by those communities
themselves.
Needless to say, few of these ideas are shared by anthropologists today.
‘Nomad’ and ‘tribe’ are not interchangeable: ‘no necessary one-to-one rela-
tion’ exists between ethnicities, communities, tribes or classes and pasto-
ral or agricultural modes of production.243 In some quarters, research on
the ‘enormous variability’ of ‘nomadic’ societies—in their management
strategies, patterns of mobility, social organization, and land tenure—has
caused the term to fall out of favour altogether.244 And if definitions of
‘nomadism’ are increasingly problematized, frameworks based on ‘the
desert against the sown’—that central premise of the Tribal Question—are
rejected altogether. They are fundamentally ahistorical, assume nomads’
political organization was determined by their mode of production, and
exaggerate the autonomy of nomadic groups by assuming subsistence
where it did not exist. They are particularly inappropriate for the Middle
East, where ‘interactions between nomads and peasants have been docu-
mented back to before 3000 B.C.’.245 Instead, scholars now emphasize
how external ties of kinship, religion, tribute, and commerce help explain
the striking diversity and complexity of nomads’ organization over time
and space. Nomadic and settled communities were certainly not ‘a race
apart’.
All this is worth emphasizing because, to a degree that would not be
tolerated with reference to race, class or gender, cavalier remarks about
nomads and nomadism are with us still. They may, in fact, provide the last
prejudice for historians of empire to address. One study of British policy
241
Deringil, ‘Nomadism and Savagery’. See further: Deringil, Well-Protected Domains.
242
Awad, ‘Assimilation’, p. 243. 243
Barth, ‘General Perspective’, p. 16.
244
Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’; Salzman, ‘Is
“Nomadism” a Useful Concept?’ A recent survey defends the concept, but recognizes that
‘few such peoples [as the Bedouin] maintain herding as a single economic activity’: Chatty,
‘Introduction’, p. 25.
245
Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, p. 37. Remarkably, such basic assumptions
went substantially unchallenged into the 1970s, as we shall see in Chapter 4.
in mandatory Palestine, for example, reinforces long-standing assump-

tions about nomadism as primitive, even justifying aerial action against
nomads for ‘institut[ing] in the bedouin mind the concept of sedentary life
and . . . the benefit of abandoning nomadism’.246 In East Africa, historians’
tendency to characterize the Maasai as ‘conservative’ smacks of colonial
clichés about the ‘timeless’, static nomad, and downplays the adaptability
evidenced by the archival record.247 Another history of the Arab Legion,
published some sixty years after Peake’s, opens with the same observation
that ‘Jordan . . . has been divided between the “Desert” and the “Sown”
since time immemorial’.248 Even leading global historians, in their eager-
ness to uncover historical patterns beyond a Eurocentric pattern of the
‘West and the Rest’, risk inadvertently reproducing a ‘broadly universal
conflict . . . between settlers and wanderers’.249As Peregrine Horden and
Nicholas Purcell have noted, it is ‘disheartening’ to see scholars repeating
this ‘dyadic opposition’ while simultaneously ‘amassing information that
demonstrates its invalidity’.250 In following the gaze of interested contem-
poraries, we must tread carefully between recovering lost areas of activity,
and reproducing colonial categories of thought.
Taken together, these notions of nomads and nomadism, the desert and
the sown, amount to something more than commonplace or prejudice. For
communities of interested Britons, thinking about ‘the modes of life’—a
given society’s sedentary or nomadic basis—acquired a systematic, ideo-
logical dimension. The category of ‘nomad’ was one of potentially univer-
sal applicability, connoting as powerful a set of ideas about the empire and
the world as race, class, and gender—concepts with which it intersected
and, in the right circumstances, overruled. For many Britons, ‘mode of
life’ itself formed the key intellectual construct through which they made
sense of the peoples and history of broad regions of their empire. It cut to
the heart of a society’s organizing principles, or ‘essence’; it was no subsidi-
ary function of race, class, or ‘civilization’. And just like these other con-
cepts, understandings of the ‘modes of life’ were ambivalent, and highly
contested.
That debate, between the implacable critics of nomadism and its cham-
pions, forms the subject of Chapter 4. But the idea that nomads formed
a discrete social group was widely accepted, necessitating distinct poli-
cies and professional expertise. Dividing humanity into its ‘modes of life’
246
Falah, British Administration, pp. 8, 46.
247
As Knowles and Collett observe: ‘Nature as Myth’, p. 455.
248
Lunt, Arab Legion, p. 2.
249
Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories’, p. 738.
250
Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, p. 551.
formed an intellectual package that was sometimes crude, sometimes

complex, but persistent either way. Values and systems of production were
indistinct; anomalies were dismissed as deviations from ‘pure’ nomadism
or settled life.251 This seldom bore much relation to how nomadic commu-
nities saw themselves. But the ubiquity of this outlook and the conviction
with which it was felt suggests the existence of yet another lens through
which Britons sought to make sense of their empire. This was, after all, an
era in which ‘the social units of . . . analysis’ that politicians and academics
chose to use ‘made a very great difference’.252 Historians should be pre-
pared to take them seriously.
Once alive to the possibility of this outlook, the extent of application is
striking. It transcended nationality and topography as it did race and class.
From ‘the Reindeer Tungus’ of Manchuria to the Maasai of East Africa,
societies were compared on the basis of typologies which privileged their
‘mode of life’.253 Where nomads were imperial charges, a firm understand-
ing of the ‘modes of life’ was thought key to the conduct of imperial rule.
Where nomads were absent, it still offered explanations of the present,
and narratives for the past—even in Britain itself. It provided a language
for discussing the ‘street Arabs’ of the London poor, and the restless rural
labourers that made up Australia’s ‘swagmen’.254 ‘In his savage state’, the
RGS Instructor in Photography reflected after ten years overseas,
whether inhabiting the marshes of Equatorial Africa, or the mountain ranges
of Formosa, man is fain to wander . . . Hence it is that in London there are a
number of what may be termed, owing to their wandering, unsettled habits,
nomadic tribes.255
Even Lucien Febvre, determined to ‘put aside’ all ‘childish simplifications’,
thought ‘the modes of life’ key to understanding human history.256
To ask the Tribal Question, therefore, was to engage in a debate with
pedigree. Participants drew on traditions of discussing sedentary and
nomadic communities. If the broader history of these attitudes is yet to
be written, it suffices here to suggest that another layer be added to com-
prehend British views on the world. By taking contemporary interest in
the ‘modes of life’ seriously, we enrich our understanding of the multiple,
251
‘When I first began to travel among the Mongols’, Lattimore later confessed, ‘I cer-
tainly had a preconception—shared by many other travelers, and influencing me through
books I had read—that there must somewhere be a “pure” Mongol culture, a prototype of
pastoral nomadism . . . ’: Lattimore, Studies, p. 24.
252
Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore’, p. 765. See further: Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism.
253
For example: Lindgren, ‘Reindeer Tungus’, p. 222; James, ‘Kenya Masai’, p. 50.
254
Waterhouse, ‘Settling the Land’, p. 62.
255
Thomson, Street Life, p. 1. For Thomson’s work, see Parker, ‘John Thomson’.
256
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, pp. 365, 240, 169.
contradictory prisms through which Britons perceived their empire. At

the Royal Central Asian Society, members were separated by departmen-
tal rivalries and thousands of miles. But in the reach of the ‘mode of life’
outlook it is possible to see something of the unofficial ideologies that
underpinned them all. Here, at least, ‘race theory’ had not cleanly replaced
‘stage theory’.257 As Glubb saw it, and as Peake and Jarvis could only have
agreed, ‘mode of life’ was ‘no less important to the formation of character
than heredity’.258
T H E T R I B A L F RO N T I E R O F
THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Tracking the ebb and flow of the Tribal Question helps recover an
unofficial but imperial organization, the events that caught its eye, an
emerging colonial profession and an established ideological framework.
One final exercise in reorientation remains. If we could see with the
Society’s eyes, by standing in its Grosvenor Street office, or peering over
the shoulder of an overseas member as he opened a copy of the Journal,
then what would Britain’s empire look like? What would happen to its
dimensions, its spatial configuration, its regions of activity, and its zones
of influence?
At the centre of the Society’s world lay ‘the great belt of deserts, stretch-
ing across the land mass of the Old World from the Sahara to the Gobi’,
at points ‘pierced’ or ‘outflanked’ by the communications routes of
empire.259 Versions of this vision differed in detail, but seldom in audacity.
To one member, the North-West Frontier was but ‘the outer fringe . . .
of the Central Asian tableland which stretches northwards to the Oxus
and westwards to the Mesopotamian plains’, on ‘through Anatolia’ and
into the Balkans.260 Ormsby-Gore, too, was drawn by the suggestions of
geography to link discussion of the Indian frontier with the ‘new frontiers’
in Mesopotamia and Palestine.261 As for Egypt, its deserts were, a later
proponent of ‘nomad assimilation’ sighed, merely a fraction of
a desert region curving in a great arc . . . from the Indian Ocean to the
Atlantic, interrupted at the centre by an area of cultivation and sedentary
life. Had it been merely a question of dealing with the “local” desert folk, the
257
Meek, Social Science. ‘Nomadism cannot’, one commentator concluded, ‘be scientifi-
cally correlated with race’: James, ‘Kenya Masai’, pp. 69–70.
258
MECA: JBG 1/1, ‘Iraq Southern Desert’. 259
Fawcett, Frontiers, p. 14.
260
Anon., ‘Frontier Problem’, pp. 80–81.
261
Ormsby-Gore, ‘Organisation’, pp. 85–86.
problem [of their assimilation] might have been solved, once and for all, in
early Pharonic times.262
The boundaries of this ‘great belt of deserts’ remained fluid and impre-
cise. In 1934, Percy Sykes gave the Society’s brief as ‘the whole of Asia’,
although ‘the plains of India’ lay firmly beyond its expertise.263 Geology,
climate, the presence and absence of the monsoon and ‘frontier weather’
pointed to a fundamental division within the ‘brotherhood of man’,
between ‘steamy plains’ and more ‘rugged’ environments.264 For all the
imprecision, members were very aware that their fixation with deserts and
steppe set them apart from many of their contemporaries. ‘Few people
realise’, wrote an officer of an Egyptian Camel Corps, ‘that for a large
number of people the desert comes first and the Nile Valley afterwards’.265
To get a better sense of this worldview, it is necessary to revisit the repu-
tation of one of the great political geographers of the age. In his 1904
paper to the Royal Geographical Society, Halford Mackinder described a
future in which power would shift from seafaring nations to land-based
empires. Competition to command continental interiors, made possible
by the expansion of railways, would make Central Asia the future ‘Pivot’
of world politics.266 In 1919, Mackinder revised his prediction to include
Central Europe within the ‘Heartland’ of the Eurasian ‘World-Island’.267
The impact of these ideas at the time has long been thought to have been
negligible: Democratic Ideals and Reality disappeared amidst the shelves
of books published to interpret the postwar world, its pessimistic predic-
tions of future geopolitical strife ‘out of harmony with the most hopeful
tendencies of our times’.268 It was only in the 1940s, we are told, once
Germany ‘had fulfilled Mackinder’s prophecy in the East’, that his ideas
gained wider acceptance.269
But at the Royal Central Asian Society, this worldview met with greater
sympathy. With the routes to India prompting as much discussion as ever,
Mackinder’s cautious, even bleak prediction of ongoing geopolitical strug-
gle caught the Society’s mood. One founding member later described
its work in Mackinder-ish terms, recognizing ‘the constant conflict of
the peoples of the Heartland and the sea-going nations on the perim-
eter’.270 This may have been coloured by Mackinder’s later reputation, but
262
Awad, ‘Assimilation’, p. 242. 263
Sykes, ‘Founding and Progress’, p. 7.
264
Fitzgerald Lee, Military Geography, pp. 2–3.
265
MECA: Russell papers 1/1, T. Russell, ‘Report on Camel Patrols’, 31 Mar. 1906.
266
Mackinder, ‘Geographical Pivot’.
267
Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, pp. 73–74, 110, 150.
268
Blouet, Mackinder, p. 164; The Spectator, 27 Sept. 1919, p. 408.
269
Blouet, Mackinder, pp. 119–122, 164, 172.
270
Anon., ‘Golden Jubilee Dinner’.
contemporary defence of the term ‘Eurasia’ was not.271 Railways and land
routes made Central Asia ‘the strategic cockpit of the continent’.272 Just as
Mackinder had thought the future flash-points of the world were its ‘mar-
ginal regions’, so the Society understood ‘marginal territory’, where nomads
and farmers could both ‘scrape a precarious existence’, as being everywhere
a site of conflict.273 Both built on far older fears of a ‘wedge’ being driven
between British interests in the Mediterranean and the Western Indian
Ocean, as well as the heightened significance the region acquired in 1918
as Russian collapse and renewed German pressure threatened an extended
Asian front.274 Society members were equally focused on land empires,
grand strategy, and terrestrial communications—so much so that they, like
Mackinder himself, were criticized for being too dismissive of the world
of the sea.275 Such convergence may have owed much to Mackinder’s rela-
tionship with Curzon, whose spell as the Society’s President helped stamp
this geopolitical outlook on its activity.276
Ideas about nomads and their ‘arts of life’ lay at the heart of this view of
the world. Before ‘the Columbian epoch’ of European maritime suprem-
acy, the Pivot of Eurasia ‘lay open to the horse-riding nomads’, whose
‘remarkable succession of outbreaks’ had shaped ‘a large part of modern
history’. Now, in a closing world, the railway augured a return to the geo-
politics of land, but ‘this immense area’ still retained ‘all the conditions
for the maintenance of a sparse, but in the aggregate considerable popula-
tion of horse-riding and camel-riding nomads’.277 Nomads were not, of
course, about to re-inherit the earth. For Mackinder, this was a reading of
the past that explained the present: railways had ‘directly’ replaced ‘horse
and camel mobility’, just as ‘Russia replaces the Mongol Empire’. But for
many at the Society, for whom nomads were an everyday responsibility,
this placed their work within a broader struggle to contain and control
movement across a great arc of the globe.
Mackinder’s world, therefore, provides an insight into that imagined
by the Society’s membership. His map of ‘The Natural Seats of Power’
(1904) closely resembled that printed between the Journal ’s covers: both
used projections and omissions to exaggerate the size and significance of
271
Anderson, ‘Highway’, p. 191. 272
Wheeler, ‘Land Routes’, pp. 586.
273
Philipps Price, review of Mongol Journeys, p. 462.
274
Hoskins, British Routes; Darwin, Empire Project, p. 313.
275
This was unfair to Mackinder (he chaired the Imperial Shipping Committee for
twenty-five years), if not to the Society. For criticism of its trends, see Haward, ‘India’s
Defence’, p. 121; Anon., ‘Arabia in Perspective’.
276
The two men were near-contemporaries, first overlapping at the Oxford Union and
continuing to influence each other’s thinking. See Blouet, Mackinder, pp. 114, 172–177;
Goudie, ‘Curzon’, p. 207.
277
Mackinder, ‘Geographical Pivot’.
Map 1.2 ‘The World Island united, as it soon will be, by railways, and by aero-
plane routes, the latter for the most part parallel with the main railways’, in H.J.
Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (London, 1919).
the Eurasian steppe. He too was drawn to the band of deserts bisecting
global communications, and to the imperial advantages that would accrue
from their control (Map 1.2). Just as his writings on nomads gave a grand
context for local officers’ work, his map of the World Island reduced a
complexity of landscapes to a single label: ‘Desert’.
Mackinder was no crude determinist, but plenty of less nuanced read-
ings remained in circulation between the wars.278 For the members of the
RCAS, a globe girdled by a contiguous ‘Desert’ band was an invitation to
Manichaean schemes of thought. Peake’s policies were informed by a men-
tal map in which the Hedjaz railway divided Trans-Jordan ‘into two’, its
population being ‘sedentary, except east of [the line], where the Nomadic
278
Lucien Febvre, for one, complained of the influence of geographical determinism in
contemporary thinking: Febvre, Geographical Introduction, p. 359.
Tribes lived’.279 Glubb, trained as a Royal Engineer, copiously illustrated

his reports, Society lectures and publications with his own maps, often
juxtaposing ‘desert and settled areas’, or stressing the centrality of the
Middle East as ‘the Hub of the Old World’. Crucially, mapping the ‘modes
of life’ onto vast, undifferentiated ‘Desert’ terrains exaggerated nomads’
significance even as it erased their diversity. This cartographic practice of
lumping deserts and nomads together continued into the 1950s, and was
something of which even the more subtle thinkers on habitat and econ-
omy were guilty.280
Across a great arc of desert and steppe, therefore, from Egypt and the
Sudan to the North-West Frontier of India and beyond, perceptions of
common problems engendered common approaches and ideas. Members
audaciously compared and translated policies between desert terrains—
they were, as Glubb later put it, ‘desert-minded’.281 ‘Chinese Central
Asia’ was ‘a land of desert and bush tracts similar to Western Australia’,
and would benefit from irrigation schemes ‘such as have brought pros-
perity to India and Egypt’.282 Royal Air Force attacks on generic ‘desert
strongholds’ (holdouts of ‘the Wottnotts’) conveyed its work to air show
crowds.283 Central Asia was defined in ‘climatic’ as much as a political
terms, with concern for the causes of desiccation linking Baluchistan,
Sinai, and ‘the semi-desert areas . . . of Palestine, Trans-Jordan, the Hedjaz
and the Sahara’.284 William Palgrave, setting out across Arabia in 1862,
had resolved to keep ‘the men of the land, not the land of the men . . . my
main object of research’. Few desert officers made the distinction. The very
task in which they were engaged—desert administration—rolled people,
problem, and place into one.
All this was grossly insensitive to distinctions on the ground. Today’s
geographers stress the variability of the world’s desert environments,
while anthropologists see pastoral nomadism as ‘[a]‌cultural construction
brought to an environment rather than [a] behaviour pattern generated by
[it]’.285 And yet, for all this, there are advantages to setting aside our many
279
IWM: FGP 4/3, Peake, ‘Report on the Population of Trans-Jordan’, p. 28; IWM: FGP
4/10, Peake, ‘On the Work of the Arab Legion’.
280
See, for example, Lucien Febvre’s map of ‘Regions of the Nomads’, in Febvre,
Geographical Introduction (reproduced as the shaded area in Map 1.1) ; or C. Daryll Forde’s
‘World Distribution of Dominant Economies’, in Forde, Habitat.
281
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb, ‘The Desert as a field of Manoeuvre in History and
Today’, (n.d. Aug. 1941).
282
Etherton, ‘Central Asia’, p. 94.
283
‘The R.A.F. Aerial Pageant’, Flight, No. 704 (22 June, 1922), p. 351. See fur-
ther: Omissi, Air Power, p. 172.
284
Jarvis, ‘Goat Standard’, p. 319.
285
Goudie, Warm Desert Environment; Salzman, ‘Studying Nomads’; Dyson-Hudson
and Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, pp. 35, 50. Aridity itself has historically
objections, and working through this ambitious worldview. As Owen

Lattimore put it himself, history ‘is not only a question of what people
know, but of what they believe’, for even mistaken beliefs are ‘one of the
innumerable varieties of raw materials’ that go into its construction.286 If
the Turnerian frontier has any place in our discussion, it is surely as evi-
dence of the ‘mythic force’ of the imagination.287
After all, the interwar years were marked by an inclination to think
big. A ‘vogue’ for ‘generalized historical comparison’ arose from Europe’s
encounters with the rest of the globe in the era of two world wars, reflected
in the work of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and H. G. Wells.288 At
the Society, history was marked by contiguous ‘nomad hordes’ bursting
forth from ‘natural’ reserves to impact on the rest of the world.289 The
Sinai, the Syrian Desert and the North-West Frontier were all ‘historic
routes of invasion’.290 Some, following Ellsworth Huntingdon, put these
outbreaks down to climatic change. Others, pointing to one of Jarvis’
favourite works, The Wilderness of Zin, thought desert ‘climatic condi-
tions’ (and thus nomadic predation) had ‘always been the same’. Either
way, the association of deserts with ‘fluctuating waves of nomad invasions’
was strong.291 And so in turn, for members even fleetingly familiar with
Edward Gibbon, was that with the fate of empires.
Historians, therefore, stand to profit by having a concept of a ‘Tribal
Frontier of the British Empire’ in their tool kit, as the political dimen-
sion of an imagined geography. For a Society committed to exploring
world regions ‘in all their bearings—political as well as economic or sci-
entific’, a ‘Tribal Frontier’ was but a short step from that ‘great belt of
deserts’. Members compared ‘tribal policy’ on a vast inter-regional can-
vas that brought Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier, Egypt and Iraq,
‘Indo-China, Burma, Morocco, Tripoli, Aden, the Sudan, or East, West
and South Africa’—wherever ‘tribal elements bulk largely’—into the same
frame.292 It partly overlapped with the contours of the Islamic world, but
given widespread disagreement as to whether nomads were ‘fanatical’ or
proved notoriously difficult to define. Peveril Meigs’ scientific formulation—a common

starting-point today—was not expressed before 1953.
286
Lattimore, Studies, p. 24.
287
As Alistair Hennessy has explored: Hennessy, Frontier.
288
Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore’, p. 759. Wells, too, placed ‘the two sorts of life, the agricul-
tural and the nomadic’ at the centre of his Short History.
289
For example: Chirol, ‘Storm Waves’, p. 198; Lyautey, ‘Aerial Geography’, p. 202;
Peake, ‘Trans-Jordan’, p. 376.
290
Cole, Military Geography, p. 205; Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 123.
291
For Huntingdon, see Chappell, ‘Climatic Change Reconsidered’. Lawrence and
Woolley, Wilderness, p. lxv.
292
Bruce, ‘Sandeman Policy’, pp. 56, 60, 62.
‘easygoing’ in their religion, cannot be reduced to this alone.293 Instead,

mobility formed the basis for ‘drawing an analogy’ between the raids of
the Afridis and those of the Boers, and between the ‘habits’ of the Pathans
and the Arabs.294 ‘This tribal question’, in the Council’s formulation,
‘stretches far beyond Southern Arabia into India, Africa and other parts
of the British Empire’.295 One former Agent to the Governor General of
Baluchistan believed common policies might apply not merely to the ‘great
borderland’ between the Himalayas and the Arabian Sea, ‘but indeed to all
other suchlike tribesmen all over the world’.296 ‘Tribal’ peoples and their
‘marchlands’ formed a distinct problem wherever they were found, requir-
ing particular forms of government (and preferably in British hands).297
This unsettled geographical conventions and categories for subject
peoples. ‘The Frontier’, Sir William Barton insisted, ‘is not India’: it
had ‘an individuality of its own’.298 In much the same way, Jarvis dis-
missed the idea that the Bedouin might feel kinship with ‘the Arab fellah
of the Palestinian villages’. The broader conflict of the desert and the
sown, he insisted, would always trump a flimsy race solidarity, even if
‘at the present time one has rather lost of it owing to the Jewish contro-
versy’.299 Chins and Kachins were ‘closer’ to Highland Scots than to their
Burmese neighbours; the Mahsud was expected to develop in time ‘like
his Scottish prototype did’.300 In the same way, managing nomads rose
above even the most exclusive of professional identities. Harold Ingrams,
reviewing Jarvis’ work for the Society, found in it proof that ‘the theory
that it needs Arabian experts to deal with Arabs is a myth’. In Jarvis,
members had ‘an Arabian expert whose methods can with advantage be
used elsewhere’.301 Modern studies of the Middle East have tended to be
isolated from wider imperial historiography, but to contemporaries the
Tribal Question transcended Arabists’ regional expertise. To understand
tribal policy in Egypt or Trans-Jordan or Iraq, we too must acknowledge,
293
Compare Jarvis’ views on the ‘lax’ Bedouin with those of Wilfred Thesiger, for exam-
ple: Jarvis, review of Arabia Phoenix, p. 102; Thesiger, ‘Badu’, p. 57.
294
Howell, ‘Some Problems’, p. 292. See also: Sayers, ‘Nomad Tribes’.
295
Hamilton, ‘Social Organisation’, p. 142; Byrt, ‘North-West Frontier’, p. 292.
296
Bruce, ‘Sandeman Policy’, p. 56. 297
Barton, ‘Law and Order’, p. 16.
298
299
Jarvis, ‘Empty Quarter’, p. 664; Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 206. Glubb also
thought ‘modern theories’ of race and nationalism too insensitive to desert/sown dynamics
in the Middle East: Glubb, Soldier, p. 34.
300
Lethbridge, ‘Burma Military Police’, p. 442; Byrt, ‘North-West Frontier’, p. 271. In
some ways, this resembled earlier contrasts drawn between the ‘hearth’ culture of southeast-
ern England and ‘a succession of marchlands’ in Scotland, Ireland, North America and the
Caribbean. However diverse the reality of life in these locales, English perceptions of them
had much in common. See Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers.
301
Ingrams, review of Three Deserts, p. 697.
as we seldom have to date, the shape, scope, and dynamics of a greater

‘Tribal Frontier’. This was typical of local desert officers, who couched
their activities in terms of global trends and pointed to precedents else-
where: winning superiors’ support might rest on bringing ‘the Tribal
Question’ into focus.
Across this great arid arc of the world, therefore, many contemporaries
considered the similarities between ‘frontier’ situations more significant
than their differences. Prepared to formulate and propagandize ideas based
on unitary, common principles, the Royal Central Asian Society saw a vast
arid zone at the centre of their world, disrupting conventional calculations
of imperial territory. Studies of tribal policy at the national level all too
readily overlook this arena of activity. For many, a Tribal Frontier formed
the prism through which local policy was formed. As one administrator
among the Nuer complained, it was not his colleagues’ ignorance that
complicated tribal policy, but ‘the mental assumptions that every man has
as a result of his previous experience’.302
* * *
In recent years, a small number of historians have begun to address similar
phenomena in the imperial and global past. Jos Gommans has explored
the dynamics of a pre-modern Arid Zone, extending from Morocco to
Bengal and the Carnatic.303 James Scott refers to ‘tribal frontiers’ as a
way of comparing how states have sought to control ‘illegible’ terrains.304
Others refer to a tribal ‘Fourth World’, though the term can blur into
considerations of statelessness, poverty and marginality in general.305 But
to capture the geographical extent of our subject, its connection with an
assumed aridity, its specific themes, ideological frameworks and (most of
all) the overriding concern for colonial administration and control, a new
conception of a ‘Tribal Frontier’ of the British Empire may be necessary.
In writing its broader history, the Royal Central Asian Society can be
only a partial guide. Even within the interwar period, there were limits to
its activities, potential links that were never established, and other insti-
tutions engaged in separate efforts to resolve similar problems. In East
Africa, to offer just one example, the interwar years also saw a growth
in ‘scientific study’ of managing nomads, and a heightened awareness of
‘world-wide processes’ at work, but these efforts tended to be funneled
towards the fora of East African Governors’ Conferences and the journal
302
CAC: GLLD 14/23, Willis to Lloyd, ‘Southern Provinces of the Sudan’, 13
Feb. 1929.
303
Gommans, ‘Silent Frontier’. 304
305
Tapper, ‘Anthropologists’, p. 48.
Africa.306 At no point did the RCAS exist in isolation: active links with a
host of other organizations embedded it firmly in the British associational
world.307
How these other institutions operated, however, and how far their
regional debates achieved a wider significance, must await further
research. In time, tracing the development of ‘Tribal Questions’ may pro-
vide a means of comparing activity within imperial regions, and perhaps of
transcending them altogether. But this will only be possible once regional
variables have been documented, and so, for the present, our task is clear.
In the years between the two world wars, nowhere loomed larger in the
Society’s ‘Tribal Question’ than that ‘pièce de resistance’, the ‘desert cor-
ridor’ of the Middle East. It is to this that we now turn.
306
James, ‘Kenya Masai’; Knowles and Collett, ‘Nature as Myth’; Dyson-Hudson and
Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, p. 49.
307
At times before 1945, for example, the Society shared an office with the Royal Asiatic
Society and the Palestine Exploration Fund, and a lecture hall with the Royal United
Services Institute and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. It recruited members of
the Athenaeum, borrowed equipment from the Royal Geographical Society, absorbed the
Persia Society, held joint meetings with the East India Association, was a patron to the India
Museum and helped establish the School of Oriental and African Studies.
2
Beating the Bounds
The Growth of British Desert Administration
At dawn one Friday in October 1924, the fortnightly mail flight from
Cairo to Baghdad departed Heliopolis and climbed slowly through the
thin subtropical air.1 Two RAF Vickers Vernon biplanes, each carrying
two pilots, a fitter and a wireless operator, turned north-east along the
edge of the Nile delta, crossed the Canal at Ismailia, and entered the Sinai
peninsula. To their right rose the granite mountains of Southern Sinai.
Beneath them the desert’s limestone plateau gradually gave way to a thin
belt of sand dunes, fields of winter barley and the Mediterranean coast.
Passing the Governor’s residence at El Arish, the pilots opted to take the
new Southern Route, opened only weeks before, along the edge of the
Negev to Beersheba and the Dead Sea at Al-Lisan. Turning north along
the Hedjaz Railway, away from Ma’an and the Jebel Tubeiq, the flight
picked up the latest meteorological report at Ziza before striking east into
the desert.
For the next 450 miles—two-thirds of the total run—the route
bisected the Syrian Desert: an open plateau of gravel and sand, sloping
from an altitude of 2,000 feet in the north and west to sea-level in the
south and east. For lack of landmarks, the pilots flew low to pick up
‘the desert furrow’: a thin track etched into the gravel surface by the
wheels of a car convoy. Twenty rudimentary landing grounds had been
marked out by plough—a chain of giant circles, letters and arrows—
signifying the pilots’ progress towards the Euphrates. At Azrak they
passed the last pools of water for 250 miles, and entered a north-south
band of basalt boulders and mud flats. It was here that the track was
1
The following draws on the journeys described in: Hill, Baghdad Air Mail. For the effects
of tropical air density on aircraft, see Brancker, ‘Air Routes’, pp. 258–259; Brooke-Popham,
‘Notes on Aeroplanes’, pp. 128–129.
most easily lost. Far to the south-east, the Wadi Sirhan stretched for
300 miles from Kaf to the Jauf depression: the largest oasis in the
area, the winter grazing ground of the Beni Sakhr and Howeitat, and
recently occupied by Ibn Saud.
Some 130 miles from Ziza, the lava field abruptly ended and open steppe
began. Between landing grounds ‘H’ and ‘R’, a part of the steppe known to
pilots as the Upland of the Winds, the aircraft remained glued to the track
below: a ‘frail thread through the wilderness that binds the pilot to civiliza-
tion’. A permanent westerly wind helped carry them to the Rutbah wells,
where the track met the trans-desert motor route from Damascus. This was
a good place to break the return journey when battling against a headwind,
but now, making good time, our pilots pressed on. After passing more of
the glittering, glass-like mud-flats at landing ground ‘V’ and the bitumen
pools near ‘I’, the flight finally reached Ramadi and the Euphrates. By twi-
light, they were descending on Baghdad, ‘hardly distinguishable at evening
from the desert’.2 By sea the journey via Bombay, Karachi, and Basra might
have taken a month. By air it had taken nine hours.
This is the area contemporaries knew as the ‘desert corridor’ of the
British Empire, and the focus of this book. It was not, as our pilots could
have testified, a uniform space, but consisted of a range of topographical
types. It had no formal political unity, and spanned the boundaries of
numerous states under varying degrees of British influence. Indeed, as
one pilot remembered, ‘to complete the flight in one day’ was to cross ‘the
four great rivers of history’.3 Yet a set of specific connections, Bedouin as
well as British, led some to see it as a whole. How they came to do so, and
what this means for historians, forms the subject of this chapter.
* * *
The First World War transformed British power in the Middle East.
Before its outcome was even decided, the Society imagined the war
‘transfer[ring] the pivot of Britain’s Asiatic Buffer-State system from the
Oxus to the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles’ and ‘expanding until it
embraces the Nile on its right and the Oxus on its left’.4 Turkish revan-
chism and the Treaty of Lausanne meant that the end product was not
quite as expansive or assured. But with its main rivals either bested or
exhausted, Britain still dominated much of the modern Middle East.
Of the other Great Powers interested in the region at the outset of the
war, only France remained, and its gains in Syria and Lebanon were
modest by comparison. Geopolitical rivalry now took a back seat, and
2
Brooke-Popham, ‘Notes on Aeroplanes’, p. 136.
3
Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, p. 54. 4
Yate, ‘Buffer States’.
Beating the Bounds 69
for as long as it did the question British statesmen faced was not how to
achieve greater power in the region, but what to do with the power they
so demonstrably had.
Histories of what followed, however, seldom acknowledge the unity of
the problem. They have tended to be written as a ‘series of episodes’, cen-
tred on the political units that later became nation-states. With jurisdic-
tion (and consequently the archives) split between the Foreign, Colonial
and Indian Offices, writing has remained ‘distinctly patchy’.5 Examining
things from the perspective of Britain’s desert corridor, in contrast, may
re-unite disaggregated histories. After all, developmental rhetoric at the
League of Nations aside, many of those charged with administering the
region’s desert frontiers showed little interest in ‘nation-building’. They
took a dim view of the capacity of national governments to undertake such
‘professional’ work, and put little faith in the viability of an independent
‘Egypt’, ‘Trans-Jordan’, or ‘Iraq’ (an outlook bound to cause friction with
emerging national leaders, as we shall shortly see). Their gaze, instead,
was fixed on running ‘the corridor’. It was the management of movement
across the region—as much as any logic of ‘divide and rule’—that defined
their engagement.
The evidence for this perspective is striking both in its prevalence
and in its conviction. ‘This Mediterranean-Indian “corridor” ’, wrote
a correspondent to the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute in
1927, was destined to become ‘our future main route to India’, making
it ‘incumbent on Great Britain to consolidate this “corridor” by every
means in her power’.6 Glubb was equally enthusiastic. A unique con-
figuration of climate and culture, he argued, ‘made Arabia and Egypt
the most important corridor in the world’.7 Some spoke of ‘the British
arch’ of which Palestine and the Persian Gulf were the western and
eastern ‘springers’, ‘straddled by the Arab peoples’ all the way.8 For
others, the corridor represented Britain’s greater obligation ‘to link up
the three countries [Egypt, Palestine and Iraq] which had been part of
the empire of Alexander the Great’.9 Maps proliferated of past, pre-
sent, and future routes across the Middle East, often with international
boundaries left out. By 1931, Henry Dobbs admitted to ‘visions of
a future vast Arabia Rediviva, holding the nerve centres of the main
routes of the world’.10
5
Sluglett, ‘Formal and Informal Empire’, pp. 421–422.
6
Newman,‘Palestine’, pp. 853–854.
7
MECA: JBG 215, Glubb, ‘The Corridor’ (n.d., 1944).
8
Main, ‘Iraq: a Note’, pp. 431, 433. 9
Salt, Imperial Air Routes, p. 39.
10
Dobbs, ‘Unifying British Control’, p. 482.
What commonalities lay behind these conceptions of ‘the corridor’?

For many, it broadly coincided with the contours of the Syrian Desert,
imagined as an arid triangle between Sinai, Aleppo, and the head of the
Persian Gulf.11 This was a more specific geographical entity than an imag-
ined ‘Tribal Frontier’, but its problems and solutions were thought to be
comparable. The concept took time to emerge, and built on long-standing
concerns for the stability of western Asia. But it was heightened by war-
time habits of thinking and planning on an ambitious, regional scale. By
December 1917, the Royal Central Asian Society was leading calls for
the permanent control of ‘the great tract, largely desert, stretching from
the Shatt-Al-Arab to the Suez Canal’.12 For others, visions of the corridor
awaited the spread of desert administration on the ground. Trans-Jordan,
for example, was initially seen as an interstice between Syria and Arabia
and was only gradually reimagined as a valuable link between Palestine
and Iraq.13 The course of the war and its technological innovations further
encouraged depictions of deserts as areas in their own right: ‘bridges, cen-
tres of expansion and radiation, little worlds with attractive values of their
own, linking together the men and regions on either side of them’.14 For
Glubb, the desert itself formed ‘one of the cockpits of history’.15
Three overlapping ideas ran through these enthusiastic descriptions of
Britain’s newest responsibility. The first depicted a zone of imperial com-
munications and mobility residing within (and above) the Syrian Desert
itself. Egypt’s centrality as an imperial node was already an interwar cliché,
but the attention paid to connection through the ‘desert corridor’ was
something new, and has received less attention. As its surveyor, A. L. Holt,
explained in 1923:
The products of the desert are practically speaking nothing, and the inhabit-
ants of no account . . . Nothing produced from the desert will ever give the
country importance or commercial interest. And yet the desert has a great
future. As in the past the desert was the only line of communication between
Europe and the East . . . so again it is as a line of communication solely that
it can look to the possibility of a future.16
The corridor was also imagined as a device to contain Saudi expan-
sion. Here, attention centred on the eastern ‘rectangle’ of Trans-Jordan as
11
For example: Grant, Syrian Desert, p. 8; Holt, ‘Future’, p. 260.
12
Yate, ‘Buffer States’, p. 17; Blyth, Empire of the Raj, p. 146.
13
Toth, ‘Transformation’, p. 183.
14
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, p. 301.
15
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb, ‘The Desert as a Field of Manoeuvre in History and
Today’, (n.d. Aug. 1941).
16
Holt, ‘Future’, pp. 264–265, 267–268.
defined in the Hadda Agreement, bridging an ‘all-red’ route to Iraq and

intervening between the Ruwala in Syria and Nejdi tribes to the south.17
For Peake in particular, preventing these tribes’ conjunction gave the cor-
ridor much of its meaning.18 As Churchill reminded Herbert Samuel in
1922, ‘provided that south of the desert air route and east of the Hedjaz
Railway a wide strip of desert is rendered secure from raids, we must leave
the interior of Arabia alone’.19
Finally, while much of the period before 1936 coincided with the
absence of serious imperial rivalry in the Middle East, laying a claim to
the corridor was also a means of anticipating its occupation by others.
Concern about French activity in Syria, for example, would shape the
growth of desert administration in British territory.
Thinking with the ‘desert corridor’ as our unit of analysis may generate
new insights, but it prompts two further considerations. On the one hand
lies the danger of echoing contemporary discussion of the corridor with-
out examining the patterns and processes that made the concept possible.
The idea that deserts are ‘highways’ is asserted more often than explored,
but histories of communication by land, as much as by sea, must be firmly
grounded in an appreciation of agency, contingency and power.20 In the
years between the two world wars, it was the projection and realization of
specific air routes, motor routes, railways and pipelines that ‘created’ the
corridor for many Britons, shrinking distances and collapsing time. The
details of this transformation demand further attention.
The second problem is that discussions of trans-desert communications
seldom consider the implications for imperial relations on the ground.
Rightly or wrongly, movement along these lines of connection was thought
to depend upon effective control of the steppe: a new art of desert admin-
istration. New networks of coercion and collaboration were forged to sus-
tain imperial communications, and it is these, more than any new lines on
the map, that warrant us considering the desert corridor as a distinct his-
torical space. By acknowledging the personnel, practices, and politics that
made this possible, the centrality of imperial communications to British
interests in the region—long sensed—may be more fully grasped.
Of all the components of the corridor, the desert air route was the
most spectacular, inspiring lectures, slide shows, memoirs, even poetry.
Winston Churchill and Air Vice-Marshal Trenchard had proposed open-
ing a route between Cairo and Baghdad in 1919 as a more efficient means
17
Toukan, ‘Transjordan’, p. 253.
18
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 135.
19
FO 371/7714, Churchill to Samuel, 28 Aug. 1922.
20
A theme explored in: Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic World.
of making reinforcements across the region, and Majors Burton and Holt
explored possible flight paths the following year.21 By June 1921 survey par-
ties from Amman and Ramadi had ploughed the desert furrow and prepared
the landing grounds, and the RAF service air mail began. Four months later it
was opened to the public, with prices soon falling to 3d an ounce, and cutting
the time for mail from England to Baghdad from twenty-eight to nine days.
Additional flights extended the service from Basra to Karachi, and in 1927
Imperial Airways took over the route, instituting a weekly passenger service
and developing Rutbah with a rest house, wireless station, petrol dump and
police post.22 ‘The speed of communications’, Ian Steele reminds us, ‘was
bound up with legitimate expectations’. To contemporaries, the Baghdad air
mail was the most ‘radical change in Imperial communications . . . since the
cutting of the Suez Canal’.23
Yet the route’s success belies the extent to which interwar aviation
remained tied to effective control of the ground below. As Arnold Wilson,
himself a passenger on the first aerial crossing of the El Jidd plateau, put it to
the Society: ‘I am not so afraid when flying of what is in the air, as of what is
on the ground’.24 Much of the literature on imperial aviation tends to discuss
‘route development’ as a paper enterprise: a matter of government subsidies,
imperial conferences, Parliamentary committees, and metropolitan aviation
boards.25 Contemporaries were more aware of the interdependence of air
route development and local administration. In all theatres, aircraft relied on
ground installations and forces for meteorological data, wireless communica-
tion, aerodrome guards and fuel supplies. This was especially true of the desert
air route. Because pilots did not begin training in point-to-point navigation
until the 1930s, the desert furrow was more than a navigational aid.26 ‘The
track is the beginning and the end’, one pilot recalled, ‘the pilot’s present, his
past and his future’. Sticking to it provided the only hope of rescue when air-
craft were forced to land. And forced to land they were. Engine trouble, dust
storms, atmospheric interference in April and May, ‘disconcerting’ changes
in wind direction, the glare off mud-flats, sun stroke and unpredictable tur-
bulence all added to the risks of trans-desert flight.27 Beating the prevailing
21
Brooke-Popham, ‘Notes on Aeroplanes’, pp. 130, 144.
22
Burchall, ‘Air Route’, pp. 7–8; Salt, Air Routes, p. 46; Lloyd-Williams, ‘Re-Marking’.
23
Steele, English Atlantic, p. 5; Salt, Air Routes, p. 40.
24
Acland, ‘Communications’, p. 113. Not that trans-desert travel by land was without
risks for Wilson personally. One of the drivers at the Nairn Transport Company, for exam-
ple, once drove Wilson from Baghdad at sunrise to Beirut by sunset. ‘Would not stop to let
Sir A. pee’, reads the note in his file: ‘made him use a peach tin which nearly cut his penis
off’. MECA, Nairn collection, ‘Nairn Transport Employees’ (n.d.).
25
The standard account is: Higham, Air Routes. See also Butt, Arab Skies.
26
Omissi, Air Power, p. 146.
27
Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, pp. 27, 53ff; Brooke-Popham, ‘Notes on Aeroplanes’,
pp. 129, 131.
ALEPPO MOSUL
RAF service air mail,
1922
JEZIREH KIRKUK Proposed trans-desert
R.
railway lines, 1920s
EU
The Nairn track, 1922
PH
R.
PALMYRA
RA
Imperial Airways, 1930
TIG
TE
TRIPOLI
RIS
Oil pipeline, 1934
BEIRUT
DAMASCUS Imperial Airways, 1938
MEDITERRANEAN RAMADI
BAGHDAD Overland reinforcement
SEA route, 1938
HAIFA
RUTBAH
JERUSALEM
ALEXANDRIA
R T
D E S E
EL ARISH
A N
KOSSAIMA S Y R I
NASIRIYAH
HASSANA BASRA
MA'AN
HELIOPOLIS
CAIRO SUEZ
PE GU
KUWAIT BUSHIRE
R LF
SI
A
N
R. NILE
HA'IL R.S.G FLETCHER 2011
Map 2.1 Trans-Desert Communications Routes, 1919–1939

westerlies required permanent petrol dumps at landing grounds ‘D’ and ‘V’,
supervised on the ground to prevent interference from the Bedouin. If an
aircraft came down in the lava field, as occurred in October 1922, rescue
was impossible by air.28 The practical demands of maintaining the route also
explain why it could not follow the old Damascus caravan route, as much of
this now fell within French territory.29
Nor were atmospheric conditions pilots’ only cause for concern.
‘Ground conditions in the Middle East’, Wilson warned the Society,
seemed ‘distinctly more unfavourable’. The Arabs had ‘become accus-
tomed to regard the aeroplane as an enemy rather than a friend’, and ‘can-
not resist the temptation of shooting at the bird’.30 His remarks reflect
the vulnerability of this newest technology of empire, and the broader
concern that the arms gap between the British and the Bedouin had, if
anything, closed. Many complained that the war had gifted the Bedouin
‘almost unlimited arms . . . so that there was now not an Arab within . . .
200 or 300 miles’ without modern rifles and ammunition.31 During the
war a downed British pilot had indeed been killed by Sinai Bedouin; in
July 1926, no less an airman than Alan Cobham, foremost propagandist
of imperial aviation, was fired upon above Nasiriyah, his navigator killed.32
In March 1920, Major Burton’s first attempt at surveying the air route was
aborted when Bedouin attacked his party, killing three.33 And when the
Ikhwan advanced on Amman in 1924 it was at Ziza aerodrome, a stop on
the air mail service, that imperial, Hashemite and Wahhabi forces clashed,
‘leaving a considerable number of dead in the neighbourhood of the land-
ing ground’.34
These incidents took on a disproportionate significance in official
visions of the corridor, making the case for the exercise of control over
the desert itself. ‘The first thing one does if one has to spend the night in
the desert’, Air Commodore Brooke-Popham maintained, ‘is to get one’s
machine-gun ready’.35 In truth, most flights and forced landings passed
without incident, as pilots familiar with the route came to testify.36 But
even when these ‘grave fears’ subsided, it was still thought important for
British officials in Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq to engage closely with
28
Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, p. 24.
29
30
Acland, ‘Communications’, p. 113. 31
Holt, ‘Future’, pp. 269–270.
32
For the ensuing investigation: AIR 23/302, Howes to Air Staff Intelligence, 8
July 1926.
33
Brooke-Popham, ‘Notes on Aeroplanes’, p. 144–145.
34
Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, p. 37.
35
36
Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, pp. 74–78.
their Bedouin subjects to assure their goodwill. As Glubb saw it, the open-
ing of the air route spelled the end of the Ottoman, ‘reactionary’ policy of
administrative ‘non-interference in the desert’.37
The desert air route was the most striking expression of the desert cor-
ridor, but it was not necessarily the most important. For others, the direct
desert motor route from the Mediterranean to Baghdad constituted the
real ‘revolution in transit’—a ‘New Land Route to the East’.38 A route
from Damascus to Rutbah and thence along the desert furrow to Ramadi
was reconnoitered in April 1923, and the following month Norman
Nairn (a Society member), finding the going smooth ‘like a billiard-table’,
became convinced of its commercial viability.39 By 1925 Nairn Transport
Company convoys were regularly completing the journey in 24 to 26
hours. Within two years the Society felt the road ‘so well known as to call
for little comment’, and anticipated extensions to Teheran, Baluchistan,
and beyond.40 Passing over much of the same territory as the air route,
emphasis was again laid on tribal policy as a means of protecting and sus-
taining communications: in the absence of this in 1925, the Nairns were
forced to pay khuwwa to protect their convoys.41
Unlike the air mail, the trans-desert motor route was not ‘all red’.
Difficulties in navigating the belt of lava country meant that cars had to
pass through French-mandated territory. The Nairn brothers’ preference
for American vehicles also put paid to hopes of a British subsidy.42 Yet the
route was still widely perceived as ‘a great Imperial asset’. It directly com-
plemented the early air route (Nairn mechanics repaired downed aircraft),
on which the capacity for passengers was extremely limited. Passage from
Beirut to Baghdad cost just £30, or £50 return (against £150 each way by
air), and convoys proceeded weekly rather than fortnightly. This cut travel
costs from London to Baghdad by a third, and travel time by two-thirds.43
As a mail service to Europe it was no slower than the air (both services
connected with the same mail boats at Port Said), and it secured a number
of prominent government contracts.44 The service even became a symbol
of imperial unity forged in toil ‘on these borders of Empire’, with a staff
37
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb, ‘Arab Legion: historical’, (n.d.).
38
McCallum, ‘French in Syria’; Polson-Newman, ‘Palestine’, p. 854.
39
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, p. 64. See further: Munro, Nairn Way.
40
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, p. 54; Anon., ‘Overland Motor Route’; Skrine, ‘From
Baluchistan’; Patterson, ‘From Rawalpindi’.
41
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, p. 63. Widely translated as ‘blackmail’ or ‘protection dues’,
khuwwa is perhaps better understood as a payment made to strong Bedouin groups by those
‘wishing to opt out of the economy of raiding’: Toth, ‘Last Battles’, pp. 52–53.
42
British cars were ‘built too low in the chassis’ to withstand rough terrain. The Nairns
preferred Americans: McCallum, ‘Discovery’, pp. 51, 60.
43
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, pp. 56, 49. 44
Salt, Military Geography, p. 168.
Table 2.1. Trans-Desert Overland Traffic between Baghdad and Damascus,
1926–1933
Transits Tonnage Passengers Parcels Letters Suez Canal Suez Canal
(units) (kg) Transits Tonnage
1926 1,910 15,936 4,980 26,060,377

1927 3,894 866 9,262 5,105 18,833 5,445 28,962,048
1928 1,857* 18,046 7,168 30,884 6,084 31,905,902
1929 1,100* 15,227 11,895 96,737 6,274 33,466,014
1930 3,596 2,271 15,536 13,161 266,987 5,761 31,668,759
1931 3,530 3,842 11,532 10,209 241,283 5,366 30,027,966
1932 3,888 6,121 14,119 7,454 146,627 5,032 28,340,290
1933 4,053 7,367 14,859 2,676 80,278 5,243 30,676,672
*
Damascus to Baghdad data only.
Source: FO 684/ 7, Colonel Mackereth, ‘Trasdesert traffic’, 26 Mar. 1934; Farnie, East and West of Suez,
pp. 751–752.
of ‘Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Canadians, Australians and South

Africans . . . all British ex-Servicemen . . . keeping up the prestige of the Old
Country’.45
Such pride in its human material helps explain the Nairns’ hold on the
imagination. Yet their renown has obscured the wider networks of trans-
desert traffic that spread between the wars. By 1934 its growing volume
had attracted a number of competitors, driving down the Nairns’ passen-
ger prices to £9 per journey, with rivals offering a lesser service for as little
as £3 (Table 2.1). Viewed together, these networks unsettle familiar spatial
configurations. Few studies of British interwar imperialism, for example,
or even of Anglo-Egyptian relations, dwell on the Sinai peninsula. Yet to
contemporaries, it was an integral part of Britain’s desert corridor. British
officials of its Frontiers Administration pushed through the development
of an all-weather road to Palestine in the face of Egyptian government
opposition, opening in 1928.46 In 1936, Jarvis finally completed the ten-
year project for which he had deferred his retirement: a new road through
Sinai’s Mitla Pass.47 By the outbreak of the Second World War, his colleagues
had constructed new roads to Mersa Matruh and an experimental ‘mix-in-
place’ surface for the Sinai route, enabling ‘the rapid transfer of troops from
Palestine to the Libyan Desert, or the other way round’.48 The completion
45
Salt, Military Geography, p. 58. Norman and Gerald Nairn were New Zealanders, and
veterans of the Palestine campaign.
46
Perkins, ‘Colonial Administration’, p. 417.
47
FO 141/539/1, Lampson to Weir, 11 Apr. 1935; Jarvis to Wallace, 28 Nov. 1935.
48
Jarvis, ‘Roads in Egypt’. Before the FDA, mail to El Arish was 30-40 hours’ ride from
Qantara: FO 371/62, Shoucair to Director of Intelligence, 4 May 1906.
of a metalled road through Trans-Jordan’s lava field in 1938–1940, bridging

the ‘most historic barrier of the ancient world’, further connected the Sinai
and Baghdad routes.49
Revived interest in a trans-desert railway also fuelled perceptions, if not
the reality, of trans-corridor mobility. Euphrates Valley Railway schemes
had sputtered across the second half of the nineteenth century, but the
Sykes-Picot agreement, dividing the region into British and French zones,
precluded construction along ‘any route hitherto recognized as possible’.50
In the early 1920s, however, the project was revived as a Haifa–Baghdad
line across the Syrian Desert itself.51 In 1922 St John Philby and A. L.
Holt, considering the Wadi Sirhan route impracticable, suggested an
alternative alongside the desert furrow.52 The Royal Geographical Society
responded with cynicism, ridiculing the ‘extraordinarily small amount of
goods to move’ and fearing ‘the lawlessness of the people’. But audiences at
the Royal Central Asian Society were more receptive.53 A Haifa–Baghdad
railway would advance Mesopotamian agriculture, service pilgrims and
make Baghdad ‘the clearing-house for the Persian trade’. It also tied in
with proposals for a pipeline, envisaged by some at the Society as early as
1922.54 Following the discovery of oil at Baba Gurgur in 1927, a southern
pipeline branch was planned to cross British mandated territory through
the corridor; it came online in October 1934.55 Again, communications
and tribal policy were linked. New Arab Legion posts were erected at
pumping stations.56 By ‘sit[ting] on the watering-places’ Holt thought a
railway would not simply frustrate Bedouin raiding, but would trigger the
tribes’ sedentarization:
The reason that these people live in the desert at all is simply that they have
nowhere else to go . . . [O]‌nce you open up a country like Iraq these people
will flock to it and cultivate the lands . . . [S]o the problem of the security of
the railway rather solves itself.57
Others were less optimistic. The hostility of Ibn Saud (and of Nuri Sha’lan,
paramount shaykh of the Ruwala), attacks on survey parties and financial
stringency delayed comprehensive surveying until 1930–1931.58 But one
49
Hamilton, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Road’, p. 232.
50
Keeling, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Railway’, p. 373; Barron, ‘New Responsibilities’,
pp. 260–261.
51
Hoskins, British Routes; Keeling, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Railway’, p. 373.
52
Holt, ‘Journeys’, p. 184. 53
Holt, ‘Future’, p. 271.
54
Holt, ‘Journeys’, p. 186. 55
Bentwich, ‘Palestine’s Progress’, p. 78.
56
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2, (typescript draft autobiography), pp. 198–200.
57
Holt, ‘Journeys’, pp. 180–181.
58
Keeling, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Railway’, p. 378. As a junior officer in Trans-Jordan
observed: ‘There is a party surveying the desert for the proposed railway to Baghdad. The
prospectus imagined it passing through the lava field to arrive at Rutbah,

now . . .
practically the centre of the desert . . . a remarkable junction for every kind
of cross-desert traffic. The various air lines stop and refuel, the two motor
routes from Damascus and Jerusalem converge on their way to Baghdad,
the southern branch of the oil pipe-line from Iraq passes through, and the
railway will have a station here. Eight years ago Rutba consisted of few wells
visited by the Bedouin.59
For Glubb, it was enough to relocate the old cliché about Egypt to the
desert itself: ‘from being, at one time, an abandoned and unadministered
area, the corridor now seems to be developing into the Clapham Junction
of Northern Arabia’.60
For many, therefore, the desert corridor was a meaningful area of activity,
and it was the links forged by British policy, technology and innovation that
had made it so. Aspects of this are dimly perceived in national histories, where
routes through desert ‘peripheries’ elicit only marginal interest. But to inter-
ested contemporaries, together these links amounted to nothing less than a
new ‘great route to the East’—The Third Route—succeeding the maritime rev-
olutions of Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand de Lesseps.61 This view was widely
shared by the scholars, administrators, and surveyors of the Royal Central
Asian Society, who were comfortable periodizing global history in terms of
transport technologies. Thanks in part to the internal combustion engine, the
Golden Road to Samarkand would be the cardinal route of empire once more.
Yet the making and meaning of this ‘third route’ is the one least explored
in the existing scholarly literature. For generations of historians, the Suez
Canal has been synonymous with ‘the route to the East’, and ‘East and
West of Suez’ a shorthand for the complex geography of empire. ‘The cut-
ting of the Canal’, the story goes, ‘practically killed the land route’; 1869
was a decisive event in the history of imperial communications.62 Indeed,
H. L. Hoskins’ 1928 account of imperial routes, long recognized as the
standard, ends with the resounding conclusion that the Canal ‘has thus far
scarcely required an alternative’.63
British Government thinking that it was necessary to take some measures for their pro-
tection approached Nuri Shalaan . . . [and] offered him £20 a week to protect the party.
He, quite naturally, laughed and said that for £200 he might consider it. He is now busy
demonstrating to the Government that it would have been worth every penny . . . [H]‌e is
molesting the survey parties in every way short of killing them. I met one of them the other
day’. IWM: R. F. G. Jayne papers, 78/15/1, diary for 11 Mar. 1931.
59
Holt, ‘Journeys’, pp. 180–181.
60
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Apr. 1938.
61
Sassoon, Third Route; Salt, Air Routes, pp. 85–94.
62
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, p. 44. 63
Hoskins, British Routes.
Certainly, the Canal continued to loom large in numerous interwar confer-

ences and debates—particularly for representatives of the Pacific Dominions.
But imperial communications between the wars witnessed a relative decline
in the importance of the maritime dimension. Recovering the desert corridor
substantiates claims that Britain was becoming ‘less reliant on the Navy in the
1920s and ’30s than at previous times for protection of the strategic routes
to India’, and that connections through the region were ‘[not] only a matter
of sea-power’.64 This was something to which Hoskins’ contemporaries, if
not Hoskins himself, were very much alive. ‘The cutting of the Suez Canal’,
wrote one contributor to the Journal, ‘seemed to administer the final coup
de grâce to the Syrian Desert route’, but with the advent of aviation and car
convoys ‘unexpectedly the Syrian Desert route has once more snatched the
palm of speed from its rivals’.65 Another stressed that in bringing ‘the Syrian
Desert within a day’s compass, the Suez route has lost a certain amount of
its value to Britain’, while complaints about Canal fees further encouraged
thought about alternatives.66 These interwar Britons, it seems, were in no
danger of forgetting Curzon’s insistence that theirs was not merely ‘the great-
est sea-power’ but ‘also the greatest land-power in the Universe’.67
One hesitates to revise too much. This was still a profoundly maritime
empire. Even at its peak, trans-desert trade (mostly in cereals, livestock,
carpets and textiles) was dwarfed by that through the Canal, let alone that
around the Cape—still the preferred route for non-perishables (Table
2.1).68 Instead, historians must be sensitive to moments in which maritime
networks have reached out into surrounding zones, as well as moments of
‘recursiveness’ when ‘the land exerts a more potent influence on the coast-
lands than does the world of the sea’.69 As such, the ‘third route’ might best
be considered an occasion in which maritime and land-based systems inter-
sected: this was the desert corridor of an oceanic empire. Even the most
enthusiastic proponents of desert railways accepted that ‘the Suez Canal
revolutionized trade with the East, and is likely to keep the bulk of it’, but
still hoped to ‘attract some of the traffic back to the old route and . . . create
a new trade’.70 What happened in the desert had maritime implications.
Communications, historians broadly agree, formed the essence of
British interest in the interwar Middle East.71 Given the tenacity of
64
Letherdale, Britain and Saudi Arabia, p. 3; Darwin, Empire Project, p. 470; Morewood,
Defence of Egypt, p. 11.
65
Anon., review of Syrian Desert, p. 504.
66
Main, ‘Iraq’, p. 427; Cole, Military Geography, pp. 19–20.
67
Curzon, Frontiers, p. 9. 68
Cole, Military Geography, p. 19.
69
Horden and Purcell, ‘New Thalassology’.
70
Keeling, ‘Haifa-Baghdad Railway’, p. 384.
71
For example: Balfour-Paul, ‘Britain’s Informal Empire’, p. 490.
popular notions of ‘oil imperialism’, this point is worth re-stating.72 Yet

it is often made without extensive efforts to explore the provisionality
of these routes. This is not to suggest that the argument is incorrect, but
merely to note that further insights await those who examine its details.
In the years between the two world wars, the specific patterns of commu-
nication discussed above—the desert air route and trans-desert road pro-
jects, plans for a railway and the realization of a pipeline—gave rise to a
desert corridor of the British empire. The missing element which made it
all possible was the exercise of desert administration on the ground. It was
local desert administrators who explored and developed new routes, as
did Jarvis on a 1923 expedition in search of Zerzura, and Peake in 1921 in
clearing the road to Azraq for the air route ‘furrow’.73 It was desert admin-
istrators who helped pioneer the technology that enabled mechanized
desert movement: the 9-inch low-pressure ‘sand tyres’ which ‘revolution-
ised desert transport’ (born out of Frontiers Administration anti-smug-
gling operations); sand channels, sun compasses, and expansion tanks for
conserving radiator water.74 It was these same desert officers who set the
terms of mobility, monopolizing authority over horizontal connections
across the corridor, effectively isolating them from the writ of the region’s
national governments. When in 1927 a private car collided with a train in
northern Sinai, for example, Frontiers Administration officials seized the
chance to reserve the province’s roads for itself and for imperial interests,
refusing to issue travel permits for nine months.75 It was Jarvis, Peake, and
Governor Hatton whose permission, information, protection and sup-
port made possible Ralph Bagnold’s interwar expeditions between Egypt
and Trans-Jordan.76 Similarly, it would be the Frontiers Administration
which, when the British Army had neither desert maps nor desert equip-
ment in the summer of 1940, helped to form the famous Long Range
72
Oil, an obvious dimension of British interest in the interwar desert, is strikingly absent
from administrators’ reports and correspondence. Commercial production began in Kirkuk
in 1927, Bahrain in 1932, Saudi Arabia in 1938, and Kuwait in 1946. But demand for oil
did not rise inexorably across our period (in the early 1930s supply actually outstripped
demand) and, as we shall see in Chapter 4, interwar officials often assumed that the region’s
economic future lay in agriculture instead. The classic account of British oil diplomacy is:
Kent, Moguls and Mandarins.
73
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 105–107; IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiogra-
phy), missing pages, pp. 31–32.
74
FO 371/18011, Egypt Annual Report for 1933, para. 411; Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’.
The Long Range Desert Group acknowledged its forebears in this regard: Kennedy-Shaw,
Long Range Desert Group, p. 12; CAC: BGND C24 (Desert technology), B. Paget, ‘General
Orders No. 193’, 4 Feb. 1944.
75
FO 141/790/27, Plumer to Lloyd, 28 Dec. 1927.
76
For example: CAC: BGND B2, Bagnold, ‘Egypt to Palestine and Transjordan by car’,
9 Apr. 1926.
Desert Group.77 In developing, policing, and maintaining desert routes,

local officers also laid the foundations for re-deploying British military
forces across the region—a crucial British interest.78 ‘Provided that the
Beduins of the Syrian Desert are “squared” ’, an officer hoped in 1927,
‘reinforcements can be rapidly dispatched to Mesopotamia by motor
transport from Mediterranean ports’.79 By the time war returned to the
Middle East, the Overland Reinforcement Route and Heron Plan pro-
vided for just that.80
It is fitting, therefore, to conclude this survey of British trans-corridor
mobility with the careers of desert administrators themselves. Glubb, most
famously, was transferred from Iraq to Trans-Jordan to bring his desert
experience to bear, but the practice was common. Special Service Officer
(SSO) Guy Moore, once Glubb’s colleague in Iraq, later Wilfred Thesiger’s
commander in the Sudan, was also considered for the Trans-Jordan job on
the basis of his ‘valuable experience of Bedouin tribal affairs’.81 Another
SSO served in Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq before seeking a contract with
Egypt’s Frontiers Administration.82 That Administration had begun by
asking the Foreign Office to interview suitable candidates in London,
but was soon responding directly to individual enquiries from across the
region.83 Such mobility across jurisdictions is often obscured in ‘national’
histories. Peake, for example, appears in standard accounts of the Arab
Legion as the father of a national force, inextricably bound to the history
of a single nation. But close reading of his personal correspondence reveals
that he considered a range of other postings—with Ibn Saud’s forces,
the Turkish gendarmerie, the Greek gendarmerie, and the Iraqi police—
throughout his time in the country.84
In part, this mobility reflected the insecurity of many postings and the
fluidity of imperial arrangements. But it also reveals how professional
expertise was sought across the corridor, and the role of perceived desert
conditions in enabling interchangeability. Dr John Ball of Egypt’s Desert
Survey helped map the desert furrow, while Major Burton, surveyor of
the Haifa–Baghdad railway, constructed the Western Oasis Railway that
77
Kennedy-Shaw, Long Range Desert Group, p. 17.
78
For inter-command reinforcement plans, see AIR 5/1212, Hall to RAF Headquarters,
31 Dec. 1937; FO 141/534/16, S. Dowding, ‘Frontiers Administration’, 26 Nov. 1937.
79
Polson Newman, ‘Palestine’, pp. 858–859.
80
AIR 24/818, Operations Record Book for Iraq, 3 Feb. 1939.
81
FO 371/14479, Courtney to Mack, 31 Mar. 1930.
82
FO 371/13147, J 2802/1121/16, Montagu-Douglas-Scott to Murray, 9 Oct. 1928.
83
FO 141/436/5, MacDonnell to Cairo Residency, 4 Oct. 1919.
84
Glubb also sought St. John Philby’s intercession on his behalf to secure a post with Ibn
Saud’s forces at some point in the 1920s: MECA: STJPH 2/3/10, Peake to Philby, 16 Mar.
1929; Philby to Peake, 10 Apr. 1929; 2/3/1/6, Philby to Glubb, 24 Feb. 1958.
delivered Jarvis to ‘unattractive’ Kharga.85 Jarvis himself ‘served eighteen

years in the Frontiers Administration, all of which . . . in the desert’, mov-
ing from Amira to Kharga before becoming Governor of Sinai. When it
came to appoint his successor, he recommended W. B. Kennedy-Shaw of
the Sudan Government Agricultural Service (and later of the Long Range
Desert Group) because of his familiarity with desertic soils.86 Similar
career trajectories could be traced for Wilfred Jennings-Bramley, Leonard
Hatton, A. W. Green, and N. B. de Lancey Forth, or SSOs Woolley,
Moore, Jope-Slade, Kenny-Leveck, and Howes. For the Frontier Districts
Administration (FDA)’s Military Administrator, service offered ‘such an
experience of deserts that no matter how difficult the country [the officer]
may be asked to traverse in his subsequent career, he will feel at home in
it’, envisaging a regular turnover of officers to broaden the numbers with
‘professional’ desert experience.87 This traffic in personnel, as much as that
of goods, passengers and mail, compels us to take the corridor seriously.
‘A C U R I O U S A N O M A LY ’ : T H E G ROW T H O F
B R I T I S H D E S E RT A D M I N I S T R AT I O N
In 1934, soon after his appointment as High Commissioner to Egypt,

Sir Miles Lampson embarked on an extended tour of the country’s desert
frontiers. His itinerary suggests the depth of British interest in these
areas.88 In March he ‘covered most of the roads of the Sinai Peninsula’
in the company of its Governor, Claude Jarvis, whose ‘efficient and able
control’ commanded respect in ‘this bleak and barren land’.89 The follow-
ing months in the Western Desert, ‘just as in Sinai’, Lampson was ‘struck
by the important role assigned to the Frontiers Administration’.90 Back
in Cairo, Lampson wrote a series of reports to London championing the
Administration’s work. Out there, British officers still displayed ‘the natu-
ral gift of our countrymen to . . . manage native races’, in a country where
the opportunities for doing so seemed to dwindle by the day. ‘It strikes one
as a curious anomaly’, he wrote,
that [Sinai]—and the other outlying provinces of Egypt—should be the ben-
eficiaries of a quasi-benevolent despotism exercised by a British Governor . . .
85
Holt, ‘Journeys’, p. 187.
86
FO 141/539/1, Jarvis to FDA Director-General, 28 Nov. 1935; Lampson to Symes,
30 Dec. 1935.
87
FO 141/436/5, Wallace to Cairo Residency, 6 June 1920.
88
MECA: Sir Miles Lampson collection 2/3, 1934 Diary.
89
FO 371/17978, Lampson to Simon, 16 May 1934.
90
FO 371/17978, Lampson to Simon, 11 June 1934.
whereas the provinces of Egypt proper suffer under the administrative meth-
ods of a purely Egyptian régime.91
This section accounts for Lampson’s ‘curious anomaly’. It explains why,
faced with grave anti-colonial unrest between 1919 and 1922, imperial
influence grew in the deserts of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, even as its
‘advisers’ were recalled from the region’s towns and cities. It ought to be
a commonplace that local administrative undertakings, quite as much as
trade, treaties or troop levels, helped determine the shape of empire. Yet,
in stark contrast with the literature on Indian provinces and cities, there
remain remarkably few local studies of Britain’s ‘moment’ in the Middle
East.92 The view from the frontier can revise our impressions of its nature,
chronology, and orientation. To take the pulse of colonial rule, and to
gauge the prospects of aspirant nationalism, it may be that we have been
looking in the wrong place.
Desert administration took different forms in Egypt, Trans-Jordan,
and Iraq, but local officers faced common problems. Most pressing was
the tribal disruption and dislocation that attended the rise of Ibn Saud.
While General Allenby and the Emir Faisal were making their entry into
Damascus, Ibn Saud sought to use the Ikhwan—semi-settled Arab tribes
of Wahhabi faith—to expand from his base in Nejd. With the fall of Hail
in 1922, Saudi power was being projected into the Syrian Desert for the
first time in a century, pressing on the frontiers of Hashemite domains
and British territories in Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq.93 For the British,
committed to both Ibn Saud and to his Hashemite rivals, the question of
how far to defer to Saudi expansion was debated in all three of our ter-
ritories.94 For the Society, the stakes could not have been higher: catching
and destroying an Ikhwan raid on the outskirts of Amman was ‘one of the
small decisive battles of the world’.95
If Saudi expansion was unsettling, then so too was the prospect of
its much-anticipated collapse, and the maelstrom of raiding that was
expected to ensue.96 In 1927, that nightmare seemed on the verge of
becoming a reality. Ibn Saud’s relationship with the Ikhwan—critical
to his earlier expansion—began to unravel. With the conquest of the
91
FO 371/17977, Lampson to Simon, 30 Apr. 1934.
92
As Peter Sluglett has observed: ‘Formal and Informal Empire’, p. 422.
93
For the broader political context, see Kostiner, Making of Saudi Arabia.
94
This predicament is neatly captured in: CO 831/22/2, Cunliffe-Lister to Wauchope,
1 Feb. 1933.
95
Thompson, ‘My Impressions’.
96
Philby aside, few at the Society expected the Saudi regime to survive a day longer than
Ibn Saud himself. See Philby, ‘Triumph’; MECA: HRPD 3/1, Dickson, ‘Future of Arabia’
(n.d. 1931).
Hedjaz complete, and seeking accommodation with Britain’s presence in

the region, Ibn Saud attempted to rein in Ikhwan activism by restricting
their raiding, grazing, and trading privileges. The result was the revolt,
over the next three years, of the Mutair, Harb, and Ajman tribes along
the frontiers of Saudi authority. Perhaps as many as four hundred tribes-
men were killed in Iraq alone before Ibn Saud re-established control.97
Historians have long suggested that British tribal policy was made in reac-
tion to this shift in ‘the dynamics of Bedouin politics’.98 This is substantially
true, and echoes official views that Nejdi raids ‘obliged an unwilling govern-
ment to extend its administrative organization to the desert’.99 But while desert
dynamics cut across national boundaries, they also fed into complex, local
struggles for authority between Bedouin tribes, urban politicians and imperial
officials, so that the apparatus and growth of British desert administration
varied considerably. The political micro-climate in Egypt differed from that in
Trans-Jordan, which differed again from that in Iraq: this mattered to the men
on the spot. So although we are justified in treating the desert corridor as a
whole, the origins of its administrative arrangements owed much to decisions
made locally, and remained liable to disruption by events at the national level
too. For these reasons this section explores the growth of Britain’s steppe insti-
tutions in Egypt, Iraq, and Trans-Jordan in turn, before reflecting on the com-
mon trends that emerge. As historians of transnational phenomena elsewhere
have been warned, neglecting national histories ‘for no other reason than they
are nationally focused’ can distort the very stories we are seeking to tell.100
‘Illegitimate offspring’: Egypt’s Frontier

Districts Administration
Lampson’s anomaly was an interwar phenomenon. Until then, for all the
reformist energies of Mehemet Ali and the Khedives, administering Egypt’s
desert hinterlands remained a low priority. It was once thought that ‘the
settlement of the Beduins’ in Egypt had been largely accomplished by the
start of the twentieth century, with the dramatic increase in cultivation and
the growth of the railways speeding these nomads on their inevitable path
to sedentarization.101 More recent research, however, highlights the lim-
ited penetration of the state and its coexistence alongside the ‘special social
sector’ of nomadic pastoralists.102 Mehemet Ali mobilized the Bedouin in
97
Toth, ‘Conflict’. 98
Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’; Toth, ‘Last Battles’, p. 66.
99
MECA: Edmonds 3/1, report JQ1825.M4 (n.d. 1928). See also: AIR 23/45, Glubb,
‘Intelligence from Najd’, 28 Nov. 1928.
100
Canny, ‘Moving Forward’, p. 413.
101
Baer, ‘Settlement’. 102
Aharoni, Pasha’s Bedouin.
support of his wars, but did not effect their permanent settlement. Nor
did British occupation from 1882 herald the onset of an administrative
revolution in the desert, east or west. The great cadastral map of 1907, to
some scholars the crowning achievement of colonial ‘legibility’, remained
‘surrounded by a huge white space of untouched paper’ until the 1920s.
‘Everything outside the cultivation of the Nile’, Jarvis recalled, ‘was an
unknown quantity as far as real survey work was concerned’.103
In Sinai, this manifested itself in a thin and halting prewar regime.
Some date the start of regular administration to the ‘Taba incident’ of
1905–06. That winter, confusion over jurisdiction, an undefined fron-
tier and the movements of small patrols around Aqaba led to heated
exchanges between the Egyptian and Ottoman governments. Wilfred
Jennings-Bramley, an officer in the Sudan with an ethnographic interest
in the Bedouin, was made Inspector of Sinai to bolster Egypt’s claim.104
When Lord Cromer ordered the British Mediterranean fleet to sea, the
Porte reluctantly agreed to a ‘separating administrative line’ that secured
the peninsula for Egypt.
But activity on the ground, directed by the Intelligence Department of
the Egyptian War Office, remained fitful, temporary and circumscribed.
Jennings-Bramley was soon recalled as a concession to the Ottoman
authorities.105 His successor, A. C. Parker, concentrated on quarantine
measures and building rest-houses along the declining pilgrimage route. It
was the Monastery of St Catherine, not a regular government official, that
dispensed small subsidies to local shaykhs.106 By 1910, when a government
office was finally constructed at Nekhl, enthusiasm for a forward policy
was waning fast. The new Consul-General made light of concerns that not
enough was being done ‘to safeguard the Egyptian frontiers’. ‘Nature’, he
argued,
103
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 105–106; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, pp. 87–88. For the pro-
gress of Egypt’s Desert Survey to 1926, see WO 33/1085, Military Report on Egypt, 1926,
pp. 156–157. T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley’s archaeological survey of Sinai and the
Negev, The Wilderness of Zin, was a belated attempt to make good deficiencies in imperial
knowledge of Egypt’s north-eastern frontier.
104
The career of Wilfred Jennings-Bramley (1871–1960) weaves in and out of our story.
He arrived in Egypt in 1891, and served in the Sudan between 1901 and the ‘Taba inci-
dent’—for which Wilfred Scawen Blunt unfairly held him responsible. He spent the war in
the Western Desert and Cyrenaica ‘winning the heart of the Libyan Bedouin’. Thereafter he
was the driving force behind the development of Burg el-Arab: a trading hub thirty miles
west of Alexandria which, during the battles of Alam Halfa and El Alamein, he refused to
leave. Expelled by the Egyptian Government in 1955, he continued to urge on the Foreign
Office Britain’s right to intervene in Egypt’s deserts (see Chapter 5 below). He died in
Florence in 1960: Murray, ‘Obituary’.
105
Warburg, ‘Sinai Peninsula’, p. 689. 106
Parker, Diaries.
has never yet invented the boundary that would completely satisfy the mili-
tary mind, but I venture to think that the inhospitable deserts which separate
us on either side from Turkish territory are as satisfactory a barrier . . . as this
globe can supply.107
In the event of hostilities, government would withdraw from Sinai alto-
gether, fall back on the Suez Canal, and trust to the desert to turn back a
hostile force. A more vigorous policy might only provide a casus belli. ‘The
only way’ the Ottoman Army would be entering Egypt, the War Office
predicted in January 1915, would be ‘as prisoners of war’.108 This was,
contemporaries soon noted, ‘perhaps forgetful of [Sinai’s] history’.109 Two
weeks later, Djemal Pasha crossed Sinai and attacked the Canal. It took
two years to clear the peninsula of his forces.
In the west, too, the strategic significance of Egypt’s desert frontiers was
not thought to warrant an advancing administrative presence. Instead, it
was hoped that the desert tribes—untaxed before 1917, and under the
nominal authority of the Egyptian Coastguard—would ‘act as a buffer
state’ against potential aggression from Tripoli.110 A small outpost was
established at Sollum during the final stages of the Italo-Turkish War with
only a distant eye to frontier delimitation.111 Such limited penetration
took its toll on information. Preoccupied with the prewar movements
and pronouncements of the Grand Senussi, Sayyid Ahmed, officials were
largely unaware of the desperate state of the western desert tribes as trade
collapsed. Because Sayyid Ahmed’s correspondence seemed friendly (‘he
made his preparations’, General Sir Archibald Murray confessed, ‘under a
cloak of negotiations’) the Senussi Rebellion, when it began in November
1915, caught the British by surprise.112 Sollum had to be evacuated ‘at
very short notice’.113 As one report later concluded, Britain had paid
for a ‘lack of interest’ in this desert ‘since the early days of the Roman
occupation’.114
Cairo’s response to the rebellion revealed the depth of its ignorance.
This was an ‘information panic’, one of those moments of intelligence
107
FO 371/248, A. Albert (Duke of Connaught), ‘Inspection of Troops and Defences in
Egypt’, 30 Apr. 1907; Gorst to Tyrrell, 2 May 1907.
108
FO 141/473, ‘Official Communiqué’, 20 Jan. 1915. Jarvis bemoaned the deci-
sion: Yesterday, p. 132.
109
MacMunn and Falls, Military Operations, p. 8.
110
FO 141/634, Anon. memorandum ‘Western Frontier of Egypt’, 25 Sept. 1907;
Hunter to Wingate, 25 Feb. 1917.
111
FO 141/634, Hunter to Gorst, 6 Nov. 1911.
112
FO141/653, Clayton to Cheetham, 3 June 1915; FO 141/653, Murray to McMahon,
6 Oct. 1916.
113
FO 141/653, Clayton to Residency, 15 Dec. 1915.
114
WO 287/27, Military Report on the North-Western Desert of Egypt, (n.d. 1937).
breakdown that unveil the preconceptions behind British policy.115

Without detailed knowledge of this desert in peacetime, officials gave full
rein to the imagination. Nomads, by essence ‘fanatics’, were driven by ‘a
fervor compound of puritanical zeal and lust for robbery’.116 An assumed
religious kinship and a tendency to conflate the Senussi with the Bedouin
in general gave the rebellion alarming proportions: it was ‘a spark traveling
along a fuze to a powder-barrel’.117 Faced with visions of nomadic hordes
sweeping down on the Nile, some 30,000 troops, badly needed elsewhere,
would spend much of 1916 guarding the Western Desert. ‘For months’,
Jarvis remembered, ‘our troops remained facing a perfectly empty desert’
because ‘as a nation we dearly love the bogy of a fanatical army of millions
of desert Arabs yelling “Allah!” . . . ’.118 Had British administrators been
on the ground, it was soon being argued, ‘many millions of pounds would
have been saved’.119
Between 1915 and 1917, rebellion in the west and the long cam-
paign in the east transformed British approaches to these deserts. Since
the start of the occupation, British officials had hoped that Bedouin
affairs could be neatly contained in the desert. Now, ‘the ease with
which these two invading armies crossed these sandy wastes’ gave
‘practical demonstration that the deserts could no longer be left to
their own devices’.120 The future security of Egypt, Archibald Murray
recommended, could not rely on ‘a great defensive position in proxim-
ity to the Suez Canal . . . [I]‌t would be far preferable to push out across
the Sinai Peninsula . . . making dispositions for an active defence’.121
Without a dynamic presence among them, others argued, Senussi
rebels and Sinai Bedouin (who had acted as Ottoman guides) had lost
sight of ‘the advantages of a policy of peace with us’.122 In May 1917,
with the end of combat operations in Sinai and the Western Desert,
Murray created the Frontier Districts Administration to make good
these deficiencies.
The Frontier Districts Administration ought to be more familiar to
scholars of the Anglo-Egyptian relationship: at its height, it controlled
115
Bayly, ‘Knowing the Country’. Martin Thomas has also explored the concept: Thomas,
Empires of Intelligence, pp. 26, 73, 76.
116
MacMunn and Falls, Military Operations, pp. 101–118
117
MacMunn and Falls, Military Operations, pp. 152–153.
118
Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 5; Kennedy-Shaw, Long Range Desert Group, p. 12. The official
history, however, defends the decision: MacMunn and Falls, Military Operations, p. 103.
119
FO 371/13147, D. J. Wallace, untitled report, 27 Mar. 1927, in Lloyd to
Chamberlain, 23 Mar. 1928.
120
Jarvis, ‘Tasks’.
121
FO 371/23246, Murray, ‘Appreciation’ (n.d. Feb. 1916).
122
FO 141/653, Jennings-Bramley, ‘Notes on the Senussi Question’, 7 Dec. 1914.
‘the whole of the territory of Egypt outside the Nile Valley, the Delta, and
the Fayoum’.123 Established under the Protectorate by an act of martial
law, it took ‘its orders from the Commander-in-Chief and its policy from
the Residency’. It was attached to the Egyptian Ministry of Finance, who
were ordered to meet its costs, but the Government of Egypt had ‘really
no control over it’.124 It became, therefore, ‘the illegitimate offspring of the
British Army out of the Residency, and the Egyptian Ministry of Finance
were asked to accept paternity’.125 Part of its rationale was to retain British
expertise acquired in the desert campaigns. Its first Military Administrator,
Colonel G. G. Hunter, had been Chief Staff Officer of the Western Desert
Frontier Force established to face down the Senussi. Majors D. J. Wallace
and C. S. Jarvis, leading figures in the administration into the 1930s, both
joined its ranks in 1918.
As the war edged into Palestine, British Military Governors took over
from the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration to create three new
Provinces: the Western Desert, Sinai, and the Eastern and Southern Desert.
Their ‘special powers’ reflected the disturbed environment in which the
administration came of age. To lighten the ‘extreme misery’ of the western
Bedouin, guard the north-west coast, guarantee peace in Sinai, secure supply
lines to Palestine, relieve British troops of their guard duties, furnish reli-
able intelligence, resettle refugees and ‘repair the ravages of war’, Governors
assumed ‘all the functions of government hitherto dispersed amongst [its]
various Departments’.126 Provinces were divided into districts, each super-
vised by a British officer and an Egyptian mamur, and could call on their own
Camel Corps and Light Car Patrols, drilled in English and under British com-
mand. By 1921, forty-five Britons were serving in the Administration’s ranks.127
Desert administration in Egypt, therefore, was every inch ‘a war creation’.128
Its survival in peacetime was less assured. With the end of the war responsibil-
ity passed from the Commander-in-Chief to the Residency, but its authority
still came from British martial law, and the Egyptian Government still picked
up the tab.129 Should either platform prove untenable, as seemed likely in the
face of serious unrest in March 1919, the FDA would ‘at once cease to exist’.130
Worse, the Milner Mission on the future of Anglo-Egyptian relations—while
123
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘FDA Annual Report for 1921’.
124
FO 371/4991, E 9820/182/16, J. Loder (Foreign Office) minute, 11 Aug. 1920; FO
141/504/7, Congreve to Allenby, 15 Sept. 1922.
125
126
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘Annual Report for 1921’.
127
FO 371/6322, Allenby to Curzon, 12 July 1921.
128
FO 371/4991, J. Loder minute, 11 Aug. 1920.
129
FO 141/504/7, Congreve to Allenby, 15 Sept. 1922.
130
FO 371/6322, D. J. Wallace, ‘Judicial Administration of the Areas Controlled by the
FDA’, 21 Nov. 1920.
‘anxious to perpetuate [the] existence’ of this administration—to the bewil-

derment of many ‘made no mention [of it] whatever’ in its final report.131
Edmund Allenby, the new High Commissioner, also thought British control
of the Frontiers ‘might make all the difference in the event of a serious out-
break’, but refrained from a public declaration to that effect.132 With neither
a treaty nor a formal pronouncement in its defence, control ultimately rested
on Britain’s preparedness to insist on command of its networks and personnel.
To deflect criticism and secure influence over the administration,
Allenby handed responsibility to the Egyptian Ministry of War in 1922.
Whatever the future of Britain in Egypt, he reasoned, imperial interests
would justify ongoing supervision of this Ministry.133 With a British
Director-General at the helm, the FDA would have direct access to the
Minister of War, and key positions in the desert Provinces would remain in
British hands. Moreover, buried amidst ‘the larger expenditure of a similar
nature already incurred . . . by the Egyptian Army’, the costs of this auton-
omous administration would be ‘less conspicuous’.134 When in 1925 the
British Director-General made way for an Egyptian, Ahmed Shafik, the
arrangement proved ‘ideal’. For the next decade the ‘Anglophile’ Shafik was
‘a rubber stamp’ who masked the extent of British control while ‘let[ting]
the British officials do what they liked’.135 When Shafik’s deputy died
unexpectedly in 1927, the Residency worked to suppress the position alto-
gether, so that no Egyptian could come between the senior British officer,
D. J. Wallace, and the Director-General himself.136 Wallace, nominally the
Civil Secretary, was left ‘in almost entire charge of this Administration’.137
Nonetheless, the British position remained vulnerable, and refer-
ences to the administration’s ‘delicacy’ and ‘ambiguous and irregular
position’ would persist across our period.138 Its overlapping and con-
fused jurisdictions helped veil British influence, but could also stall
131
FO 371/6322, Lindsay to Curzon, 12 Feb. 1921.
132
FO 371/6322, Allenby memorandum, 2 Apr. 1921.
133
FO 371/4991, J. Murray minute, 9 Nov. 1920; Perkins, ‘Colonial Administra
tion’, p. 413.
134
FO 371/6322, Curzon to Allenby, 17 Feb. 1921.
135
FO 141/539/1, W. Smart, ‘Frontiers Administration’ minute, 13 Apr. 1935. There
was more than ‘Anglophilia’ at work here. Under a Wafdist Ministry, Shafik Pasha knew
full well that ‘his best chance of retaining his post’ was ‘to throw in his lot with the British
officials’: FO 141/799/5, D. Wallace, ‘Report on Frontiers Administration, 1st January
1926 to 30th April 1927’.
136
FO 371/14649, Smart to Lorraine, 14 May 1930; FO 141/576/4, W. Smart, ‘Deputy
Director General of FDA’, 17 May 1928.
137
FO 371/21398, Wallace to Smart (n.d. 1938).
138
For example: FO 141/539/1 W. Smart, ‘Frontiers Administration’, 8 Apr. 1935; FO
371/13147, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23 Mar. 1928; FO 141/436/5, Dowson to Allenby, 23
Jan. 1921.
decision-making: disagreement over the design of its uniform, seem-

ingly a simple matter, took fourteen years to resolve.139 The post of
Assistant Director-General was only suppressed ‘by verbal agree-
ment’ between successive High Commissioners and Egyptian Prime
Ministers; it might be revived—perhaps in ‘Anglophobe’ hands—at any
time.140 As neither a racial nor a religious minority, the Bedouin did
not strictly qualify for the Residency’s special protection.141 The budget
was met by the Egyptian tax-payer: tolerable enough during the war
years, perhaps, but ‘full of prospects of trouble for the future’.142 And
the Camel Corps and Light Car Patrols, ‘troops over which legally we
have no control’ but which the British assumed would ‘loyally accept
our orders’, were ‘only one more of the normal incongruities of the
Egyptian situation’.143
The result was that retaining the Frontiers’ British personnel and
exceptional responsibilities required continuous justification. Local
officers became adept at pointing to frontier crises to expand their
jurisdiction, court the support of superiors, ward off attempts at
Egyptianization and otherwise defend a ‘somewhat illogical but
extremely efficient’ arrangement.144 The rumoured movements of
a Wahhabi force around Aqaba, for example, helped secure the
Administration’s incorporation into British Canal Defence Schemes.145
Had the Administration existed in 1915, Wallace routinely reminded the
Residency, then ‘the Senussi invasion would have been averted’.146 And
when Ibn Rifada’s revolt against Ibn Saud’s authority threatened to spill
into Sinai in June 1932, the administration seized ‘an excellent opportu-
nity of rubbing in to the FO our old argument . . . about the case for the
retention of British elements’.147
Desert administration in Egypt grew unevenly. As resources, priorities,
political capital, and events changed, so attention shifted between the admin-
istration’s deserts. The shockwaves sent out by the rise of Ibn Saud put Sinai
139
Even then, it involved contributions from the Army Council, the Administration’s
Officer’s Committee, a special board at the Egyptian War Office, the Minister of War, the
Residency and even the King: FO 141/703/2, Smart to Lorraine, 6 Jan. 1932.
140
FO 141/604/1, C. W. Spinks, ‘Post of Assistant Director General, Frontiers
Administration’, 19 June 1936.
141
FO 141/514/5, Allenby note, 21 Mar. 1923.
142
FO 371/4991, Dowson to Allenby, 8 Dec. 1920.
143
FO 141/539/1, Wier to Lampson, 4 June, 1935.
144
FO 141/534/16, J. Marshall-Cornwall, ‘The Frontiers Administration’, 17 Feb. 1937.
145
FO 141/504/7, MacDonnell to Allenby, 11 Sept. 1922; M. S. MacDonnell, untitled
memorandum, 12 Sept. 1922.
146
FO 141/436/5, Wallace to Allenby, 6 June 1920.
147
FO 141/742, W. Smart minute, 15 June 1932.
centre-stage for much of the 1920s, as the recipient of raids from the Hedjaz,
and as a listening-post on Arabian affairs. Questions over the future of Ma’an,
the modernity of raiders’ rifles and the permeability of these borders made
raiding ‘a more difficult problem’ here than in the Western Desert.148 In the
west, meanwhile, delimitation of the Cyrenaican frontier (1925), Italian dis-
placement of Senussi refugees (1927), the fall of Kufra (1931), and mounting
tensions with Italy raised the administration’s profile and responsibilities. A
series of attacks on motorists in 1929 prompted an extension of FDA juris-
diction west of the Canal, while in Sinai measures against smuggling, as we
shall see in Chapter 3, strengthened its hand as never before.149 Throughout,
seasonal variation in rainfall and grazing further affected the rhythms of
administration.
To appreciate the collective significance of these local activities, we must
take a step back and view the Frontier Districts Administration in its national
context. Between March 1919 and the end of 1921 the British presence
in Egypt, engorged by the war, prompted widespread political unrest. In
response, Britain wound-down its involvement in direct administration in
exchange for safeguards over more circumscribed imperial interests. Both
the Milner Mission and High Commissioner Allenby calculated that the
Egyptianization of civil administration could buy acquiescence in the reten-
tion of British forces.150 The number of British officials in Egypt was ‘exces-
sive’, Milner advised Lord Curzon, and in 1922 Allenby gave notice to most
of the British ‘Advisers’, whose activities had created ‘a British parallel service’
alongside their Egyptian Ministers.151 By George Lloyd’s calculation, of the
1,051 foreign officials working in government before the 1922 Declaration,
only 171 remained five years later. From the sidelines, Jarvis watched the
British presence shrink to ‘a skeleton force’.152
Events in the desert, however, appear to have bucked the trend.
There, British influence was expanding into all new areas, deepening its
involvement in the inhabitants’ lives. Some even toyed with the idea of
annexing the Sinai outright.153 This forward movement drew strength
from a particular reading of the 1919 unrest, in which Egypt’s deserts,
148
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘Annual Report for 1921’; FO 371/7715, Allenby to Curzon,
30 Sept. 1922.
149
FO 141/799/5, D. Wallace, ‘Report on the Frontiers Administration, 1st May, 1928
to 30th April, 1929’.
150
As Lord Curzon memorably put it, ‘Why worry about the rind if we can obtain the
fruit?’: CAB 24/119, Curzon memorandum, 14 Feb. 1921.
151
FO 371/4980, Milner to Curzon, 17 May 1920; FO 371/7732, Allenby to Curzon,
4 Mar. 1922; FO 141/793/7, Allenby to Curzon, 13 May 1922.
152
Lloyd, Egypt since Cromer, ii, p. 105; Jarvis, Desert and Delta, p. 27.
153
For example: FO 371/10071, J. Murray minute, 6 Oct. 1924; CAC: GLLD 14/18,
Lloyd to Chamberlain, 31 May 1927.
flanking a turbulent Nile, remained politically quiescent. National

histories often overlook this point, but it became the rallying cry of
Britain’s desert officers. To Colonel Hunter, the ‘calm’ that reigned
throughout FDA jurisdiction more than vindicated its administrative
costs.154 The Milner Mission was boycotted across Egypt, but not out
here, where ‘very little [anti-British] propaganda’ was heard.155 Sinai
Bedouin showed ‘no coherent ideas or attitudes towards the proposed
treaty’.156 For Jarvis, then posted to Amira, the rising of 1919 proved
‘the most uneventful and peaceful period of my life’.157 Later, certain
shaykhs shrewdly played to this memory in seeking Residency sup-
port for their exemption from conscription.158 This struggle affected
how some Britons viewed their position in Egypt. After all, until the
mid-1930s it was nationalism, not Great Power rivalry, which posed the
greatest threat to their authority.159
Instead of looking for advance or retreat, therefore, we might re-think
Britain’s presence in interwar Egypt as an act of rebalancing. Superficially,
Britain’s fortunes in the desert were not dissimilar from those else-
where: between 1919 and 1927 the number of British officers in the Egyptian
Army collapsed from almost two hundred to just nine, and those in the FDA
from forty-five to seven.160 But the key difference was that this administra-
tion’s most senior positions—the civil Governorships and the command
of the Frontier Forces—remained in British hands. In the Egyptian Army
proper Britain’s only important staff officer was the Inspector General, and
there was no longer a British sirdar. In short, the number of British officials
in the Ministry of War fell, but those who remained were concentrated in the
FDA. ‘The FDA today’, observed John Murray of the Foreign Office in 1928,
‘is very much an Anglo-Egyptian show (with the emphasis on the first half of
the hyphenated adjective), even though it contains but seven Englishmen’.161
The rest of the Egyptian Army, in contrast, was progressively viewed as a
liability, not an asset.162
In this context, tracing the growth of desert administration belongs in
any discussion of ‘the 1922 system’: the set of arrangements through which
154
155
FO 141/514/5, Joyce to Parker, 4 Nov. 1920.
156
FO 141/514/5, Parker to Allenby, 2 Nov. 1920. See also: FO 371/4989, Allenby to
Curzon, 17 Nov. 1920.
157
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 30–31. For Awlad ‘Ali recollections of the period, see Cole
and Altorki, Bedouin, pp. 84–86.
158
FO 141/514/5, Bedouin petition to Allenby, 2 Sept. 1922.
159
Morewood, Defence of Egypt, pp. 16, 18.
160
161
FO 371/13147, J. Murray minute, 13 Dec. 1928.
162
Rothwell, ‘Military Ally’, pp. 180–187.
Britain hoped to restructure its position in the country.163 It acted in the

spirit, if not the letter, of the four ‘reserved subjects’.164 By shifting personnel
and powers to the periphery, many hoped to appease urban discontent even
as imperial interests were secured. The result would be a revived imperial
presence, more palatable and less visible. ‘[We] must have some control of
Sinai’, the Oriental Secretary Walter Smart insisted, ‘either in co-operation
with the Egyptian authorities, or independently under their noses, whether
they like it or not’. If the FDA did not exist then ‘special measures’, with
regrettable diplomatic complications, would be necessary.165 It formed
‘a vital covering screen for Intelligence and Security’; it was ‘an essential
British interest’.166 As Jarvis puckishly put it: ‘[British officials in the FDA]
hold the balance between what is required from, shall we say, the British
standpoint, and Egyptian ideas of how things should be done’.167
All this added to the impression that Egypt’s ‘desert borders’ possessed
an imperial significance ‘out of all proportion to their commercial or eco-
nomic value’.168 Local officers emphasized the centrality of regular desert
administration to the effective exercise of foreign policy. They maintained
communications routes, escorted foreign dignitaries and responded to
complaints from neighbouring states about gun-running and trans-border
raids.169 Their detailed knowledge of the ground proved invaluable in mak-
ing delimitation claims to Britain’s advantage, and in defusing boundary
tensions. It was also a political asset. It was reassuring to believe it ‘beyond
the understanding’ of simple nomads ‘to think as a nation’, but it fell to
the FDA to keep things that way.170 With powers of direct intervention
and rule without parallel in Egypt’s coastal and riverain towns and cities,
sensitive frontier zones (and the communications routes running through
them) might be isolated from the jurisdiction of national elites. British
personnel kept the key desert posts because ‘suitable and experienced
Egyptians’ were ‘unavailable’.171 Governors appointed subordinate officials
163
The phrase is John Darwin’s: Britain, Egypt and the Middle East, p. 268.
164
In Curzon’s eyes, the FDA was the ‘one military duty . . . which it was generally
agreed that the British must continue to perform’: FO 371/4980, Curzon memorandum,
11 Oct. 1920.
165
FO 141/703/2, Report to Sir Lancelot Oliphant on Walter Smart’s visit to Jerusalem,
22 July 1932.
166
FO 141/534/16, Marshall-Cornwall, ‘Frontiers Administration’; FO 371/13147,
Butler to Trickett, 3 Aug. 1928.
167
FO 141/604/1, Jarvis to Lampson, 17 June 1936.
168
WO 33/2831, C. Williams, ‘Report on the Military Geography of the North-Western
Desert of Egypt’, (n.d. 1919).
169
FO 141/653, Oliphant to Allenby, 15 Dec. 1923.
170
Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 299; FO 141/514/5, ‘Beduin Representation in Parliament’,
16 Mar. 1926.
171
‘as much as possible from local candidates’, purged the Frontier Forces of
suspected dissidents, and replaced Egyptian conscripts with Sudanese and
‘Arab’ volunteers.172 ‘To [the] Bedouin of the West’, Jarvis reported, ‘Egypt
[was] practically a foreign country’: its deserts beyond national politics, its
people ‘in no way a commitment to British Forces’.173 ‘There must be but
one authority in the desert’, Wallace told a sympathetic George Lloyd. ‘If
any Egyptian in the future takes any interest in the Arabs . . . it may be
taken for granted that his motives are to influence [them] against Great
Britain’.174
In this reserved space, British power grew. The FDA ‘fulfill[ed], in
the areas under its control, the same functions as are performed in the
Nile Valley by the Ministries of War, Interior, Justice, Education and
Public Works and the Departments of Coast Guards, Police and Public
Health’.175 It agreed its own budgets, collected its own taxes, employed
its own revenue officials and audited its own accounts.176 Its Light Car
Patrols, under the British Governors, were ‘the only efficient part of the
Egyptian Army’ (and its only mechanized cavalry).177 It had initially been
hoped that British martial law might be allowed to continue in these fron-
tier areas, but when this was found unacceptable, customary Desert Law
proved the next best thing.178 ‘Desert Regulations’ permitted a Governor
to ‘establish any form of control he might think desirable’.179 Egyptian
authority was ‘a polite fiction’. Jarvis, Lampson enthused, ruled Sinai ‘like
a colonial governor’.180
For all this, the question of how far this ‘illegitimate child’ warranted to
protection under the four ‘reserved points’ remained unclear, resolved, as
often as not, in exchanges between individual High Commissioners and
the Egyptian Department in London.181 A final look at one such exchange
reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of its position.
172
FO 141/718, D. McCallum, ‘Memorandum on the Administration of the Province of
Sinai’, 30 Apr. 1934; FO 141/799/5, D. Wallace, ‘Report on the Frontiers Administration,
1st January 1926 to 30th April 1927’.
173
FO 141/781, C. Ryder, ‘G. S. (I) Intelligence Report’, 25 Apr. 1929; WO 287/27,
Anon., ‘Military Report’.
174
FO 371/13147, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23 Aug. 1928.
175
WO 33/1085, Military Report on Egypt, 1926.
176
FO 141/718, McCallum, ‘Memorandum on the Administration’.
177
FO 141/534/16, ‘Record of Meeting on February 17th 1937’ (n.d.);
J. Marshall-Cornwall, ‘Report on the Frontiers Administration and Coastguard Service’,
6 June 1937.
178
FO 371/4991, J. Murray minute, 9 Nov. 1920. See Chapter 3 below.
179
FO 371/19054, Lampson to Hoare, 22 Nov. 1935.
180
FO 141/703/2, Report on Smart’s visit to Jerusalem; FO 141/539/1, ‘Meeting
between His Excellency and the CIGS’, 20 Mar. 1935.
181
FO 141/604/1, Jarvis to Hopkinson, 2 Aug. 1936.
George Ambrose Lloyd, High Commissioner between 1925 and 1929,

looked kindly on this sort of thing. As part of the wartime Arab Bureau
he would often head out into the desert at sunset just to ‘delight in wide
spaces’ (‘I think’, he wrote to his wife, ‘that some forbear of mine must
have been a gipsy’).182 For Lloyd, the move away from direct British
administration was ‘shirking the responsibilities’ of ‘our Imperial history’,
so he clung to the FDA, praising its contributions to law and order, bor-
der security and an informed foreign policy.183 ‘It was a great source of
satisfaction to us’, wrote Wallace on Lloyd’s resignation, ‘that you took the
trouble to find out exactly what we stood for and even went to the desert
and saw how things were there for yourself ’. Summary justice, military
discipline and ‘undivided control’, Lloyd concluded, were the keys to the
administration’s success.184 But he was also acutely aware that such idi-
osyncrasies could become ‘harassing anomalies’, hostages to ‘an undefined
position’.185
In 1927, the new Egyptian Minister of War, Ahmed Khasabha Pasha,
moved to end this ‘curious anomaly’ by discharging the FDA’s British
officials, amalgamating it with the Coastguard, abolishing Desert Law
and downgrading its forces to ordinary police. To Lloyd, these steps
were not part of a legitimate programme of Egyptianization, but aimed
at ‘rendering the nomad tribes amenable to political influence and pro
tanto diminishing our influence over them’.186 Determined that ‘the
British element’ in the FDA ‘has been reduced to a minimum beyond
which . . . we should not be driven to go’, Lloyd hitched it to the four
‘reserved points’ more explicitly than ever before. ‘This opinion’, he
argued, ‘is based on (a) political aspects (including the importance of
good administration and the prevention of incidents on the frontiers)
and intelligence work, and (b) suppression of [arms and narcotics] smug-
gling’.187 Thus ‘the question before HMG’ was made ‘simple’: would
Britain stand by the 1922 Declaration or not?188 As part of a gather-
ing ‘Army Crisis’, Lloyd persuaded the British Government to warn
Egypt against encroaching further on the FDA’s activities. Faced with
the arrival of British naval reinforcements, Sarwat Pasha’s government
182
Cited in: Charmley, Lord Lloyd, pp. 54–55.
183
Lloyd, Egypt since Cromer, i, p. 359.
184
CAC: GLLD 14/18, Wallace to Lloyd, 30 July 1929; Lloyd to Chamberlain, 28
Mar. 1927.
185
Lloyd, Egypt since Cromer, i, p. 209.
186
FO 141/799/5, D. Wallace, ‘Report on the Frontiers Administration, 1st January,
1926 to 30th April, 1927’; FO 141/436/5, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 3 Mar. 1927.
187
FO 371/13147, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23 Mar. 1928.
188
backed down. Khasabha Pasha was transferred to the Ministry of

Communication, and British control of the FDA was, for the time
being, acknowledged.189
But Lloyd’s intervention came at a price. The FDA had been brought
to the forefront of Anglo-Egyptian politics, debated on a plane beyond
the reach of its local officers. The more acrimonious its future became,
the more political capital its protection would consume. Some at the
Foreign Office were already inclined to see it as ‘a subordinate problem’
to negotiating a treaty with Egypt. In an earlier clash, over the desirability
of retaining control of Jaghbub, the Governor of the Western Desert was
outmanoeuvred by a Foreign Office intent on securing Italian diplomatic
goodwill.190 For all their local strength, the fortunes of the FDA would
now depend on its officers finding another champion at the Residency.
In the late 1920s, George Lloyd took a characteristically uncompromis-
ing stance and became ‘the best friend [the FDA] had ever had’. In the
mid-1930s, Miles Lampson looked on the administration with equal
favour, but wondered aloud ‘whether we pay sufficient attention or
attach sufficient weight’ to its work.191 The coming years would provide
an answer.
Patronage, Politics, and Recruitment in the

Southern Desert of Iraq
Further east, a comparable struggle for political authority was playing out
in the Shamiyah, the Southern Desert of Iraq. Stretching out between
the Iraq’s Shia heartland, the overland approaches to Kuwait Bay and the
edges of Wahhabi influence to the south and west, the area had long pre-
sented challenges to any would-be ruling authority. Historians have come
to stress the dynamism of the late Ottoman Empire, as reformist gover-
nors and military officials sought to project power and build collaborative
relationships with the nomad populations of the south. But it remains the
case that government authority only took root over significant parts of
its territory in the interwar years.192 Beyond the riverain zone, Ottoman
influence was inconstant, subsidizing powerful shaykhs south of Baghdad
to keep order on its behalf. Even Basra, as Reidar Visser has shown, looked
189
FO 371/13880, Annual Report for Egypt and the Sudan, 1927-28.
190
FO 141/526, Chamberlain to Allenby, 10 May 1925.
191
CAC: GLLD 14/18, Wallace to Lloyd, 30 July 1929; FO 371/17987, Lampson to
Simon, 11 June 1934.
192
Sluglett, ‘Mandates’, p. 125; Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ‘Transformation’, p. 502.
to the Indian Ocean more than it did to Baghdad.193 When British and
Indian forces landed at Fao in November 1914, few would have imagined
that desert affairs would loom so large in their subsequent activities.
They came to do so for similar reasons as in the Egyptian case: in
response to the tribal dislocation occasioned by the rise of Ibn Saud, and
to see off rival bids for frontier authority. Yet when John Glubb was recog-
nized by the RCAS for his part in ‘pacifying’ this desert frontier, he made
no mention of these fraught origins. Desert administration in Iraq, he
claimed, owed its success to recruiting local Bedouin to form frontier secu-
rity forces: an efficient, logical, and incontestable response to a timeless
problem. ‘Armed and mounted at their own expense’, the tribes formed
‘a cheap weapon, ready to hand’.194 This downplayed the political nature
of his work, but a generation of soldier-scholars, some of whom served
under Glubb’s command, have since repeated the claim. For James Lunt,
who served with Glubb from 1952 to 1956, this straightforward ‘soldier’s
aversion to politics’ made a suitable epitaph for colonial recruitment writ
large.195 Indeed, the assumed deftness with which colonial powers managed
local forces—‘setting ethnic and religious groups against each other’ in the
puppeteer’s art of ‘divide and rule’—still underlies much of the writing on
the ‘guardians of empire’.196 The idea persists that ‘remote’ frontier envi-
ronments lay somehow beyond politics, where officers’ relationships with
their men were ‘simple’, and ‘life could be clean and uncomplicated’.197
Such ideas evoke consoling colonial fictions, to be interrogated rather
than reproduced. Colonial recruitment was seldom a tidy arrangement
between biddable subject communities and an undifferentiated colonial
state. On Iraq’s southern frontier, in fact, it became particularly fraught.
Examining the origins of desert administration here offers a window onto
a struggle for authority over the frontiers of a would-be nation-state. If
Britain came out on top, then again, as in Egypt, there was nothing inevi-
table about it.
* * *
During the First World War, Britain’s Mesopotamia campaigns had ebbed
and flowed liked the country’s rivers, and over much the same terrain. Its
armies advanced, retreated and ultimately captured Baghdad along the
twin axes of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Of the desert flanks beyond,
however, Britain exercised no direct control. From 1917 a handful of
193
Visser, Basra. 194
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’.
195
Lunt, Imperial Sunset, p. x; Lunt, ‘Arab Legion’, p. 49; Lias, Glubb’s Legion, pp. 8–9.
196
Bou-Nacklie, ‘Troupes Spéciales’.
197
Royle, Glubb Pasha, pp. 95, 449, 452. Thus Glubb would recall his ‘relief ’ at leaving
the intrigues of Amman for the ‘peace and relaxation’ of the open desert: Glubb, Story, p. 234.
agents worked to build tentative collaborative relationships with promi-

nent Bedouin groups: Colonel Gerard Leachmen worked closely with the
Amarat (Anaza), in particular. But even these remained considerably una-
ware of the topographical and political landscape of Iraq’s southern and
western deserts. For the most part, British wartime engagement with the
Bedouin was restricted to limiting their access to Euphrates markets: an
attempt both to extract notional declarations of loyalty, and a Sisyphean
struggle to check the flow of supplies to the enemy.198 Even when mili-
tary control became mandatory rule at the San Remo Conference of April
1920, British attentions remained firmly focused elsewhere.
Between July and October 1920 a serious uprising in Iraq shook the
foundations of the British presence. Re-establishing control required
large numbers of troops, and a bill of £40 million. The experience left
many wary of Iraq’s tribal populations. While unrest had centered on
the settled and semi-settled Shi‘a populations of the Euphrates, the ten-
dency to elide ‘tribe’ with ‘nomad’ meant an ongoing mistrust of the
Bedouin too.199 Such suspicion was compounded by the weakness of the
mandatory regime. As an early air operation against the Beni Huchaim
revealed—selected as a test case in ‘Air Control’—British forces remained
unfamiliar with significant tracts of the Euphrates, let alone the desert
beyond.200 It was this deficiency that the RAF’s new SSOs were expected
to make good. As Air Force responsibilities expanded after the 1921
Cairo Conference, SSOs took on many of the duties formerly exercised
by British Political Officers, including influencing tribal policy, directing
military operations, and liaising between local inhabitants and troops.201
In time, some found themselves relocating Bedouin populations, super-
vising seasonal migrations, regulating musabilah and settling local
disputes. But for much of the 1920s, their influence in the Shamiyah
remained limited. Air Headquarters were nervous of undermining Iraqi
mutasarrifs, and warned against getting bogged down in civil adminis-
tration of the desert.202 The life of an SSO, applicants were assured, was
not altogether ‘removed from the society of brother officers’: for all the
emphasis on touring, most were still based in riverain towns some 200
miles from the frontier.203 ‘Most of the Iraq Government complacency
198
For Leachman, see Bray, Paladin of Arabia. For an attempt to reconstruct how this
period appeared in the eyes of one Iraqi Bedouin shaykh, see Fletcher, ‘Amarat’.
199
For example: AIR 23/800, General Headquarters, British Forces in Iraq to Secretary
to the High Commissioner, 10 Apr. 1922.
200
AIR 5/344, Cox to Thomas, 3 Feb. 1924. The best account of the Air Control scheme
remains: Omissi, Air Power.
201
Anon., ‘Role of Special Service Officers’, p. 52.
202
AIR 23/18, Air Staff Intelligence to Howes, 4 June 1927.
203
over desert affairs’, Glubb observed, ‘is due to the fact that they do not
know what goes on there’.204
One episode from the mid-1920s is particularly suggestive of the lim-
its of Britain’s desert authority. In the autumn of 1925, the Government
of Iraq launched an experimental scheme condoning inter-tribal raid-
ing. Bowing to pressure from prominent shaykhs, notably Ajil al-Yawir
of the Shammar and Fahd bin Hadhdhal of the Amarat, the government
announced that henceforth it would tolerate ‘internal’ raiding.205 As long
as raiding parties remained within national borders, gave notice of their
targets, avoided main roads and left the sedentary population unmolested,
raiding between specific Bedouin groups was not to be treated as a crime.
These conditions formed the new ‘Rules for Raiders’. Improbably, they
were printed-up as pamphlets and dropped by aircraft over select Bedouin
camps, while intelligence officers and police posts were issued logbooks
and instructed to keep score of who raided what from whom. Only ‘exter-
nal’ raiding, given the implications for foreign relations, would require
intervention. The distinction meant little to Bedouin themselves, but
became cemented by legislation in September 1925.206
In his retirement, John Glubb poured scorn on the scheme—the
‘romantic enthusiasm’ of ‘the League Football school of thought’.207 The
authorities, Glubb claimed, had long ‘evaded and postponed the task of
governing the Bedouins’: experiments like this merely delayed the inevita-
ble. Historians have tended to agree, viewing government policy across the
1920s as essentially ‘laissez faire’.208 But it had a logic of its own. Just as in
Egypt before the First World War, officials perceived the desert population
acting as a kind of buffer for an agricultural heartland. Banning raiding,
many feared, would only drive the Bedouin to flee the state’s jurisdic-
tion altogether, or undermine the authority of those shaykhs with whom
the authorities were in dialogue. This was just one of the many ways in
which the location of Bedouin groups at the interstices of many contend-
ing parties, and in a terrain the British could not yet control, afforded
them considerable political and economic opportunities in the early inter-
war years.209 In contrast, the desert outposts contemplated for a more
204
MECA: JBG 1/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
205
AIR 23/292, James to Aviation Baghdad, 30 July 1928.
206
AIR 23/375, ‘Draft Circular to all Mutasarrifs’, 29 July 1926.
207
Glubb, Arabian Adventures, pp. 84–91.
208
CO 730/140/8, Glubb, ‘Causes which make it essential to establish and maintain a
permanent administration in the desert’, 12 June 1929; Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’, p. 540;
209
Throughout the period the Dhafir, the Mutair, the Ruwala and others among the
Anaza all proved adept at ‘seeking refuge in flight’, escaping unwelcome impositions by
permanent administrative presence carried risks of their own. If sited at

permanent water sources they might disturb local tribes; near disputed
political boundaries, they might prove provoke diplomatic incident.210 For
these reasons, licensed raiding had its advocates in its day.211
For much of the decade, therefore, government was not straightfor-
wardly ‘ignoring’ its desert frontiers.212 Instead, the ‘Rules for Raiders’
experiment should be seen as part of an attempt to influence desert affairs
through patronage, in turn part of a broader push for informal control in
the wake of the 1920 uprising. In this, the British were largely prepared
to be guided by King Faisal himself. If land grants formed the currency of
Faisal’s relationship with rural notables, then permission to raid was made
to work similarly for Bedouin shaykhs. For the British, licensed raiding
was meant to boost the hold of Ajil al-Yawir and Fahd bin Hadhdhal over
their respective tribes, containing further disorder and enabling a costly
imperial garrison to be reduced. As recipients of an official subsidy, Ibn
Hadhdhal was also expected to keep open the route to Syria, and al-Yawir
that to Mosul.213
Faisal particularly looked to the ‘Shammar refugees’ under al-Yawir
to maintain his influence in the desert. Following the defeat of Ibn
Rashid and the fall of Hail, these Shammar sections had moved north
to evade Ibn Saud’s authority. They remained hostile to the new power
in the south, and had their own motives for responding to Faisal’s
overtures. In 1923 al-Yawir was permitted to raise a force to guard
the Euphrates in exchange for checking unauthorized Shammar raids.
The following year, Faisal ‘invited’ him to patrol the Nasiriyah and
Diwaniyah liwas, and expected his assistance in repelling Ikhwan
attacks.214
Britain, in turn, hoped to balance Faisal’s influence, and his enmity
towards Ibn Saud, by promoting Fahd bin Hadhdhal. As a substantial
livestock owner it was thought he would ‘favour quiet tribal conditions’,
while his ‘tactful friendship’ with Ibn Saud afforded ‘a useful and conveni-
ent channel of approach’ between two governments that did not formally
turning new political boundaries to their advantage: MECA: JBG 1/1, Glubb, ‘Handbook
of Desert Administration’ (n.d.).
210
Ibn Saud regularly protested against fort construction on these grounds: FO
371/12992, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 2 Apr. 1928.
211
‘Armed with blue pencil and typewriter’, Glubb recalled, officials ‘divided themselves
into rival camps’: MECA: JBG 3(205)/7, Glubb, ‘Authorised Raiding’ (n.d. 1929).
212
As Trevor Royle, following Glubb, has claimed: Royle, Glubb Pasha, p. 111.
213
Jamali, New Iraq, p. 65.
214
FO 371/12993, Anon., ‘Short History of ‘Iraq-Najd Relations’, 14 Apr. 1928;
MECA: JBG 10, Glubb, ‘Tribal Irregulars’; AIR 23/291, Lees to Air Staff Intelligence, 20
Feb. 1925.
recognize one another.215 As official shaykh of the Anaza from 1917, Ibn
Hadhdhal established tribal posts at Muhaiwir and Rutbah to monitor
trans-desert traffic.216 When the Shammar launched a spectacular raid
from Syria into Kuwait, it was Ibn Hadhdhal who sent word to the British
SSO.217 Again, Ibn Hadhdhal was motivated by something less than pat-
riotism. His ‘pass system’ of musabilah (the process by which nomads
obtained supplies) afforded influence and revenue, while British backing
of his claim to paramountcy over the Anaza kept him ahead of his rivals.218
As the connections between Ibn Hadhdhal and British officialdom grew,
it came as no surprise that he and his son Mahrut were viewed ‘with suspi-
cion and dislike’ by Faisal and the palace.219
The failure of authorized raiding dealt a blow to this broader approach
to Iraq’s desert areas. The scheme had naively assumed it possible to sepa-
rate ‘internal’ raiding from ‘external’ consequences.220 In practice, offic-
ers struggled to identify and stop trans-frontier raids amidst ‘the large
numbers of raids which are constantly coming and going’.221 Whenever a
group’s losses became too heavy, Ibn Saud was always willing to court their
allegiance with gifts of camels and arms. Moreover, a system that allowed
certain tribes to raid in certain circumstances only added to the confusion
of authority in the desert. Raids on caravans, travellers, and settled tribes-
men proved ‘lamentably frequent’; a ‘welter of blood feuds’ ensued. In July
1926 the licenced raiding system was scrapped.222
Faced with growing tensions on the Iraq-Nejd frontier, the Residency
and the Air Officer Commanding now moved to enforce a cordon sani-
taire: an imaginary line patrolled by aircraft and armoured cars, some dis-
tance back from the frontier, and behind which all tribes were ordered to
retreat. Any parties discovered between that line and the frontier were con-
sidered hostile and liable to attack. This bought ‘depth of manoeuvre’ (and
helped showcase the work of an independent air arm), but at the expense
of access to grazing. When SSO Ernest Howes warned of ‘serious’ herd
losses as a result of this policy, an official marked against his report that this
was not the Ministry’s business. It also explicitly denied a role in defence
for the tribes themselves. Glubb’s proposals to recruit a Bedouin camel
215
AIR 23/292, James to Air Staff Intelligence, 13 Aug. 1925.
216
AIR 23/292, Lees to Air Staff Intelligence, 18 May 1925.
217
AIR 23/295, Moore to Air Staff Intelligence, 27 Oct. 1926.
218
MECA: JBG 4(206)/9, Glubb to Air Staff Intelligence, 22 Mar. 1923; AIR 10/1348,
Handbook of the Southern Desert, pp. 138–139.
219
AIR 23/292, James to Air Staff Intelligence, 27 Aug. 1925; AIR 23/38, K. Buss min-
ute, 31 Mar. 1928.
220
MECA: JBG 1/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
221
FO 371/12993, Plumer to Amery, 20 Apr. 1928; AIR 23/300, Glubb to Air Staff
Intelligence, 18 Feb. 1926.
222
AIR 23/375, Anon., ‘Draft Circular to all Mutasarrifs’.
corps in 1923 and 1925 met with opposition—the latter sternly—and

many officials continued to take a dim view of the value of tribal forces.223
For much of the decade, then, advocating a closer relationship with
the Bedouin or advancing administration into the steppe flew in the face
of Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Air Ministry opinion. It exposed
Glubb to accusations of ‘going native’.224 ‘Administrative control of the
desert’ remained ‘an impracticable proposition’.225 In the winter of 1927,
defence planning still demanded a ‘clearing of all tribes’ from the southern
frontier so that aircraft and armoured cars might operate unhindered.226
As another raiding season opened, neither Bedouin recruitment nor a
deeper engagement with the desert seemed likely.
* * *
On 5 November 1927, a party of Mutair attacked and destroyed an Iraqi
Government outpost at Busaiyah, leaving six police, twelve ‘coolies’ and
two others dead. The Government of Iraq, furious, demanded the right to
respond in kind.227 Yet even now, in imperial circles, support for a forward
policy in the desert was by no means unanimous. ‘Raids’, the Government of
India commented coolly, ‘though regrettable, have occurred from all time’.228
To some, the attack on Busaiyah merely confirmed that desert outposts were
provocative liabilities. In Baghdad, an emergency defence conference still
envisioned no role for the Bedouin. Indeed, members of the RAF establish-
ment demonstrated remarkably little concern for Iraq’s tribes themselves,
suggesting they would be better off giving in to the Ikhwan than attempt-
ing to resist their attacks. ‘It is a far better policy’, the Chief Staff Officer
minuted, ‘to let the Nasiriyeh and Diwaniyeh Deserts alone, and to tacitly
agree to the tribes there paying tithes to Ibn Saud’.229 What changed British
attitudes were matters at one point removed from the attacks themselves.
In the preceding years the case for tighter desert control had slowly
acquired traction among the SSOs handling the refugee tribes, displaced
by years of low-intensity conflict. The act of relocating refugees, for exam-
ple, forced men like H. Hindle James, John Glubb and Guy Moore to learn
about migratory patterns, grazing rights and tribal dispute mechanisms.
223
AIR 23/32, Howes to Air Staff Intelligence, 18 Dec. 1927; MECA: JBG 4(206)/10,
Glubb, ‘Tribal Irregulars’; AIR 23/299, Aviation Baghdad to Glubb, 29 Dec. 1925.
224
Air Headquarters in Baghdad, for instance, thought Glubb too credulous of the gos-
sip of ‘uneducated tribesmen’: AIR 23/38, item 5A: Note by SO1 to Chief Staff Officer, 20
Mar. 1928.
225
AIR 23/10, Kitching to Cornwallis, 7 July 1925.
226
AIR 23/34, R. Jope-Slade, ‘Situation Report—Southern Desert’, 27 Jan. 1928.
227
AIR 23/61, Dobbs to Amery, 29 Dec. 1927.
228
AIR 23/35, Political Resident Bushire to Dobbs, 11 Feb. 1928.
229
AIR 23/31, Anon., ‘Southern Desert Conference’, 28 Nov. 1927.
Some came away with the clear impression that ‘the only solution’ for the
future was ‘for Government to deal direct’ with the tribes, and institute
a ‘system of civil administration in the Shamiyah desert’ which operated
across liwa lines.230 A growing familiarity with the landscape had also
revealed great stretches of terrain with ‘ideal cover to a ground force from
air observation’. Less reliance on aircraft, and more tribal co-operation,
would be needed in future.231 The advocates of desert administration also
noted what its absence had done to British prestige—in the winter of
1927, for example, some Iraqi shaykhs had ‘put on Akhwan headdress in
the presence of a British officer’ and denounced the British Government
‘to his face’.232 Finally, as Glubb advised, frontier control would increase
Britain’s hand in diplomacy with Nejd and offered a solution to the
many shortcomings of seeking to influence the desert through patronage
alone.233 Shammar refugees, for example, ‘constantly evaded the control of
Sheikh Ajil al-Yawir’: it took intervention by British forces to bring them
to heel.234 Government support of Fahd bin Hadhdhal had driven his
rivals among the Dahamshah to camp in Nejd, and left many ‘piqued at
the excessive favour’ he received.235 Fahd’s death in 1927 also left a gaping
hole in government attempts to influence desert affairs: his son Mahrut
was widely seen as lacking his father’s weight.236 Officers were now con-
cerned that their inactivity, not their interference, was causing tribal flight.
For Glubb, all this justified ‘the establishment of a stable administration in
the desert’ even if the Ikhwan threat had never existed.237
Convincing the Residency, however, depended on connecting these
‘local’ problems of nomadic ‘amour propre, damage done to tribes, and so
forth’ with the broader interests of Britain’s desert corridor.238 As in Egypt,
local officials proved adept at doing so. Again, they stressed the centrality
of tribal affairs to the conduct of foreign policy, and the imperial advan-
tages of placing it securely in British hands. Thus the Dahamshah-Amarat
feud bred disruption from Syria to Hail, while trans-border raiding
‘gravely embarrassed relations between Iraq and Nejd’.239 Crucially,
230
AIR 23/294, Moore to Air Staff Intelligence, 28 Sept. 1926; AIR 23/297, Moore to
Air Staff Intelligence, 30 Apr. 1925 and 6 June 1925.
231
AIR 23/295, Moore to Air Staff Intelligence, 27 Oct. 1926.
232
AIR 23/61, Dobbs to Amery, 29 Dec. 1927. The demands of prestige cut both ways,
and once committed to a forward policy Britain could not withdraw without ‘very seriously
impairing’ prestige: FO 371/12992, D. Osborne minute, 7 Apr. 1928.
233
AIR 23/300, Glubb, ‘Patrols by Armed Ford Cars from Basra to Abu Ghar’, 18 Jan. 1926.
234
FO 371/12993, ‘Short History of ‘Iraq-Najd Relations’.
235
FO 371/13715, Glubb, ‘Seduction of Iraq Tribes by Ibn Saud’, 19 Mar. 1929.
236
See Fletcher, ‘Amarat’. 237
CO 170/140/8, Glubb, ‘Note on the Causes’.
238
FO 371/12992, Dobbs to Amery, 9 Apr. 1928.
239
AIR 23/295, Moore to Air Staff Intelligence, 14 Jan. 1927; FO 371/12993, ‘Short
History of ‘Iraq-Najd Relations’.
officers emphasized the potential implications of a recrudescence of raid-

ing for imperial communications. Responding to such reports from the
field, High Commissioner Henry Dobbs sought to shake London out of
its complacency:
This is not a problem of petty boundary raids, but . . . a critical situation
which is sure to affect the decision upon a project, possibly the most weighty
at present under consideration within the British Empire and its depend-
encies, namely the combined pipe-line and railway from Baghdad to the
Mediterranean Sea. Probably it transcends in importance not only the ques-
tion of making arrangements for aeroplane flights . . . along the southern
shores of the Persian Gulf, but even the possibility of temporary efferves-
cence among Indian Khilafatists.240
Unless Britain moved to monopolize authority in the Shamiyah, Dobbs
continued, the pipeline might have to be diverted out of mandatory ter-
ritory altogether. ‘Just as we have countered in India the desire of the
Amir of Afghanisatan’ to ‘penetrate’ Waziristan, ‘so must we counter the
similar desire . . . of Ibn Saud by the effective occupation of . . . the Iraq
Trans-Jordan “Corridor” ’.241 Even resolving ‘internal’ tribal disputes
was ‘essential from the point of view of all desert routes’.242 British steps
towards desert administration in Iraq were as much concerned with shut-
ting out rival influences from this sensitive frontier zone—tribal, national,
and dynastic—as with protecting Iraq’s desert communities.
Bedouin initiative was one such rival. In March 1928, Mahrut bin
Hadhdhal began agitating to raise a tribal force and commence counter-
raids on his own terms. Dobbs, fearing this would ‘throw the whole desert
into confusion’, met with him privately to beg his patience.243 Others in
the Anaza, seeking to challenge Ibn Hadhdhal’s paramountcy, threat-
ened to go over to Nejd if the government did not permit them to raid.244
Dependent on Bedouin goodwill for the discharge of their duties, local
officers felt these pressures keenly.245 Their superiors, however, were more
alarmed by King Faisal’s growing interest in the Shamiyah. The High
Commissioner’s relationship with the King was central to the exercise of
British influence in the mandate. News that it was being undermined by
240
AIR 23/36, Dobbs to Amery, 22 Feb. 1928.
241
FO 371/12993, Dobbs to Amery, 29 Mar. 1928.
242
FO 371/12994, Dobbs to Amery, 31 May 1928.
243
FO 371/12994, Dobbs to Amery, 31 May 1928; AIR 23/37, H. Dobbs, untitled
note, 10 Mar. 1928.
244
AIR 23/41, Glubb, ‘Administrative Inspector Monthly Report for June, 1928’; AIR
23/45, James to Air Staff Intell, 18 Nov. 1928.
245
‘Out in the desert’, Glubb once reminded a colleague, ‘[the tribes] feel braver than . . .
in your Office’: MECA: JBG 1(203)/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
disagreement over how to respond to the Ikhwan proved critical to revis-

ing British approaches to the steppe. Because this episode bears many
similarities with events in Trans-Jordan, it is worth exploring in detail.
The Ikhwan Revolt against Ibn Saud’s authority presented Faisal with
an opportunity to step up a conflict against an old dynastic rival. Handled
carefully, the Bedouin of the Southern Desert might present the King with
a ‘cheap weapon’ of his own. In 1922 Faisal supported the formation of
an ill-fated camel corps under Yusuf Beg al-Mansur in the hope of under-
mining Saudi influence. Later, illicit raids into Nejd by Shammar refugees
had his tacit approval.246 This alarmed many in British circles, but the
Foreign Office and Government of India most of all: they had long argued
that conciliating Ibn Saud offered the best protection for imperial com-
munications, the ‘independence’ of the Persian Gulf, and the quiescence
of India’s Muslims.247 So when news of the casualties at Busaiyah broke,
intelligence reports warned shrilly of being manoeuvred by the King into
fighting Ibn Saud on his behalf. Nothing must be done, Dobbs was told,
to make Britain appear ‘an instrument of Faisal’s personal hostility’.248 This
was far from straightforward. ‘It is impossible’, wrote Hubert Young, ‘to
expect that a man of King Faisal’s character could refrain from taking more
than an academic interest in the fortunes of the rebel[s]‌’. By the time Ibn
Saud regained control, Young suspected a fully fledged royal conspiracy
with Nejdi Shammar had been hatched.249 Indeed, as the full extent of
Hashemite collusion became apparent in the final stages of the revolt,
British officials could be forgiven their relief that, in the desert at least, the
King had not had everything his own way.250
But Ibn Saud was not Faisal’s only target: in advocating the use of tribal
forces, he also sought to increase his hand in (and circumvent British super-
vision of ) military affairs. Faisal’s desert policy should be seen alongside
his attempts to introduce conscription and disband the Assyrian Levies: all
sought greater independence of the mandatory power.251 As the Ikhwan
attacks hit home, criticism of ‘British obstruction to conscription’ was
rekindled.252 In response, Faisal proposed occupying Nejdi territory and
246
FO 371/12993, ‘Short History of Iraq-Najd relations’; AIR 23/38, Buss minute, 31
Mar. 1928.
247
CO 831/22/2, Cunliffe-Lister to Wauchope, 1 Feb. 1933.
248
AIR 23/36, Amery to Dobbs, 1 Mar. 1928.
249
AIR 23/56, Young to Passfield, 21 Oct. 1929.
250
AIR 23/56, Foster to Air Staff Intelligence, 24 Oct. 1929.
251
Omissi, ‘Assyrians’, p. 309. The British saw conscription as politically explosive—
anathema to Shi’i and Kurdish communities—and worked to block its passage across the
mandatory period.
252
AIR 23/32, H. Hindle James, ‘Tribal Opinion and Akhwan Raids’, 26 Dec. 1927;
inciting its tribes to ‘cause every disturbance’.253 His Government were

equally concerned to be seen to be taking strong, independent action.
Minister of Defence and palace confidant Nuri al-Sa’id complained that
‘our views concerning the creation of a tribal force’ had not been ‘seriously
examined’, but such a force—he assured the Prime Minister—‘would be a
decisive weapon in our hands’. The weight of public expectation was acute.
‘I do not know’, he added, ‘what the position of the Iraq Government
will be in the eyes of the nation’ if such measures were not taken.254 ‘Our
Government’, Faisal put it bluntly, ‘is jealous about her civil reputation
and her relations with her neighbours’.255
Lobbying for the use of tribal forces was, as the Foreign Office dis-
cerned, ‘part of [a]‌campaign for obtaining more powers’.256 It was also
an attempt to win further shaykhly support through the allotment of
patronage. Wary of Ibn Hadhdhal, Faisal sought to build up his rivals,
the Dahamshah, by permitting them to form a Bedouin force.257 He also
sought to project influence into Ibn Saud’s domain by extending trade
and grazing privileges to sympathetic Nejdi tribes.258 An impromptu royal
visit to Busaiyah sent British diplomats into a flutter and fed calls to shut
the King out of desert affairs. The Baghdad Residency worried that unless
something was done to pre-empt the King and his Ministers, then they
would suffer no ‘limitation of their power to build forts in the desert or
in any other direction desired’.259 Beneath the politicking, however, genu-
ine fear remained: with Iraq’s army thinly spread, the towns of Najaf and
Karbala might be overrun.260 Already evicted from one throne in Syria,
Faisal was determined not to lose another.
All these tensions came to a head in the summer of 1928, as British and
Iraqi officials planned for the forthcoming raiding season. On 14 June,
an all-British defence conference dismissed the idea of active Bedouin
participation. But by allowing its minutes to be circulated, the Foreign
Office feared that ‘all sorts of warlike ideas’ would now be ‘[put] into the
Iraqis’ heads’.261 Two weeks later, the King and his Minister of Defence
met with the High Commissioner and Air Vice-Marshal Ellington to
253
AIR 23/34, Faisal to Boudillon, 11 Jan. 1928.
254
FO 371/12995, al-Sa’id to al-Sa’dun, 18 Sept. 1928 (emphasis in original).
255
AIR 23/34, Faisal to Bourdillon, 11 Jan. 1928.
256
FO 371/12995, Gladwyn Jebb (Foreign Office) minute, 24 Oct. 1928.
257
FO 371/12995, ‘Memorandum by His Majesty King Faisal’, (n.d. Sept. 1928).
258
CO 730/137/9, Dobbs to Faisal, 5 Sept. 1928.
259
FO 141/609/5, Jakins to Cushendun, 31 Dec. 1928; FO 371/12994, Dobbs to
Amery, 31 May 1928.
260
AIR 23/36, al-Sa’dun to Dobbs, 29 Feb. 1928.
261
FO 371/12994, ‘Conference on Desert Defence’ (n.d. June 1928); FO 371/12994,
Monteagle minute, 31 July 1928.
contest the June proposals, and insist that ‘the only possible reply to raid-
ing is counter-raiding’.262 Using the tribes was not only ‘quicker and less
expensive’ than regular forces (whose ‘cheap weapon’, now?), but official
responsibility could be disavowed if necessary—precisely the scenario of
escalating frontier conflict that the High Commissioner wished to avoid.
‘The Iraq Government’, he now addressed Faisal, ‘was a civilized, not a
Bedouin Government, and could not fall back upon excuses which might
possibly be considered legitimate in the mouth of Ibn Saud’. Faisal urged
him ‘not [to] despise any weapon because it is a poor weapon’, but Dobbs
denied that Bedouin tribes constituted a weapon at all, more ‘a disorgan-
ised rabble’. The atmosphere only cooled when the King was asked to pro-
duce a ‘study of the possibility of using the Iraq tribes’—a stalling tactic on
Dobbs’ part, as his instructions from London warned him of committing
to such a policy ‘even in principle’.263 One Foreign Office hand, reading
the record of this conference, found it ‘disquieting’.264
On 11 August, Faisal made his report. Short of constructing ‘a wall like
the Wall of China’, he insisted, the only remedy was ‘to raid [the enemy] in
their own country’. He now proposed recruiting an irregular Bedouin camel
corps, armed with machine guns, as the ‘nucleus’ of a wider tribal mobiliza-
tion.265 Personal contacts from Trans-Jordan to Kuwait, among the Shammar,
Dahamshah and Dhafir, would respond to his call; the whole should fall
under Iraqi command. British Intelligence interpreted the King’s plan as des-
patching ‘hordes’ of camelmen on ‘incessant’ frontier raids. ‘Faisal’s memo-
randum’, the Foreign Office concluded, ‘is a shocking document’.266
By the end of the month the pressure on the High Commissioner had
become intense. But the interests involved were of very different gesta-
tions, and pulled in conflicting directions. Far from being ‘ready to hand’,
the idea of recruiting local Bedouin threatened intra-British conflict,
re-igniting old departmental rivalries. Austen Chamberlain’s Foreign
Office accepted that Iraq’s tribes should not be terrorized, but ‘still less’
wanted ‘Ibn Saud’s position to be imperilled by the appearance of large
forces on the frontier’. For this reason, Iraq must be ‘deprived of the obvi-
ous weapon’ of counter-raiding.267 From Bushire, the Government of
262
FO 371/12994, ‘Conference held at the Residency, on August 1st, 1928’.
263
FO 371/12995, Amery to Dobbs, 6 Sept. 1928.
264
FO 371/12994, E 4320/1/91, Gladwyn Jebb minute, 1 Sept. 1928.
265
FO 371/12995, ‘Memorandum by His Majesty’. Faisal had made a similar argument
back in January: AIR 23/34, Faisal to Bourdillon, 11 Jan. 1928.
266
FO 371/12995, ‘Iraq Intelligence Report No. 17’, 15 Aug. 1928; FO 371/12995,
G.W. Rendel minute, 1 Oct. 1928.
267
FO 371/12996, Gladwyn Jebb minute, 12 Nov. 1928; AIR 23/47, Clayton to
Chamberlain, 29 Jan. 1929.
India shuddered at the thought of provoking Ibn Saud for the sake of a
few desert raids.268 The Royal Air Force had long insisted that the desert
be cleared of tribes to create ‘air room’ for its operations, while local offi-
cials advocated a more permanent presence, not least for the benefit of
the tribes themselves. The Baghdad Residency, and others in the Colonial
Office, were increasingly sensitive to the ‘humiliating position’ into which
these ‘men on the spot’ had been boxed.269
From Iraqi ‘political circles’, Dobbs faced ‘violent indignation’ if some
form tribal force was not sanctioned. From Bedouin groups among the
Anaza, there was ‘serious danger of [their] seceding unless they see vigorous
preparations’ being made. And with the King, ‘already I have experienced
very difficult scenes . . . [and] for political reasons I am not prepared to
veto [the use of tribal forces] being even contemplated’.270 An alternative
raised by Iraq’s Prime Minister reminded Dobbs that despatching Indian
troops—scheduled to complete their long withdrawal from Iraq that year—
was a political and financial impossibility. On 27 August, Dobbs drafted a
final attempt to dissuade the King from making an approach to the tribes:
tribal bodies assembled in this manner are notoriously fickle and inclined,
at the first temporary reverse, to turn upon the regular forces . . . His
Britannic Majesty’s Government disapprove so strongly of the proposal for
counter-raiding . . . that I fear there is no prospect of their agreeing to it,
unless all other possible measures of defence fail.271
Yet this strongly worded paragraph was never sent. Between this draft in
August, and the final memorandum on Desert Defence in September,
a compromise solution became apparent which saved the High
Commissioner from risking such an open breach with the King. Britain
would support the formation of a Southern Desert Camel Corps—a
Bedouin force of camelmen, machine-gunners, and armed cars—but one
trained and recruited as Government police, answerable to the Ministry of
the Interior, and under Glubb’s supervision as the Desert’s Administrative
Inspector.272 Sanctioned ‘tribal rallies’ would also permit certain Bedouin
shaykhs to play a role in repelling Ikhwan attacks, when assisted by the
Camel Corps and imperial forces.273 By the following raiding season, these
268
AIR 23/35, Haworth to Dobbs, 18 Feb. 1928.
269
270
AIR 23/36, Dobbs to Amery, 1 Mar. 1928.
271
FO 371/12995, ‘Draft Memorandum by the High Commissioner on Desert
Defence’, 27 Aug. 1928.
272
AIR 23/44, Glubb, ‘Monthly Administration Report, Southern Desert Area, for the
month of September, 1928’.
273
AIR 23/44, Cornwallis to Sturges, 8 Nov. 1928; AIR 23/44, Sturges to Cornwallis,
9 Nov. 1928.
two components had paved the way for a broader scheme of tribal subsi-
dies, desert forts, car patrols, wireless stations, and frontier commissions.
The boundaries of a new ‘Desert liwa’ were tentatively sketched in January
1929, and a budget agreed by the Ministry of the Interior.274 The day-to-
day operation of the system is addressed in part two, but behind colonial
narratives of the progress of ‘law and order’ lies the fraught negotiation
that had marked its creation.
Britain’s move into the desert was as much politics as it was policing. It
was based on the need to see off mounting rival claims to frontier author-
ity, and a growing appreciation that an active desert presence could help
protect imperial communications and inform foreign policy. Its political
nature is made clear by local officials’ anxiety to reassure possible crit-
ics.275 By emulating Ikhwan practices, for example—issuing government
subsidies direct to shaykhs to boost their personal authority—Bedouin
raiding could be modified to rule out the ‘illegal raids’ that caused such
alarm in London.276 A planned British ‘Desert Governor’ never material-
ized, but many of his responsibilities—settling tribal disputes, dispensing
secret service funds, negotiating with Ibn Saud’s agent at Hail and direct-
ing the Desert Force—were discretely taken up by a British Administrative
Inspector and Inspecting Officer of Police.277 If it worked, it would also
be cheap. ‘Considering the solvency of the desert as a whole’, Glubb had
long argued, meant weighing the cost of imperial patrols and expeditions
(at British taxpayer’s expense) against the more modest expense of desert
administration (borne by the Government of Iraq).278
Crucially, the scheme offered the High Commissioner a way out of
his deadlock with the King. Back in August, Glubb had surprised Nuri
al-Sa’id by suggesting that a modified version of Faisal’s hopes for tribal
forces might indeed prove workable. By the following month, the Adviser
to the Ministry of the Interior thought the difference between the two
proposals ‘one of degree’.279 On 5 September, Dobbs informed Faisal that
274
AIR 23/49, Cornwallis to Secretary to the High Commissioner, 10 Mar. 1929.
275
Glubb’s earlier failures had taught him the value of being ‘sufficiently conversant in
Baghdad politics’ to see through future proposals: MECA: JBG 4(206)/10, Glubb, ‘Tribal
Irregulars’.
276
CO 730/137/9, Glubb, ‘Plans for the Forthcoming Raiding Season’; AIR 23/55,
Dickson to Barrett, 2 Sept. 1929. When Glubb raised the possibility of more spontane-
ous, unrestricted raiding, he was sharply reminded that this was ‘unpalatable’: AIR 23/56,
Cornwallis to Humphrys, 18 Nov. 1929.
277
AIR 23/41, Glubb to Kitching, 13 June 1928.
278
MECA: JBG 1/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926. Without control of the Southern
Desert, London was warned, a static defence of the Euphrates Valley might require up to
seven additional battalions: FO 371/12994, Ellington to Hoare, 2 June 1928.
279
FO 371/12995, ‘Conference held at the Office of the Council of Ministers on
Tuesday 21st of August’; AIR 23/43, Cornwallis to Bourdillon, 24 Sept. 1928.
while he could not agree to open counter-raiding, the tribes ‘might prove
themselves a very useful weapon’ if assisted in their defence by the new
Camel Corps, and directed by Glubb and the Air Officer Commanding.280
Faisal continued to doubt British conviction in the value of Bedouin forces,
and sought clarification of Glubb’s role, but the heated disagreements of
August were past.281 ‘The King’s ambitious schemes have been reduced’,
crowed the Foreign Office that November: a victory as important as any
over the Ikhwan themselves.282
* * *
Following the 1920 Iraq Revolt, the British sought out ‘subtler and less
openly offensive methods of exercising control’ in the country.283 Desert
administration should be considered as a part of that realignment. To some
local officers, the growth of British supervision in the desert was the logical
counterpart to its withdrawal elsewhere. Tribal policy was crucial to prevent-
ing ‘a constant stream of diplomatic incidents’, and because foreign policy
and defence were central to Britain’s interests in Iraq, it was in the desert that
Britain took on new responsibilities. In 1929, the year Britain declared its
unconditional support for Iraq’s entry into the League, 80 per cent of the
Nasiriyah liwa’s secret service funds were being spent on ‘Desert Intelligence’,
an asymmetry bearing little relation to its demography.284 By then, Glubb
‘combined in himself . . . the functions of mutasarrif and Administrative
Inspector of this area’—an unparalleled concentration of powers at the
time.285 Only here could the RAF still swing into action without the High
Commissioner’s prior approval. Far from languishing out of sight and out of
mind, frontier SSOs were vital to the British security regime, rewarded with
superior prospects of advancement. They executed tribal policy, maintained
the link in imperial communications, watched over troublesome border
areas and ‘extend[ed] their spheres inland’ to report cheaply and unobtru-
sively on internal affairs.286 Britain’s influence in Iraq was scaled-down over
the 1920s, but unevenly. Its say over desert affairs actually increased.
Glubb’s published memoirs downplay the political struggle behind
deeper relationships with the Bedouin of the Southern Desert. His con-
temporaries saw its implications more clearly. In Iraq, Bedouin recruit-
ment formed part of a contest between local and metropolitan Britons, the
280
CO 730/137/9, Dobbs to Faisal, 5 Sept. 1928.
281
CO 730/137/9, Faisal to Dobbs, 11 Sept. 1928.
282
FO 371/12995, Gladwyn Jebb minute, 8 Nov. 1928.
283
Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, p. 45.
284
AIR 23/306, H. Haines, ‘Report of tour in Southern Desert by SSO Nasiriyah’, 18
Aug. 1929.
285
CO 730/137/9, Dobbs, ‘Desert Defence’; AIR 2/1196, Brooke-Popham to Thomson,
8 Sept. 1930.
286
Anon., ‘Role of Special Service Officers’.
Government of Iraq, the Hashemite crown, and among Bedouin them-

selves. Partly in response to the Ikhwan threat, but as much to maintain
the initiative in sensitive frontier zones, it was the British who became
most closely involved in desert affairs. Some sceptics remained. ‘The gen-
eral policy of Government consolidation in the Southern Desert may or
may not be a wise one’, equivocated the Foreign Office, ‘but there is no
doubt that His Majesty’s Government have encouraged [it]’.287 As tribal
recruitment matured into a broader ‘desert administration’, and as the
Ikhwan threat receded, Iraqi politicians began to wonder if the scheme
had not come at too high a price. Among the networks built to super-
vise migration, pursue raiders, monopolize violence and gather forward
intelligence, nationalists decried a British sphere of activity, straddling
the nation’s borders and influencing its foreign relations. Glubb’s ‘cheap
weapon’, it was soon being argued, had a hidden cost after all.
Desert Affairs in Trans-Jordan

Of the three desert histories that this chapter explores, that of Jordan is
the best known. It is also the one most associated with a British impe-
rial force. The Arab Legion, as a military organization, a state-building
institution, and a vehicle of national identity, has inspired a range of
studies since the 1940s. In the process, a broadly accepted narrative has
emerged. The local gendarmerie raised by Frederick Peake had become
a national army by 1945. But before John Glubb arrived in 1930, so
the story goes, the Legion and the government gave little thought to
the desert. The desert was ‘almost a terra incognita’, Glubb claimed,
where the years ‘passed quietly’. Sporadic, ham-fisted interventions
achieved only ‘hatred and bitterness’.288 When the decision was made
to exert an influence over desert affairs, Glubb’s experience in Iraq
made him ‘the logical candidate’, and his approach and techniques
were transferred in toto.289
Stories distort timeframes and elide alternative interpretations, and
Glubb’s Story of the Arab Legion (1948) is no exception. He had good
reason to be dismissive of what had gone before. He had spent his final
months in Iraq investigating raids by Trans-Jordan’s tribes, growing frus-
trated at what he saw as that government’s neglect of the steppe.290 Once
in Trans-Jordan, developing a neat story about the recent past helped clear
287
FO 371/13714, E842/3/91, Gladwyn Jebb minute, 28 Feb. 1929.
288
Glubb, ‘Transjordan and the War’, p. 24; CO 831/11/1, Glubb, ‘Situation on the
Southern Frontier of Trans-Jordan’, 3 Jan. 1931.
289
290
AIR 23/46, Glubb to Cornwallis, 24 Dec. 1928.
the way for ‘doing better in the future’.291 As in Iraq, however, Glubb’s
approach was not the only one on offer. Policy between 1920 and 1930
had a logic of its own, and deserves to be explored as such. Far from being
‘the logical candidate’, Glubb’s appointment was ‘not popular in cer-
tain circles’: to Peake, his new superior, it was an unwelcome surprise.292
Thereafter, a nagging misalignment in their respective outlooks on desert
policy would persist in souring their relationship.
Re-examining these early years is complicated by the fact that Peake,
a man central to them, remains an ambiguous figure, overshadowed by
his successor. ‘Not gifted with the “pen of a ready writer” ’, as St John
Philby observed, his memoirs—patchy, anecdotal, and incomplete—went
unpublished. It fell to his more erudite contemporaries to debate his con-
sequence.293 Revisiting desert policy in the 1920s, therefore, is also an
opportunity to revisit Frederick Gerard Peake himself. This too is a task to
which we will have cause to return.
* * *
Across the nineteenth century, the expansion of agriculture in southern
Syria was matched by an unprecedented extension of Ottoman control.
Infrastructural development, a stronger security apparatus, settlement
policies, and land registration attest to the vitality of the regime in the area
later known as Trans-Jordan.294 Yet beyond the cultivated zone the influ-
ence of central authority remained ‘fitful’. Kerak may have marked the
southern limits of consolidation: when the town rose in rebellion in 1911,
it was against a newly intrusive regime.295 The Ottoman defeat in the First
World War, the collapse of the Faisali regime after the battle of Maysalun,
and experiments with local self-government in its aftermath further loos-
ened control beyond the main rural centres.
This unusually disturbed environment had a powerful impact on early
British attitudes towards the desert tribes. The guiding principle was that of
a ‘close-border’ system, delineating a boundary of exclusion beyond which
direct control was neither feasible nor advantageous. That boundary ran
291
CO 831/11/1, Glubb, ‘Situation on the Southern Frontier’.
292
Kirkbirde, Crackle, p. 62; IWM: FGP 3 Reel 1, ‘The Final House’.
293
Philby’s appraisal, written long after his service as British Representative in
Trans-Jordan, is distorted by the bitterness of his later writings: MECA: STJPH 4/2/17,
H. Philby, Stepping Stones in Jordan (n.d. 1956–1957). Jarvis’ biography of his friend bet-
ter reflects his subject (large sections correspond closely to the manuscript memoirs which
Jarvis suggested Peake publish) but, printed at a moment of high drama in the Middle
Eastern theatre, it shies from dwelling on internal tensions: Jarvis, Arab Command. Philby,
uncharitably, thought this book ‘jejeune’.
294
Rogan, Frontiers.
295
Robins, History, p. 8; Toth, ‘Last Battles’.
along the edge of the cultivated area. Where the land was ‘agriculturally
rich’, tax revenue could be reasonably expected to meet the costs of admin-
istration. The ‘sparse population eastward’ were a less pressing concern.296
The term ‘close-border’, one borrowed from the North-West Frontier, is
misleading: desert borders are peculiarly resistant to being hermetically
sealed. But the parallels with early approaches to the deserts of Egypt and
Iraq are striking. Again, Britain’s initial objectives were limited: to guard
Palestine from nomadic raids and pre-empt ‘another Power [France] estab-
lishing influence there’.297 The Foreign Office, for example, pointed out how
strongly permanent desert fortifications were ‘deprecated’ in Trans-Jordan
as a means of calling into question Glubb’s ambitious plans for Iraq.298
It was not quite fair, however, to speak of an ‘entire lack of effective
administration’ beyond Trans-Jordan’s cultivated zone.299 Instead of direct
control, Britain sought to influence Bedouin affairs indirectly through the
Emir Abdullah and his kinsman Shakir bin Zayd. This again resembles the
prominence—and political opportunities—afforded to King Faisal, Ajil al-
Yawir, and Fahd bin Hadhdhal in Iraq. Internally, Abdullah’s influence was
crucial to resolving bitter feuds, as in 1926 between the Howeitat and the
Beni Sakhr.300 It was equally important in mobilizing tribes against exter-
nal threats. After the Beni Sakhr heeded his call to repulse the Ikhwan in
1922, the Emir increasingly regarded them ‘as his special protectors against
Wahhabi invasion, and . . . accorded them special privileges’.301 And when
tempers flared during the height of the Ikhwan Revolt, Abdullah and
Shakir continued to play a crucial role in ensuring that the tribes did not
break with Government policy, supervising their withdrawal from the east-
ern frontier and talking down raiding parties on numerous occasions.302
This was an example of the latitude that T. E. Lawrence had recom-
mended in a 1921 report on the political future of the country.303 To
Herbert Samuel the ‘exclusion of Wahhabis from Azrak . . . is essential
for [the] security of trans-desert routes’, and Abdullah and ‘his camelry’
did Britain a service by controlling Azraq’s waters.304 Dependent on the
tribes’ support in return, the Emir’s views on desert politics were ‘not
lightly to be ignored’.305 The result was to effectively create a separate
296
FO 141/440, Samuel to Curzon, 7 Aug. 1920.
297
FO 141/440, Samuel to Curzon, 7 Aug. 1920; Kirkbride, Crackle, p. 19.
298
FO 371/13714, G. W. Rendel minute, 20 Feb. 1929.
299
CO 831/54/14, Glubb, ‘History, Composition and Duties of the Arab Legion’, 19
Apr. 1939.
300
CO 831/5/9, Cox to Chancellor, 15 June 1929.
301
AIR 23/797, Peake, ‘Military Report on Transjordan’, (n.d. 1928).
302
For example: AIR 23/83, ‘RAJFORD’ to Air Headquarters London, 20 Apr. 1928.
303
FO 371/6372, Lawrence to Samuel, 10 Apr. 1921.
304
FO 371/7714, Samuel to Churchill, 18 Aug. 1922.
305
AIR 23/83, Plumer to Amery, 2 Mar. 1928.
political sphere for Trans-Jordan’s desert zones, enshrined in ‘a special

form of representation suited to [the nomadic] way of living’ in the
organic law of 1928.306
We gain a further insight into this perspective by examining the state’s
first military organization: Captain Chisholm Brunton’s Reserve Force.
Formed in September 1920 to collect village taxes, serve warrants, and
restore public order, it handed down an operational philosophy, as well as
an institutional framework, to Peake’s Arab Legion. In Brunton’s eyes, the
interests of ‘the Bedouins and the peasantry’ were ‘diametrically opposed’.
‘The Bedouin robs the peasant whenever he can and the peasant hates and
fears the Bedouin accordingly’. There was, therefore, ‘only one policy to
adopt—protect the settled population from the Bedouin until the latter
can be got to settle and become more or less law abiding’.307 This suited
Britain’s broader approach to Trans-Jordan in these years, to act as ‘a hold-
ing operation’ until a more permanent arrangement could be reached.308
Brunton opposed the nomination of Mithqal al-Faiz of the Beni Sakhr
‘or any Bedouin sheikh’ to a Government post, for nomads ‘only respect a
strong Government’.309 He recruited the first hundred men of the Reserve
Force exclusively from sedentary communities. ‘Its ostensible purpose’,
Samuel told Lord Curzon, ‘is the protection of the settled population
against the depredation of the Bedouin in general and of the much-feared
Beni Sakhr in particular’.310
The Reserve Force ceased to exist in July 1923, but Peake’s Arab Legion
maintained its training, organization, and outlook.311 He too saw the
Hedjaz railway dividing the country between the desert (east) and the
sown (west) and, as he explained in an interview in 1928, considered the
former ‘outside his province’.312 For much of the decade, Peake acquiesced
in Abdullah’s authority beyond the railway line as a means of containing
Bedouin activities in the desert, freeing government to secure and develop
the settled area. To do otherwise, he warned, would not only be unjust,
but might threaten stability, make the fellahin more ‘politically-minded’,
and expose them to ‘the virus of Istiqlal doctrine’.313 When in 1923 the
semi-settled ‘Adwan rose in rebellion against the ‘favouritism’ shown to
306
For Peake’s observations on this, see IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiog-
raphy), p. 175.
307
MECA: BRUN, Brunton to Deeds, 31 Aug. 1920.
308
Robins, History, p. 13.
309
MECA: BRUN, Brunton to Deeds, 23 Oct. 1920.
310
FO 141/440, Samuel to Curzon, 5 Dec. 1920.
311
T 161/1219, Peake, ‘Work of the Arab Legion’, 11 July 1923.
312
AIR 9/61, ‘Improvement of the Intelligence System’.
313
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 125; FO 141/440, Peake to
Samuel, 1 Feb. 1921.
the nomadic Beni Sakhr, Peake’s worst fears appeared confirmed.314 The
event has since been described a ‘taxes movement’, contesting the growth
of central government tout court, but for Peake it became emblematic of
the eternal conflict between the desert and the sown, ‘the basis of almost
everything that happened in Jordan’.315
For Peake, the rebellion raised questions over how far desert affairs
could be safely left to the Emir. Soon afterwards he blamed Abdullah for
blocking renewed attempts to tax the Beni Sakhr, and for nursing Bedouin
complaints against his men. Yet he hesitated to deviate too far from a
policy of containment. With neither the funds nor the will to contemplate
an overwhelming imperial presence in the steppe, Peake feared a more
active desert policy would only be a liability. High Commissioners also
remained wary of building permanent posts in the desert on the grounds
of cost, risk, and the ‘unhealthy’ locations to which British officers might
be sent.316 This tension between the fear of assuming greater frontier
responsibility, and the consequence of allowing other parties to do so,
continued for much of the decade.
Two episodes reveal this clearly. In July 1925, with King Hussein’s author-
ity collapsing in the Hedjaz, the Colonial Office approved the annexation
of Aqaba and Ma’an to Trans-Jordan. From Sinai, officials in the FDA
applauded the move and anticipated improved frontier co-operation.317
On the mandate’s eastern frontier, however, British support for annex-
ing the Wadi Sirhan to Trans-Jordan wavered. With hindsight, Glubb
despaired of the decision. In British hands this long, well-watered valley
would have secured the winter grazing grounds of two of Trans-Jordan’s
most important tribes, and denied a crucial conduit for trans-desert raids
from Nejd.318 Peake, however, opposed any forward leap in the state’s juris-
diction, for Trans-Jordan ‘possessed no Force’ capable of controlling such a
protracted position.319 Even Kaf, the valley’s northern end and since 1922
home to an Arab Legion post, was judged to be exposed, untenable, ‘use-
less and dangerous’.320
As the debate progressed its lines were re-drawn around a broader issue:
should government protect geographical areas, or the nomadic tribes that
used them? To some, including the Chief British Resident, Henry Cox,
314
Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 105–107. Philby agreed: FO 141/672/1, Philby, ‘The
Situation in Trans-Jordan for August, 1923’.
315
Peake, History of Trans-Jordan, p. 89; Mousa, ‘Jordan’.
316
CO 732/24/6, Plumer to Amery, 31 Jan. 1927.
317
FO 141/664/8, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 31 Dec. 1926.
318
CO 831/10/2, Glubb, ‘Control of the Trans-Jordan Deserts’, 19 Nov. 1930.
319
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), pp. 75–76.
320
T 161/1219, Peake to Cox, 11 May 1924.
jurisdiction must be sufficiently expansive to ensure that tribes like the

Beni Sakhr could migrate in peace. Without this ‘our means of getting
early information from the Bedu lying to the east . . . will disappear’.321
Protecting discrete areas, on the other hand, seemed more straightforward,
and would prevent tribes from raiding and then ‘sheltering, when the
inevitable counter-raids took place, behind Imperial Forces’.322 In the end,
diplomats’ readiness to placate Ibn Saud sealed the decision. In November
1925 the Hadda Agreement granted most of the Wadi Sirhan to Nejd. As
we shall see in Chapter 3, it fell to Glubb and other desert officers to find
local ways of working around its prescriptions.
Viewed alongside the activities of the Emir Abdullah and the early Arab
Legion, these decisions provide a more complete picture of the rationale
behind policy in the early 1920s. They also provide grounds to revisit
the reputation of that most maligned of imperial forces: the Trans-Jordan
Frontier Force. Again, as a walk-on part in The Story of the Arab Legion,
the rough outlines of this narrative are well known. Comprising 700
men and inauspiciously formed on 1 April 1926 the origins of the Trans-
Jordan Frontier Force lay not in the steppe, but in years of wrangling over
the Palestine police.323 As a military force answerable to the Air Officer
Commanding, it was meant to strike out into the Trans-Jordanian desert
to defend Egypt and Palestine against Wahhabi incursions. The judgement
of history has not been kind. An ‘institutional antipathy to the Bedouin’
and ‘tactics inappropriate to desert operations’ left it ‘ineffective against
raids’ and ‘resented’ by the tribes.324 Its officers made no lasting contribu-
tion to the desert beyond ‘painting its initials [TJFF] in white on nearby
boulders’.325 Worse, its arrival trespassed on Peake’s jurisdiction, with the
result that 40 per cent of his men and all of his machine-gun company
were disbanded. In 1931, on the formation of the Desert Patrol, the TJFF
was withdrawn from the country’s desert frontiers. ‘I never had the occa-
sion’, Peake later claimed, ‘to use the Frontier Force once’.326
The truth of much of this is hard to deny. The TJFF proved adept at pre-
venting Trans-Jordan’s own tribes from raiding its neighbours, but failed
to intercept incoming attacks in turn. As herd numbers fell and casualties
mounted, the Howeitat in particular came to view the Frontier Force as an
enemy within. But accepted views of this imperial force also make it hard
to establish why it was dispatched to the desert in the first place, and why
it met with any approval at all in its day. For however much officers might
321
AIR 5/397, Cox to Storrs, 2 Nov. 1924.
322
AIR 5/397, Storrs to Cox, 18 Nov. 1924. 323
Rudd, ‘Origins’.
324
Toth, ‘Transformation’, p. 185. 325
Lias, Glubb’s Legion, p. 70.
326
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 1, Peake, untitled essay on the TJFF (n.d.).
have later denied it, its approach to the desert was shared by others within
Trans-Jordan, and built on precedents from across the region. Recovering
these enriches our understanding of the corridor as a site of intra-British
debate.
The Trans-Jordan Frontier Force worked on a ‘very different system’ to
the Desert Patrol, but it had a system nonetheless.327 As a locally raised
force under RAF command, it conformed to the formula of air control
set out by Hugh Trenchard in Iraq.328 As such, the Force did not neglect
the desert (indeed, it was built upon the premise that Ikhwan raids were
a more pressing threat than any possible communal clash in Palestine),
but instead approached it in much the same way as the RAF cordon san-
itaire had in Iraq: as a buffer zone containing Bedouin activity for the
good of an agricultural, sedentary heartland.329 What it lacked in desert
range it made up for in versatility, operating ‘East or West of the [Hedjaz]
Railway’ and capable of undertaking ‘the static defence of [rural] locali-
ties’.330 Viewed in these terms, Peake’s apparent hostility to the Force is
surprising: its objectives and philosophy closely intersected with his own.
Moreover, by 1930 the Emir Abdullah was complaining to Henry Cox
that Peake was ‘inclined to call out the Frontier Force on every occasion’,
and although Cox thought this an exaggeration, Peake’s relations with the
Force do seem to have been good.331 To explain this contradiction, we
must examine Peake’s unpublished memoirs more closely. Peake’s criti-
cisms of the Frontier Force appear in a section of the memoirs written
in retirement, possibly even after Glubb’s dismissal from Jordan, and in
Philby’s unpublished history, written immediately after the Suez Crisis.332
His criticism, which centres on how the Force undermined Abdullah’s
authority and made a mockery of his independence, seems likely to reflect
these contexts of creation.
At other times, however, and in other sections of the memoir, Peake
reached a very different conclusion. From an imperial perspective, he
wrote, the ‘wisdom’ of creating the TJFF ‘could not be questioned’. The
Legion was ‘not in a position to guarantee the integrity of the Emir’s fron-
tiers, nor to meet French demands’ about the prevention of banditry into
Syria, but the Frontier Force was.333 Contrary to Peake’s later claim that
he ‘never had the occasion to use the Frontier Force once’, it was only
327
Glubb, Story, p. 64. 328
Rudd, ‘Origins’, pp. 179–180.
329
Lunt, Imperial Sunset, p. 55.
330
CO 831/3/15, C.H.F. Cox, ‘Note on the Frontier Force’, 29 Aug. 1928.
331
T 161/650, Cox to Chancellor, 27 Jan. 1930. After all, he met his future wife at a
TJFF luncheon: Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 151.
332
MECA: STJPH 4/2/17, Philby, Stepping Stones.
333
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2, (typescript draft autobiography), p. 137.
when the Legion, the Frontier Force and the RAF worked together that
Trans-Jordan had an arrangement ‘entirely adequate for ensuring that the
nomadic tribes did not interfere with the settled inhabitants’—for Peake,
the ne plus ultra of desert policy.334 James Lunt, whose service in the Legion
came years after Peake’s retirement, also thought Peake had ‘welcomed’ the
creation of the Frontier Force, not least as a check on Abdullah’s personal
authority in the desert.335 Indeed, this last aspect of desert control increas-
ingly preyed on Peake’s mind.336
Understanding Peake’s position, therefore, requires placing ideas
about the balance of the desert and the sown above his sensitivity to
the Emir’s independence.337 However unpopular this ‘alien’ Force was,
Peake shared its broader vision of containing desert raids for the benefit
of the sown—‘the one and only theme here’, as Captain Brunton had
once put it.338 In a sense, Peake saw his work in Trans-Jordan as similar
to a nineteenth-century policeman: protecting property and maintaining
social order within a prescribed, patrolled beat. ‘Immunity from raids’
for Palestine and for Trans-Jordan west of the railway enabled ‘substan-
tial economies’ and the withdrawal of British forces.339 Beyond the beat,
the Beni Sakhr and the Howeitat ‘acted as buffers to the [Ikhwan]’, mak-
ing further intervention unnecessary.340 ‘Battles and disturbances will be
fought out in mid-desert’, Glubb wrote of this system with sarcasm, ‘far
from the settled areas and vital centres of the territory’.341 Viewed in such
binary terms, if an ‘alien’ imperial force helped boost the strike power of
the sown against the steppe, then so be it.
* * *
The immediate context for Glubb’s arrival in Trans-Jordan was the experi-
ment, between 1928 and 1930, of two desert control schemes promoted
by the High Commissioner, John Chancellor. A final examination of these
completes the picture of Trans-Jordan’s deserts as a sphere of contest and
debate.
Chancellor’s schemes stood somewhere between Peake’s vision of con-
tainment, the armed patrols at work in the Sinai, and the permanent
administration gathering pace in Southern Iraq. The first scheme sought
to address the ‘insufficient mobility and experience in tribal work’ of the
334
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2, (typescript draft autobiography), p. 166.
335
Lunt, Arab Legion, pp. 33–37.
336
MECA: STJPH 2/3/10, Peake to Philby, 1 Mar. 1929.
337
338
MECA: BRUN, Brunton to Civil Secretary Jerusalem, 3 Oct. 1920.
339
FO 141/440, Clayton to Samuel, 1 Feb. 1924.
340
FO 141/504/7, Jarvis to Director-General FDA, 2 Mar. 1928.
341
Trans-Jordan Frontier Force by mechanizing one of its companies. Here,

increasing the force’s range was presented as an ‘alternative solution’ to
‘the policy of posts’ then proving so acrimonious in Iraq.342 The second
scheme, outlined in May 1929, called for an additional ‘mobile reserve’
within the Arab Legion to undertake anti-raiding operations; a ‘Tribal
Control Board’ of mixed Emirate and Legion officials to monitor tribal
disputes and manage tribal subsidies; additional Legion intelligence offic-
ers to guide imperial expeditions; and plans to institute local, trans-frontier
talks with Nejdi officials. These measures, approved in September 1929,
required an additional £5,000 from Britain’s grant-in-aid.343
As in Egypt and Iraq, this forward movement seems, at first glance,
to be a straightforward response to trans-border incursions. In February
1928, a brutal Ruwala attack on the Zebn (Beni Sakhr) triggered a string of
counter-raids.344 Yet the tribes’ welfare came a distant second to more polit-
ical considerations. By the later 1920s raiding was coming to be seen as no
less detrimental to trans-corridor mobility than poor diplomatic relations
with Ibn Saud, something already accepted in Egypt and Iraq.345 Moreover,
there was a growing appreciation that desert tensions might even undo
diplomatic gains. The desert was home to a fifth of the country’s popula-
tion, but three-fifths of its political boundaries: ‘incidents handled by the
diplomats’, as Glubb later put it, ‘found their origins in the raids and shoot-
ings of the tribesmen’.346 This brought the Foreign Office’s views on desert
control full circle. In Iraq they had initially warned that taking too active
a stance in the desert might antagonize Ibn Saud. By 1929, however, they
were complaining that Iraqi-Nejd relations were being ‘seriously weakened
by the apparent inability of completely controlling the Transjordan tribes’,
and urged tougher measures.347 This was a belated acknowledgement of the
impossibility of controlling the corridor in fits and starts.
Political considerations also guided how Peake reacted to news
of the attack on Iraq’s Busaiyah outpost. Unlike Glubb and many
SSOs, Peake dismissed the notion that the Ikhwan attacks necessar-
ily warranted an administrative response. Instead, he accused the
Hashemites of talking up the Ikhwan threat ‘to frighten the British
into action against their enemy’, Ibn Saud. He tacitly agreed with
342
CO 831/3/15, Luke to Amery, 20 Sept. 1928.
343
CO 831/5/1, Chancellor to Amery, 31 May 1929.
344
CO 831/1/2, Cox, ‘Situation Report on Trans-Jordan for the Period 1/1/28 to
31/3/28’.
345
CO 831/8/7, Anon., ‘Notes on the Hejaz-Nejd Frontier’ (n.d. 1930).
346
Glubb, Story, p. 203.
347
FO 371/13714, E1386/3/91, Leyman minute, 18 Mar. 1929; E3397/3/91, G.W.
Rendel minute, 21 July 1929.
the view that the Iraq Government was behaving provocatively, and
urged that comparable agitation among the Beni Atiya, Billi, and
Juheinah in Trans-Jordan be nipped in the bud. The lesson that Peake
took from Iraq’s experiences, therefore, was that Hashemite anxiety
‘to get Bedwin tribes . . . to take the offensive . . . leads one to believe
that [Faisal’s] judgement is effected by other considerations than the
mere protection of his frontier’.348 It was to pre-empt this, quite as
much as to defend tribesmen from the Ikhwan, that Britain should
move to monopolise desert affairs. ‘Such control as is now exercised
over the tribes’, the High Commissioner noted, ‘is at present vested
in the Emir’, but what worried him more was the fact that Abdullah’s
requests for imperial support were
made on the strength of information supplied to him by Arab chiefs and
agents with whom he (and he alone) is in close contact . . . I have had occa-
sion to doubt the sincerity of the Amir’s attitude . . . There is reason to
think that he does not always use his influence to discourage raiding by the
Transjordan tribes . . . 349
The new Tribal Control Board, a central part of the scheme, aimed at check-
ing Abdullah’s personal authority. By affording Peake (as the Arab Legion’s
Commanding Officer) a position on the Board alongside the Emir Shakir, by
paying Shakir a regular salary, and by making Peake responsible for enforc-
ing decisions, the Board would ‘secure the advantages of the Emir’s coopera-
tion without the disadvantages of placing him in unfettered control’.350
The Board’s creation marked an unprecedented level of direct gov-
ernment intervention in the steppe, dispensing subsidies, supervising
migration, convening tribal courts, executing their rulings, and impos-
ing punishments of its own.351 But its other objective—heading off rival
opportunities to influence steppe affairs—was more familiar. Bedouin
initiative and ‘restiveness’, as in Egypt and Iraq, risked derailing British
policy.352 Anti-colonial nationalism was less pressing here, but the Emir’s
influence with the tribes remained a concern. Abdullah had long let it be
known that he considered Trans-Jordan a poor substitute for a throne in
Syria or Iraq. As late as 1928 he spoke of plans for greater intervention
in the desert while ‘compar[ing] unfavourably his position with that of
Iraq’.353 The Air Ministry were particularly keen to contain his activities:
348
AIR 23/83, Peake, ‘Situation Report—Transjordan’, 23 Mar. 1928.
349
350
351
CO 831/5/1, ‘Draft of a Law to Provide for the Superintendence and Control of
Nomadic Beduin’ (n.d. 1929).
352
CO 831/1/2, C.H.F. Cox, ‘Situation Report on Trans-Jordan for the Period 1.7.28 to
30.9.28’; CO 821/2/6, Plumer to Amery, 18 May 1928.
353
AIR 23/83, Anon., extract from report, 19 Nov. 1928.
its SSOs were warned against using intelligence ‘tainted’ by ‘Sherifian fam-
ily sources’.354
For these reasons, British influence had been advancing in the desert
for some time before Glubb’s arrival in the country, though the extent of
British influence was veiled by administrative separation of ‘the desert
and the sown’. ‘Hidden away discreetly in the wilds of Trans-Jordan’,
Jarvis recalled, the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force was less provocative than
if it had been based in Palestine, but was still able to re-enter that country
at two days’ notice.355 Chancellor’s schemes were equally careful not to
exclude Abdullah and Shakir entirely. The High Commissioner acknowl-
edged the Emir’s great knowledge of tribal customs, but the fact remained
that the alternative—imposing a British Desert Governor or Magistrate,
as in the Egyptian model—was still thought to be a political impossibility;
it would only ‘confirm growing doubts’ as to the sincerity of British inten-
tions ‘to establish an independent Arab Government in Trans-Jordan’.356
The Colonial Office, in particular, were loath to undermine Abdullah’s
standing or goodwill, both crucial in dampening anti-British propaganda
in the wake of the 1929 Palestine riots.357 It was ‘on political grounds’,
as well as in deference to his knowledge of Bedouin law, that the Emir
Shakir kept his seat on the Tribal Control Board.358
* * *
The Chancellor scheme was not without achievements. Improved intel-
ligence gathering led to the discovery of ‘numerous minor raids which in
the past were never heard of ’.359 In the spring of 1930, the Tribal Control
Board helped maintain the cordon sanitaire, ordering tribes back from the
eastern frontier and punishing those who lingered.360 But other aspects of
Glubb’s attack on the system hold true. Many tribesmen were roused to
‘righteous indignation’ against a government that punished them from
raiding, but which failed to protect them in turn. Without more immedi-
ate contact with the Nejdi authorities, the Board struggled to investigate
trans-border raids.361 Raiders soon negated the advantages of a mechanized
Frontier Force by camping in rough country.362 As in Iraq, withdraw-
ing Trans-Jordan’s tribes behind a cordon sanitaire prevented them from
354
AIR 23/83, Air Staff Intelligence to Kenny-Leveck, 27 Nov. 1925.
355
Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 147.
356
CO 831/10/1, Chancellor to Passfield, 26 June 1930.
357
CO 831/7/8, H. Dowding, ‘Raiding Situation on the Trans-Jordan-Nejd Frontier’,
(n.d. Jan. 1930).
358
359
FO 371/14460, E. R. Stafford, ‘The Bedwin Control Board, 1.1.1930–30.6.1930’.
360
AIR 23/84, Strange to Air Staff Intelligence, 9 May 1930.
361
CO 831/7/8, Chancellor to Passfield, 23 Aug. 1930.
362
CO 831/4/9, Shute to Ormsby-Gore, 29 May 1929.
counter-raiding, but frustrated their access to grazing lands, damaging

herds further.363 After fifty-five days of vacillation, the inconclusive find-
ings of the MacDonnell arbitration—intended to settle claims between
Nejdi and Trans-Jordanian tribes—exposed the limits of a negotiated solu-
tion without greater control on the ground.364
In the disagreements that followed, and which led to Glubb’s appoint-
ment, officers looked to a range of models, precedents and examples, and
this allows us to survey the myriad forms of desert administration on
display by the end of the decade. The Air Ministry, fearful that ‘too much
reliance’ was still placed on the Emir, wanted ‘some form of permanent
organization . . . on the lines of the Southern Desert of Iraq adminis-
tration’: an extended SSO system, permanent desert posts (officers in
Iraq sent over costings and advice on the best locations) and ‘a greater
measure of British control’.365 The Air Council advocated this model
in the hope of cutting costs (it would free imperial forces from cordon
sanitaire duties) and to convince its critics that it was taking the raid-
ing problem in hand.366 The British Resident at Amman also favoured
the Iraq model. The practice of stationing detachments of police in
armed cars with the tribes was well-suited to Trans-Jordan’s desert fron-
tier, where the disposition of water allowed Nejdi raiders to strike and
retreat before forces in the cultivated zone could react.367 It also seemed
to offer a way of increasing British desert control ‘without alienating the
Amir’s goodwill’. Instead of a ‘British Desert Magistrate’, a more mod-
est ‘British Intelligence Officer’ could be attached to the Arab Legion,
with a small force of ‘enlisted Bedouin in armed cars’ and access to secret
service funds: a comparable arrangement to Iraq’s Southern Desert
Camel Corps.368
Peake’s views, however, are less clear, and part of the confusion stems
from the breadth of examples on which he could draw. While Cox and the
Air Ministry took inspiration from Iraq, Peake looked west to Sinai, where
the FDA had curtailed inter-tribal raiding with frontier posts, a camel
363
CO 831/11/1, Freeman to Chancellor, 22 Dec. 1930. Peake later accepted this criti-
cism: IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 170.
364
CO 831/11/5, Glubb to Kirkbride, 19 Aug. 1931; CO 831/12/1, M. S. MacDonnell,
Arbitration Mission report.
365
AIR 9/61, ‘Improvement of intelligence and civil administration East of the Hejaz
Railway’ (n.d. 1930); CO 831/5/1, Webster to Lunn, 8 July 1929; CO 831/7/8, Dowding,
‘Report on the Raiding Situation’.
366
AIR 9/61, J. Slessor, untitled memorandum, 26 Feb. 1930; CO 831/10/2, Chancellor
to Passfield, 20 Dec. 1930.
367
CO 831/7/8, Cox to Chancellor, 8 Oct. 1929.
368
CO 831/7/8, Cox to Chancellor, 19 Aug. 1930.
corps and car patrols.369 Given Peake’s long-held concerns about the bal-
ance of ‘the desert and the sown’, it may have been the specifics of the Sinai’s
recruitment policy that explained his preference for the model (a British
Governor had tight control of drilled Sudanese troops for the Frontier
armed forces, a counterweight to any Bedouin serving in the local desert
police). Peake certainly believed in checking the Emir’s frontier influ-
ence, but still held reservations about being drawn into desert affairs.370
In many respects, Peake thought them a distraction, and remained uneasy
about lavishing too much time and attention on the Bedouin.371 In this,
he agreed with Sir Wyndham Deedes’ dissenting view of T. E. Lawrence’s
report on Hashemite rule, filed back in 1921. ‘Beduin (ie: Sherifian) rule’,
Deedes wrote, would not result in ‘any marked degree of public security’
for the fellahin and townspeople, who formed ‘the bulk of the productive
population’.372 It was ‘farmers and merchants’, Peake remembered, who
felt most betrayed by Britain’s approval of Abdullah, and he had resolved
to stand up for them.373 He endorsed many of Glubb’s recommendations,
but more with an eye to the potential benefits for Palestine and ‘settled
Trans-Jordan’ than for the Bedouin themselves.374 It was in their plans for
the future, as we shall see in Chapter 4, that this disagreement was most
exposed.
Looking west as well as east, keen to control desert policy but afraid of
fuelling anti-British sentiment, we may never know Peake’s true feelings
on the issue. In attempting to translate his understanding of the eternal
conflict of ‘the desert and the sown’ into policy, he may simply have been
inconsistent. ‘Peake was a man of uncertain temperament and restless
mind’, Philby recalled, ‘full of charm but quick to take offence, and too
much influenced by other people’s views’. As a result, he ‘too often . . .
changed his own attitude towards the problems confronting him’.375 But
whatever his opinion, he had no hand in Glubb’s appointment and—one
suspects—some concern about his arrival. It has long been assumed that
Glubb’s reputation in Iraq prepared the ground for the next phase of his
career. For Peake, however, it augured ill. As a correspondent had warned
369
CO 831/10/1, Chancellor to Passfield, 25 Jan. 1930.
370
MECA: STJPH 2/3/10, Peake to Philby, 16 Mar. 1929; CO 831/10/1, Chancellor
to Shuckburgh, 11 Apr. 1930.
371
‘Since it is known that Peake had little time for the Bedouins, it may well be that he
left Glubb to his own devices in the desert, on the assumption that sooner or later he would
fail’: Lunt, Arab Legion, p. 45.
372
FO 371/6372, W. Deedes, ‘A Note on Colonel Lawrence’s Report’, 23 Nov. 1921.
373
374
CO 831/11/1, Peake to Cox, 24 Dec. 1930.
375
him the previous year, further promotion of Glubb’s views was ‘surely a
very bad move’.376
With Glubb’s arrival in Trans-Jordan in November 1930, The Story of
the Arab Legion settles into its stride. He set about expanding the powers
of his fledgling Desert Patrol with machine guns, more personnel, better
forts and armed cars.377 As in Iraq, the forts became the spine of the sys-
tem, and subsidies the means of ‘resuscitating’ tribal life. Azraq, Bair, and
Mudawara forts were completed by 1933; Rumm (1934) and the pipeline
station at H5 (1935) followed. In 1936, following the death of the Emir
Shakir, a new Tribal Courts Law and Bedouin Control Law made Glubb
‘virtually administrator and governor of the Desert Area’.378 Nonetheless,
the deserts of Trans-Jordan were no blank canvas. The extent of govern-
ment intervention in the desert had been actively debated for years, gen-
erating arguments to which officers in other territories referred in turn.
And because permanent administration developed later here, techniques
were borrowed from across Britain’s desert corridor. All this should warn
against speaking of any straightforward, monolithic ‘British tribal policy’.
In Trans-Jordan, as in Egypt and Iraq, the desert was home to an extended
debate over the shape of Britain’s presence.
The British increased their powers in the desert, but still faced chal-
lenges to their authority. Shererat raids late in 1931 shook Glubb’s repu-
tation with the tribes. The following year Abdullah and Shakir worked
to undermine Glubb’s position through their sponsorship of Beni Atiya
raids. Among the British too, there were those who were ‘a bit sceptical
about Glubb’s fulminations’, and thought him ‘rather inclined to exagger-
ate’ on behalf of the tribes.379 The question of priorities, Peake’s main point
of contention with his subordinate, would not remain settled for long.
C O N C LU S I O N : S H I F T I N G TO T H E P E R I P H E RY
British desert administration comprised a ragbag collection of units and

forces, each shaped by the national context in which it took root. Perhaps
this explains why few historians have perceived the phenomenon in the
round. As personalities, priorities, and possibilities differed, so too did
the timeframes of each administration’s development and its degree of
autonomy. Departmental divisions also mattered. In some ways, to read
376
MECA: STJPH 2/3/10, Philby to Peake, 10 Apr. 1929.
377
CO 831/10/2, Chancellor to Passfield, 9 Dec. 1930.
378
CO 831/54/14, Glubb, ‘History, Composition and Duties of the Arab Legion’.
379
CO 831/13/3, K. W. Blaxter minute, 7 Dec. 1931.
the history of Britain’s desert presence is to see the same mistakes made
in successive locales. Had the RCAS been able to realize its hopes for a
pan-imperial ‘tribal service’, some of this may have been avoided. As it
was, it took time and experience—as we shall see in Part II—for compara-
ble administrations to reach out and connect with one another.
Nonetheless, a number of commonalities stand out. The first is the
sense of novelty contemporaries felt at bringing permanent administra-
tion to the desert. For all Britain’s long history in the region, this remained
an exciting undertaking: ‘a great progressive step’, wrote Glubb, ‘such as
has not been undertaken in Arabia for 800 years’.380 This was too dismiss-
ive of the Ottoman legacy, but desert administration deserved its frisson.
Local British officers were not simply deepening their hold over tradi-
tional, often coastal, colonial enclaves, but were extending rule into alto-
gether new areas. Ill-defined ‘buffer zones’ gave way to sites of policing,
arbitration, recruitment and development. Even where the British stood
on the shoulders of their predecessors—Ottoman, tribal, or Khedival—
the dislocation of the war leant the intervening years the character of an
interregnum.
This contributed to a revolution in thinking about deserts as ‘natural
frontiers’. For years Napoleon’s dictum—‘of all obstacles which may cover
the frontiers of empire, a desert like this [between Egypt and Syria] is
incontestably the greatest’—had been an article of faith, reproduced in
journals, army examinations, ‘imperial geographies’ and reports. Arid
frontiers everywhere were ‘separating areas’, seldom ‘zones of inter-
course’.381 But in the run-up to war, some wondered how long Britain
could continue to ‘sit calmly down on the Canal bank’, safeguarded by
the surrounding ‘wastes’.382 Between 1914 and 1930, events across the
desert corridor provided their answer. ‘Since Napoleon’s day’, one report
on desert administration ran, ‘the invention of the air arm and of mechani-
cal transport . . . has largely discounted the barrier offered by the desert’.383
From the Western Desert of Egypt to the Southern Desert of Iraq, armed
car patrols and commercial ventures traversed a desert ‘that till the war
had been considered quite impracticable for all wheeled traffic’.384 With
greater knowledge of nomadic migrations, oases, wadis and wells came
a shift in ideas about the desert itself, from a non-state, barren ‘space’ to
a peopled ‘place’: a zone of political interaction. Attention now centred
380
381
Fawcett, Frontiers, p. 37.
382
FO 371/1112, Ottley to Wood, 7 Apr. 1911.
383
FO 141/534/16, J. Marshall-Cornwall, ‘The Frontiers Administration and
Coastguard Service’, 6 June 1937.
384
on creating ‘scientific frontiers’: administrative and military measures that

consolidated Britain’s position. ‘The deserts of Egypt’, Jarvis explained,
constitute as effective a barrier to invasion as does the sea; but this can only be
the case if Egypt controls them adequately and administers them effectually.
The mistakes of the last war must not be made again . . . 385
Here, as in so much else, the interwar years were a time of flux. Older,
determinist arguments about deserts as ‘natural’ barriers could still be
heard. But it no longer took the incisiveness of Lucien Febvre to see that,
under closer scrutiny, ‘the notion of predestined bounds disappears’.386
Despite such novelty, a second factor shared by all three territories is
the sheer prominence that came to be afforded to desert affairs. Scholars
of the Bedouin will not be surprised by this: with diras that straddled
newly imposed borders and a military capacity that rivaled emergent
states, nomads could hardly be ignored.387 And yet, while withhold-
ing control over a country’s foreign policy was a long-established colo-
nial objective, it only gradually became apparent that in the deserts of
the Middle East this meant, in practice, effective control of the steppe.
By managing migration, preventing raiding and arbitrating disputes,
desert officers in Egypt, Iraq, and Trans-Jordan gave Britain a decisive
role in shaping relationships with the Italians in Libya, the French in
Syria, and Ibn Saud in Nejd and the Hedjaz. This concern with for-
eign relations also helps explain the preoccupation with ‘external’ rather
than ‘internal’ raiding, long after the arbitrariness of the distinction had
been exposed.
But the growth of desert administration cannot be fully understood
without also exploring the politics of anti-colonial nationalism and impe-
rial rule. In the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile, British
‘advisers’ and administrative staff were gradually recalled in response to
that postwar ‘crisis of Empire’. On the region’s desert frontiers, however,
where local officers reported ‘absolute loyalty and . . . assistance’ even at
the height of unrest, we see, if anything, revived British confidence in
their influence and power.388 Compared with those other foci of author-
ity, national governments and royal courts, a lopsided advance had taken
place in British capacity to operate on the frontiers of the region’s states.
To local desert officers, these new commitments were a timely response to
postwar demobilization, political nationalism, and financial stringency.
Desert recruitment would produce reliable local forces ‘[un]affected by
385
386
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, p. 305.
387
388
FO 141/781, C. Ryder, ‘G.S. (I) Intelligence Report’, 25 Apr. 1929.
the political propaganda of townsmen’.389 Discrete structures of govern-

ance and law would create zones ‘free from party attachments’.390 Urban
discontent would be appeased even as Britain’s grip on communications
was renewed. If in Egypt the fear was of ‘evil influence from the Nile
Valley’, in Trans-Jordan and Iraq officers sought to head off local and royal
claims to trans-frontier authority.
In short, the growth of British desert administration was as much about
isolating sensitive frontier regions from the writ of political rivals as it was
about ‘playing off ’ conservative landed shaykhs against seditious urban
effendis.391 This strategy was subtlely different from that of the French
Côntrole Bédouin in Syria, which packed the Constituent Assembly with
tribal shaykhs to block the passage of radical programmes.392 In Egypt,
Iraq, and Trans-Jordan alike, the effect was to give institutional expression
to old tropes about ‘the desert and the sown’. Identifying arid ‘wastes’ in
Britain’s settler world heralded a greater degree of crown power and juris-
diction, dispossessing indigenes and reserving land for white settlement.393
That objective was absent here, but desert regions were similarly made
reservoirs of colonial power, where more heavy-handed forms of policing
and special forms of administration could be justified. It was a phenom-
enon that the members of the RCAS would have readily understood. ‘It
has frequently happened’, wrote an officer of the Indian frontier, ‘that the
Marches in other countries have to submit to restrictions which are unnec-
essary in the case of people in a less exposed position’.394
A third point on which desert officers in Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq
would have agreed was that these years were ones of imperial restructur-
ing, not retreat. The view from the frontier offers a new perspective on the
renegotiation of British power between the wars. Many hoped that their
heightened control of strategic peripheral zones would enable concessions
elsewhere, containing nationalist aspirations away from interference with
Britain’s main concern: the routes by land, air, and sea to India. This was
a bold re-articulation of long-standing priorities, and because it relied on
new institutions, always had its critics. Some in London, insulated from
the paternalist instincts of the ‘men on the spot’, questioned the central
premise of the experiment. They saw colonial rule as dependent on col-
laboration with a familiar cast of ‘props’: the Sunni urban political class
in Baghdad, prominent landowners (who ‘generally moved to the cities to
enjoy their new wealth’), Sherifian and ex-Ottoman administrative elites,
389
FO 141/539/1, Weir to Lampson, 4 June 1935.
390
FO 141/514/5, Anon., ‘Bedouin Representation in Parliament’, 16 Mar. 1926.
391
For the classic statement of this older argument: Batatu, Old Social Classes.
392
Khoury, ‘Tribal Shaykh’. 393
Buchan, ‘Subjecting the Natives’, p. 147.
394
and moderate reformists in Cairo.395 Shifting influence to the periphery,

in contrast, seemed a reckless gamble. Likewise the Chiefs of Staff opposed
the relocation of British troops away from major urban areas—as in Egypt,
for example—for much of the 1930s.396 Even the absence of unrest in
Egypt’s deserts between 1919 and 1921 could be read two ways. To John
Murray of the Foreign Office Eastern Department, the desert tribes had
merely demonstrated their political unimportance.397
In all three territories, local officers resorted to similar tactics to but-
tress the case for desert administration. The first was to draw parallels,
connecting their work with successful ‘forward policies’ in the imperial
past. Indian allusions (however erroneous) conferred legitimacy, just as
pointing to comparable problems elsewhere in the region, the empire or
the world lent extra weight to local officers in their disputes with London
and with each other. ‘The main aspects of the problem’ of tribal control,
Glubb attempted to assure Baghdad, ‘are similar to that on any uncivilized
frontier’—though a range of precedents could be invoked in support of
differing policies.398 A second tactic aimed at forming associations, again
to strengthen the hand of individual officers in their negotiations with
governments. ‘Petty local officials like the present writer’, Glubb wrote
candidly, ‘are accustomed . . . to be crushed by the reply that HMG are
considering the wider interests at stake’.399 It was here that networks like
the RCAS played a valuable role, not simply as a forum generating poli-
cies and ideas, but in conferring ‘professional’ status and other markers of
‘expertise’, encouraging members in their struggles with various authori-
ties. Together, they might just convince sceptics that the desert administra-
tion experiment was worth the candle.400
Nonetheless, critics of desert administration only lent their support as
far as it attained British regional goals cheaply and unobtrusively. The final
ingredient for its growth, therefore, was the geopolitical ‘honeymoon’ in
which it took root, when great power rivalry ran in low gear, and before
massive oil revenues revised priorities. For as long as the Mediterranean
remained ‘a very low priority in imperial defence’, British security policy
395
Similar calculations guided French policy in Syria: Hanna, ‘Attitudes’; Thomas,
Empires of Intelligence, p. 188. On the creation of a landholder comprador class in Iraq, see
Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ‘Transformation’.
396
The best account is: Morewood, Defence of Egypt.
397
FO 371/12377, J. Murray minute, 24 Mar. 1927.
398
FO 371/13713, Glubb, ‘Self Defence by Iraq Tribes’, 15 Jan. 1929.
399
FO 371/12996, Glubb, ‘Intimidation or Provocation? A note on policy’ (n.d. Nov.
1928).
400
It was Glubb’s status ‘as an expert’ that afforded him a place in discussions of Iraqi
frontier policy: FO 371/12995, ‘Conference held at the office of the Council of Ministers
on Tuesday 21st of August, 1928’.
could ‘focus on the containment of nationalism’.401 Even George Lloyd,

staunch advocate of the Frontiers Administration, thought its arrange-
ments might prove deficient if Egypt’s neighbours became more trou-
blesome in the future.402 A benign international environment gave local
officials greater freedom of action. When conditions changed, as Chapter 5
explores, their prospects looked quite different.
Viewed together, the rise of desert administration offers a revised under-
standing of power relations in the region. Desert affairs fall between the
cracks of most histories of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, or Iraq, relegated to the
margins of the national story. But they were not as sleepy as that state-
centred framework implies. It is a common argument, but a mistake
nonetheless, to imagine Peake embroiled in politics among the urbanites
of Amman while Glubb kept his hands clean ‘out in the desert with his
Bedouins’.403 Britain’s desert corridor was a site of fierce political struggle
between colonial bureaucracies and ‘men on the spot’, royal courts and
aspirant nationalists, paramount shaykhs, parvenu shaykhs and ordinary
Bedouin themselves. It fed into departmental disputes and fueled inter-
service rivalries. Its rhythms owed more to grazing cycles and regional
political crises—Senussism in the west, Wahhabism in the east, and the
displacement of nomads and ‘refugee tribes’ throughout—than to the dis-
tant beat of British parliamentary politics. Indeed, it may well be here, on
its arid margins, that the dynamism and flexibility of the interwar British
Empire are most laid bare. We lose sight of much of this if the growth of
desert administration is explained away as a natural, inevitable response
to problems of law and order. Instead, for many contemporaries, effec-
tive exercise of desert administration served as a touchstone of imperial
authority. As historians, it sometimes helps to turn familiar units of analy-
sis inside out, so that erstwhile ‘margins’ can be re-imagined as zones in
themselves. Officers’ attentions were shifting to the periphery; perhaps we,
as historians, should follow.
British desert administration had fractured origins, but its constituent
parts increasingly came to resemble one another. Events in the desert and
the idea of the corridor itself cut across conventional renderings of the
histories of these countries, be it talk of the ‘uniqueness’ of Trans-Jordan’s
experience of empire, or a framework of the mandates which obscures
the Egyptian connection. Crucially, by 1930 the activities of the Frontier
Districts Administration in Egypt, the Arab Legion in Trans-Jordan, and
the SSOs and Desert Police in Iraq were not merely comparable. Through
401
Pratt, East of Malta.
402
FO 141/664/8, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 31 Dec. 1926.
403
the course of their duties—monitoring migration, pursuing raiders and

smugglers, arbitrating disputes and developing the steppe—these units
and forces were increasingly made to collaborate and connect with one
another. In running the corridor, desert administration acquired a dynamic
of its own. These networks form the subject of part two.
PA RT I I
3
Running the Corridor
To many of the officers featured in this book, it was British ingenuity and
agency that made the desert corridor. Landing grounds, chains of petrol
dumps and the tracks left by motorcars were read as symbols of imperial
labour, etched into a timeless desert landscape. For the explorer Ralph
Bagnold, the trans-desert air mail and car convoy were
forever things apart, foreign, outside the lives of the inhabitants . . . The
tribesman of the Syrian Desert watches the motor-convoy pass; it is not of
his world, merely a special sort of dust storm on the horizon.1
But imperial innovation was not the whole story. The British officers tasked
with developing trans-desert routes were only the most recent arrivals in
an area that had been connected and traversed for centuries. The networks
they maintained across the corridor were layered on top of—even drawn
by—pre-existing and dynamic patterns of mobility and exchange. Some
desert officers appreciated this; most, blinded by that ‘special sort of dust
storm’, did not.2
This chapter explores the relationship between the indigenous, colonial
and pre-colonial connections that together gave the corridor a dynamic of
its own. The aim is to establish how far talk of a ‘desert corridor’ acquired an
administrative reality, to rethink boundary-making in the modern Middle
East, and to consider the role of desert zones, like oceans, as meaningful
political, social and cultural units in the imperial and global past. British
desert officers ‘ran the corridor’ in both senses of the term. Responsible for
maintaining new communications routes, they were plunged into a world
already in motion.
1
CAC: BGND: B6, R. Bagnold, ‘Motor-Cars in the Orient’, The Times, 9 Aug.
1929, p. 11.
2
‘To the map reader and the air passenger’, one desert surveyor later reflected, ‘Sinai
seems no more than a bridge joining the continents; to some 10,000 Arabs it is their
home’: Murray, ‘Land of Sinai’, pp. 140–142.
At first glance, however, the interwar Middle East would seem an

inauspicious setting for exploring these problems. Between 1914 and
1923 its political map had been transformed. The web of provinces and
districts of Ottoman Greater Syria now lay divided between the man-
datory regimes of Britain and France. Most studies stress the ‘devastat-
ing’ impact of these postwar boundaries, laid down with little regard for
demography or topography. At a stroke, the argument runs, a function-
ing regional economy was cleft into a series of national ones. Nowhere
have these lines in the sand been thought more destructive than among
the Bedouin. Boundaries cut through tribal territories and split grazing
areas. Customs regimes and passport controls disrupted seasonal migra-
tion and trade. And when two governments disagreed, ‘the bedouin,
caught in the middle, became pawns in international politics’.3 The
result, we are told, was a new landscape incompatible with the practice
of nomadic pastoralism.
This argument gained much currency at the time.4 It helped to bracket
nomads as a ‘vanishing race’, doomed to disappear in a closing world.5 Yet
aspects of this narrative have proven remarkably impervious to revision.
Historians can still write of the necessary conflict between ‘straight lines
on a map’ and ‘the ancient rhythms of nomadic life’, or of the ‘inevita-
ble’ damage caused by ‘the imposition onto Arabia’ of ‘European rules’ of
sovereignty.6 ‘For a nomad’, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin once wrote,
‘political frontiers are a form of insanity’.7
The interwar years were certainly disruptive for the region’s pastoral
nomads. Tribal autonomy was challenged as never before, and some pat-
terns of grazing and trade underwent considerable change. Nomadic con-
cepts of territoriality had typically been more concerned with the use of
resources and patterns of allegiance than with fixed, exclusive boundaries.
While statistical evidence for the interwar years is sparse, one detailed
study of the Bedouin economy concludes that ‘the overall picture is rather
grim’.8 Here it is useful to distinguish between government sedentariza-
tion schemes and broader structural changes—notably land reform—that
indirectly undermined Bedouin traditions. In a number of ways, British
officers may ultimately have prepared the ground for outcomes that they
3
Hiatt, ‘State Formation’, p. 5.
4
The ‘stereotyping of boundaries’, St. John Philby told the RCAS, was ‘a revolu-
tionary development . . . contrary to the Badawin sentiment of countless ages’: Philby,
‘Survey’, p. 471.
5
Many thought only ‘civilized’, agricultural societies capable of comprehending and
working with delimited frontiers. See, for example: Fawcett, Frontiers, pp. 25–27.
6
Wilkinson, Arabia’s Frontiers, p. xi; Omissi, Air Power, p. 92.
7
Chatwin, ‘Mechanics’, p. 330. 8
Running the Corridor 135
did not always favour.9 Nonetheless, there remain a number of issues that
complicate the prevailing picture of dismemberment and dislocation.
The first surrounds the problematic tendency to examine imperial activ-
ity in the region through the prism of ‘state-building’. Thus a ‘central goal’
of the British in Iraq is held to have been building ‘a liberal, modern, sus-
tainable state’; in Trans-Jordan, meanwhile, officers allegedly worked ‘to
integrate [the Bedouin] within the fold of the nation-state’.10 This cause
may have resonated with some officials, but it did not hold true for all.11 As
we saw in Chapter 2, those most involved in tribal policy were often more
concerned with managing movement across the region than with the mak-
ing of citizens. So rather than hold them to a standard that they might not
have recognized, we may gain more by exploring British relations with the
steppe on their own terms. Given that the strongest critiques of nomadism
have been associated with state-building projects—where mobility may
compromise ‘the national development of territory’12—the particular pri-
orities of colonial officers may have nourished alternate approaches.
A second problem lies in assuming the frailty of Bedouin society: that
to change one aspect of nomadic life would spell the collapse of the whole.
This idea, too, was common enough at the time. New borders, many
officials believed, would make migration impossible, and new technolo-
gies, like the motorcar, would ‘steadily’ deprive the Bedouin ‘of his means
of livelihood’.13 Despite determinist undertones, the tidy idea of social
upheaval ‘from camel to truck’ remains in circulation today.14 But this
surely overlooks Bedouin capacity to work with interwar realities—even
to turn them to their advantage. A feature common to borderlands eve-
rywhere, one global survey suggests, has been ‘the efforts of people to use,
manipulate, or avoid the resulting border restrictions’.15 After all, Bedouin
conceptions of dira (tribal territory) were concerned with the command of
people and resources: it was seldom seen as immutable.16
9
Falah, British Administration, p. 45; Baer, ‘Settlement’, pp. 15–16.
10
Dodge, Inventing Iraq, p. xii; Massad, Colonial Effects, p. 57.
11
As Peter Sluglett has shown, the temporary nature of the Iraq mandate and Britain’s
supposed duty to prepare its people for independence were ‘considerations which seem only
rarely to have had any practical influence on determining policy’: Sluglett, Britain in Iraq,
p. 272.
12
Noyes, ‘Nomadic Landscapes’, pp. 198–199.
13
14
For example: Blecher, ‘Desert Medicine’, pp. 257–258. Recent oceanic histories, by
contrast, emphasize the surprisingly long afterlife of indigenous modes of transport: Bose,
Hundred Horizons, p. 28; Mackenzie, ‘Lakes, Rivers and Oceans’.
15
Baud and van Schendel, ‘Borderlands’, pp. 214–215.
16
‘Indeed’, anthropologist Ugo Fabietti observes, ‘the members of a group are often the
first to consider their territory as having been acquired to the detriment of other groups at
some point in history’: Fabietti, ‘Control’, p. 34.
Thirdly, we should not assume that the emergence of states between

the wars was necessarily hostile to Bedouin interests, or treat nomads and
states as diametrically opposed ‘types’. Such an interpretation is a very
recent one: there is a long tradition in the social sciences, not least in the
Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldûn, of examining nomads as active agents in
state formation. If views of nomads as the victims of states have been fed
by anthropology of the present, then their agency may be better revealed
in examinations of the past. Nomads may even have been peculiarly
well-placed to exploit the obscured sovereignty and complex dynamics of
rule in a colonial context.
A fourth problem lies in exaggerating the speed and impact with which
these boundaries took root in the first place. There is a sense in which
their impression on us as historians (inured to images of Hadrian’s Wall
and Offa’s Dyke) far exceeds that felt at the time. Syria’s borders were not
fixed definitively before 1930; that with Trans-Jordan was only demar-
cated in 1932. The Sinai frontier dated from 1906, but the concrete pillars
that marked it out were spaced up to ten kilometers apart.17 Over time
the weather, passing traffic and local populations could render frontier
cairns all but indistinguishable.18 Even where borders were clearly signaled,
police outposts could be set many miles back: station ‘H4’ in Trans-Jordan
and its counterpart at Rutbah in Iraq were nearly 150 miles apart.19 With
400,000 square miles to administer and around 600 men to do it, the
Deputy Director-General of Egypt’s Frontiers Administration sighed, ‘it is
surprising that any sort of control is possible at all’.20 Evidence of evasion,
overstretch and the permeability of borders is not hard to find.
Finally, for all that we think we know about postwar boundary-making,
we have surprisingly few concrete studies of its local impact. Some scholars
have reasoned that political borders ‘might be expected’ to encapsulate
and sedentarize nomads, but in lieu of closer analysis the claim remains
as much theory as fact.21 Scholars of other borderlands lament ‘a relative
dearth of historical studies of borders . . . as motive forces’ in history, while
the field of ‘border studies’ itself remains overwhelmingly concerned with
examples from elsewhere.22 Middle Eastern boundaries may well have
17
Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 66–67.
18
FO 141/630/30, P. A. Clayton, ‘The Demarcation of the Western Frontier’, 8
Dec. 1937.
19
Lias, Glubb’s Legion, pp. 52–53.
20
FO 371/14764, D. J. Wallace, ‘Anti-Contraband Work in the Frontiers
Administration’, CNIB Annual Report for 1929.
21
Falah, British Administration, p. 11.
22
Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p. 49.
been drafted by aloof statesmen in distant capitals. Their enforcement,

however, fell to local officials whose work we are yet to explore.
Our task, therefore, is to resist being too dazzled by those lines on the
map, or misreading the desert landscape as an undifferentiated ‘waste’.
This chapter examines indigenous patterns of movement—of grazing,
raiding, refuge, and trade—with an eye to their impact on administrative
practice between discrete jurisdictions in the desert corridor. And it starts
by tracking a single form of movement across the Sinai frontier: the smug-
gling, by Bedouin, of the sticky, paste-like intoxicant, hashish. This was by
no means the only form of contraband channelled through Britain’s desert
corridor: the subject deserves a study of its own.23 Yet the topic is ripe for
revision. Much of the work on narcotics and empire doggedly stresses the
agency of imperial committees, commissions and Boards of Trade: ‘wily
Europeans’, one historian characterizes this literature, ‘peddling harmful
products to simple dupes across the rest of the world . . . ’.24 By setting
judgement aside, and treating narcotics as we would any other commod-
ity, its flows may cast fresh light on the porosity of borders and the political
struggles for frontier control. Smuggling is sometimes dubbed ‘the sub-
versive economy’, eluding customs revenue and undermining state legiti-
macy.25 But as we shall see, the politics of nationalism, and the demands of
colonial rule, took an interest in Bedouin mobility too.
A S U BV E R S I V E E C O N O M Y: N AT I O N A L I S M ,
IMPERIALISM, AND THE POLITICS
OF SMUGGLING
Egypt took an early lead in international efforts to prohibit the traffic of

hashish. But before the mid-1920s there was little to suggest that cannabis
use in the country, long established as remedy, restorative, and intoxicant,
would become embroiled in political dispute. Since the medieval period
Islamic scruples against intoxicants had led to fitful attempts at prohibi-
tion. In the nineteenth century a modernizing Egyptian nationalism and a
growing medical profession prompted further legislation against the drug,
23
Indeed, by the end of our period, desert smuggling of arms to Libya, Eritrea and
Palestine was increasingly the focus of attention.
24
Mills and Barton, Drugs and Empires, p. 13.
25
For this concept, see Donnan and Wilson, Borders, pp. 88, 95; Farooqui, Smuggling as
Subversion, p. 8. The term ‘smuggling’ privileges the state’s perspective, but for the sake of
clarity this chapter uses it throughout. As Adam Smith put it, the smuggler might have been
considered ‘an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which
nature never meant to be so’: Smith, Wealth of Nations, ii, 898.
but effective controls remained elusive. Until 1925 narcotics offences in

Egypt were considered mere contraventions, with a maximum penalty of
seven days’ imprisonment or a £E1 fine.26
What changed matters was the unexpected decision at the League of
Nations’ Convention on Opium in 1925 to add hashish to the list of
substances subject to international control. It was the Egyptian delega-
tion—in the face of British opposition—that led this campaign. In his
study of the Convention, historian James Mills has shown how the poli-
tics of nationalism as much as the ethics of reform guided the delega-
tion’s actions.27 Trading in cannabis played an important part in British
efforts to balance the books of the Government of India. In pushing for
a ban, the Egyptian delegation sought to embarrass Britain at an interna-
tional level, and discredit its rule in Egypt itself: forty years of occupation
and ‘protection’ had failed to stamp out the vice. This attempt evokes the
‘discovery’ of Egyptian banditry during the early years of the occupation,
when another national problem had been ‘invented as a political weapon’
by Egyptian elites in a bid to build ‘a stronger, centralized state apparatus’,
and to keep that apparatus out of British hands.28
Because a number of the leading traffickers were European, highlight-
ing the trade also provided ‘a stick to beat the Capitulatory Powers’ and the
elaborate legal structure that shielded them from prosecution.29 Across the
1920s British officials feared the consequences of Egypt taking its politi-
cal grievances onto the international stage, and this delegation lost no
time in reminding the Convention that it was ‘the first time that Egypt
had been represented by a purely Egyptian delegation at an international
conference’.30 When it succeeded in getting hashish placed under interna-
tional controls, the British, as a member of the League, ended up bound to
enforce regulations that their own delegates had opposed.
Mills contends that the issue of controlling hashish was ‘forced on
the conference by Egyptian delegates eager to dent Britain’s interna-
tional standing’. Others see the campaign as ‘part of a civilizing process’
dear to the Egyptian elite, intent on fighting ‘moral degeneration’ and
attaining ‘national modernity’.31 Either way, most studies of Egyptian
26
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 604; Russell, Egyptian Service, p. 225.
27
The following paragraphs are guided by his account: Mills, ‘Colonial Africa’.
28
Brown, ‘Brigands’.
29
George Lloyd also perceived the capitulatory system being abused in this way: FO
371/13880, Annual Report for Egypt and the Sudan, 1927–28.
30
Mills, ‘Colonial Africa’, p. 178. For the political dividends reaped by the campaign in
Cairo, see FO 371/13974, M. F. El-Kaisy, ‘The State of Public Security in Egypt in 1928’
(n.d. 1929).
31
Mills, ‘Colonial Africa’, p. 182; Kozma, ‘Cannabis Prohibition’.
‘drug diplomacy’ end amidst the high politics of Geneva and Cairo.
Enforcement, in contrast, fell to the officers and men of Egypt’s Frontier
Districts Administration. Remote Sinai became the frontline of this
anti-contraband campaign and, in the FDA’s hands, smuggling became
an opportunity, as much as an embarrassment, for the colonial power. The
Egyptian delegation may have hoped that raising awareness of hashish
smuggling would discredit British rule. Within a decade, the mechanisms
developed to fight the trade would themselves be the subject of dispute.
* * *
At the beginning of the interwar period British officials knew little about
hashish smuggling, and had done even less. Thomas Wentworth Russell,
Commandant of the Cairo city police and first Director of the Central
Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, found it ‘difficult in retrospect’ to recall
‘when the seriousness of the drug traffic impressed itself upon us’, but
doubted it was before the 1920s.32 Indeed, earlier attempts to disrupt sup-
plies of white drugs—considered much more harmful to Egypt’s social
fabric—had seen open toleration of hashish smuggling in exchange for
information on the cocaine and heroin trades.33 Claude Jarvis, whose
province now lay at the centre of operations, still could not bring himself
to consider hashish any more of an evil than the hangover one got from
mixing whisky and champagne. If it made the hard life of the fellahin more
bearable, so be it. At any rate, he reasoned, it was ‘impossible’ to patrol
‘every length of coast or mile of desert where hashish might be run’.34 In
common with so many cross-border activities, it was only when ‘the moral
tide threatens eviction from office’ (or when customs revenue is compro-
mised) that policies and attitudes changed.35 When Russell was appointed
to head the new Narcotics Bureau, he had to hastily brush up on the task
ahead. His reports allow us to reconstruct the mechanics of the trade.
Over the course of the interwar years, a growing proportion of the hash-
ish entering Egypt was grown and refined in Lebanon and Syria. Packed
into flat, khaki-coloured cakes, the best-quality hashish came from the
moist soil of the higher Lebanon range, and inferior grades from the irri-
gated plains of the Beqaa. From there it was either smuggled into Egypt
aboard small individual craft, often in league with coastal Bedouin, or
brought overland by camel through Trans-Jordan, Palestine, and Sinai.36
Desert smuggling in Sinai was almost exclusively concerned with the
32
Russell, Egyptian Service, p. 222. 33
Russell, Egyptian Service, p. 236.
34
Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 173; Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 589.
35
36
FO 371/14764, ‘Sources of the Drug’, CNIB Annual Report for 1929.
hashish trade, there being easier means of bringing less bulky white drugs
to market. As other sources of the drug were disrupted in the 1920s, the
importance of the desert route only grew.37
The trade was divided into a hierarchy of owners and financiers (many
European) and local agents and runners. Until the authorities had enough
material to prosecute those at the top, attention centred disproportion-
ately on those running the product. Smugglers made their runs for a fixed
fee or a small percentage of the sale—in general, they took the greatest
risks for the least reward.38 Nonetheless, the quantities run (if the statistics
of interceptions alone are anything to go by) were significant, and point
to the importance of the trade for all parties concerned. By the end of
the 1930s the FDA was increasingly active in seizing contraband hashish,
and was making over sixty captures a year.39 As restrictions tightened, par-
ticularly on the Sinai–Palestine railway and in Egyptian ports, a premium
was set upon those communities able to make overland border crossings
without arousing suspicion. In economic terms, this gave the Bedouin a
comparative advantage.
Bedouin testimonies of their attitudes towards boundaries and smug-
gling are hard to find, and for the most part their voices reach us through
imperial records. Yet for all the problems of cognitive bias that use of
the colonial archive implies, the effort to listen remains worthwhile.
Even imperial perceptions did not develop ‘entirely independent of real-
ity’: officers were, after all, earnestly keen to comprehend (and control)
their charges.40 Read critically, there is much here of real historical value,
offering an insight into Bedouin motives and methods.
Smuggling became an increasingly important activity for Bedouin
communities between the wars, as other lucrative sources of revenue were
disrupted or closed down. When John Glubb, as Administrative Inspector
of Iraq’s Southern Desert, was bombarded with shaykhs’ requests for subsi-
dies, he listed the causes of their economic distress.41 Governments’ resolve
37
FO 371/14764, Wallace, ‘Anti-Contraband Work’, CNIB Annual Report for 1929.
Before 1914 the trade had centred on Greece, Cyrenaican ports, and the Western Desert
coast. Customs officials reported a thriving maritime trade at the turn of the century, but
interception was sporadic. See their reports in FO 141/470/3. During the 1920s and 1930s
tighter controls in coastal ports (Greece prohibited hashish cultivation in 1932) pushed
smugglers to intensify their overland activities: See Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 148, 265–
266; Dumreicher, Trackers and Smugglers.
38
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 592.
39
FO 371/23585, Hamersley, ‘Seizures by Frontiers Administration’, CNIB Annual
Report for 1938.
40
As David Omissi observes: Omissi, Air Power, p. 108.
41
AIR 23/44, Glubb, ‘Monthly Administration Report, Southern Desert Area,
September 1928’.
to monopolize desert authority had disrupted camel raiding, a means of

redistributing wealth and of rebuilding herds that had been weakened by
drought.42 Prohibition of khuwwa also reduced tribes’ income from pass-
ing travellers and caravans. Across the length of the desert corridor, from
the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, fears of the Ikhwan prevented
pastoralists from accessing the best grazing areas, damaging herd numbers
further. Within Sinai, Bedouin also lost their profitable monopolies on
the transport of people and goods to At-Tur and Santa Katerina.43 Some
tribes responded to these problems by moving across boundaries and
switching political allegiance in pursuit of camels, arms and money. As
one section of Iraqi Dhafir heading for Nejd told Special Service Officer
Ernest Howes in 1927, ‘we are going for what we can get’.44 But for oth-
ers, especially as livestock prices collapsed during the Great Depression,
smuggling was a lucrative means of making up for lost income. Jarvis
thought a 10lb load of contraband hashish ‘all that [an Arab] need carry
to make a handsome profit’, while Bedouin could always be found who
would risk imprisonment ‘for little more than a day’s wage’.45 The rewards
could be such that some sacrificed valuable racing camels in their efforts
to bring contraband to market.46 In similar circumstances, smuggling by
nomads mushroomed in Iran in response to new state monopolies on
foreign trade, opium and tobacco. When times are tough, it still goes on
among Bedouin today.47
Hashish is not the easiest of drugs to smuggle. Unlike heroin and
cocaine, its high weight-to-value ratio makes for bulky packages, diffi-
cult to conceal. In running the product into Egypt, the Bedouin showed
an ingenuity and adaptability that many desert officers, inclined to look
down on pastoralism as a backward stage in human development, did
not anticipate. At first, smugglers came up against police patrols so thinly
deployed and ill-organized that they could actually be attacked and driven
off with reasonable hope of success.48 If a patrol proved more tenacious,
the bulk of a smuggling party might pin them down with steady rifle
fire, while a smaller group pushed on to the Canal, burying the contra-
band until it could be collected. Even if police successfully picked up a
smuggling party’s tracks, the chances of interception were remote. The
best smugglers chose the roughest ground (making tracking difficult),
42
The classic study of the economics of raiding is: Sweet, ‘Camel Raiding’.
43
Glassner, ‘Bedouin’, p. 36.
44
AIR 23/305, Howes to Air Staff Intelligence, 2 May 1927.
45
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, pp. 588, 604.
46
47
See Chatelard, ‘Desert Tourism’, p. 727.
48
moved only at night, and left their camels to graze innocently by day.49
The Bedouin, Jarvis complained, ‘possess exceedingly fast-trotting nagas
(she-camels) that can outstrip the Government animals’.50
Government forces were reorganized in response to these shortcom-
ings, but Bedouin parties proved equally resourceful. Smugglers shifted
between multiple routes once the police began to make arrests. It was only
when the number of interceptions fell, but the price of hashish in Cairo
did not rise, that government forces discovered an ‘extensive’ trade passing
down the Wadi Araba to Aqaba, by boat to a point on the Sinai coast, and
thence by camel through the granite mountains of the south.51 By 1929
the Frontiers Administration had identified five main routes across the
Sinai alone, with other Bedouin operating in conjunction with steamer
crews in the desert west of Alexandria.52
As government forces became more familiar with the interior routes of
the Sinai, smugglers improvised techniques of concealing their contra-
band. Small quantities could be stitched into camel saddles, or wrapped
up in Bedouin egals.53 Larger quantities were crammed into small metal
canisters, forced down a camel’s throat, and recovered when the ani-
mal was slaughtered in the Cairo market.54 Alternatively, Bedouin might
shave the hair off a camel’s hump, glue it on top of slabs of hashish,
and then glue the whole package back onto the camel’s skin. ‘Carefully
combed over’, Thomas Russell reported, ‘there was nothing in the
appearance of the hair of the hump to reveal the trick’.55 One final exam-
ple of Bedouin ingenuity. Police in Sinai became suspicious when local
Bedouin, who typically went barefoot, began to wear sandals. On closer
examination . . .
it was disclosed that the soles of these sandals were not made of leather, but
of a specially shaped slab of hashish weighing about 3⁄4 lb., which meant that
for some time every individual wearing shoes had been passing the Customs
barrier with 11⁄2 lb. of the drug on his feet.56
In retirement, Jarvis likened the campaign against desert smuggling to
damming a stream with earth: plugging a hole in one spot only increased
the pressures elsewhere. By the end of our period Bedouin were still
49
Russell, Egyptian Service, p. 273. 50
51
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, pp. 591, 596–597.
52
53
FO 371/23585, Hamersley, ‘Seizures by Frontiers Administration’, CNIB Annual
Report for 1938.
54
Russell, Egyptian Service, p. 277–278.
55
Twenty-five such camels, carrying 140 kilograms of hashish, were intercepted in Feb.
1932: Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 276–277.
56
running contraband and would ‘probably continue for all time’ unless
pressure could be brought on the hashish-producing countries.57 It was
only during the Second World War, when the Syrian and Palestinian
Governments forbade the export of live camels, and when British occupa-
tion forces in the Levant helped destroy the cannabis crop at source, that
the traffic slowed appreciably.58
* * *
The fragmentary nature of the evidence of trans-border narcotics smug-
gling means that fully quantifying the trade may never be possible. Official
statistics relate to seizures only; smugglers’ successes went unreported. Yet
one recent trend among criminologists, as Eric Tagliacozzo has explained,
is to eschew building compendia of statistics and instead ask how, when,
where and why criminal systems operate.59 Taken together, the evidence
points to the emergence of Sinai as a favoured geography of interwar
contrabanding, a real ‘hot-bed of hashish smuggling’. As Syria and the
Lebanon replaced Greece as the chief cultivators of hashish, ‘the Bedouin
Arabs of the Sinai province became the carriers’.60 Desert conditions made
smuggling possible with low overheads and local knowledge: the terrain,
especially in the south, was so rocky and mountainous that tracking was
difficult and visibility restricted. Crucially, as D. J. Wallace of the FDA
explained, Sinai was ‘by no means a waterless desert’. In Egypt’s Western
Desert, water scarcity confined smugglers to well-defined routes. In Sinai,
however, water could be found within 30 kilometres of any given spot.61
This was something that the British—whose book-bred ideas about deserts
as ‘natural frontiers’, as we saw in the previous chapter, were slowly being
undermined—gradually came to appreciate.
All this helps in our task of rethinking boundary-making and explor-
ing the desert corridor’s dynamics. War, certainly, had brought profound
dislocation to the Bedouin livestock trade. In 1913, Egypt imported some
33,000 camels from across north Arabia—a trade worth £12,000–£16,000
a year that all but ceased during the Sinai and Palestine campaigns.62 Tens
of thousands of camels were commandeered by the Ottoman Army from
southern Palestine, and lesser conflicts continued to disrupt Bedouin trade
57
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 591, 600, 604. See also: Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 185–186.
58
Even then, the area under crop showed signs of recovery by the summer of
1945: Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 279, 281–282.
59
Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, p. 373.
60
61
62
FO 141/443, T. C. Macaulay, ‘The Problem of the Sinai Frontier’, 10 July 1920; Toth,
‘Last Battles’, p. 65.
across the interwar years.63 War could be a boon to camel trades: the Awlad
Ali hoped that the Italo-Turkish war for Libya (1911–1912) would ‘last
forever’, for ‘there never has been such a time for the employment of cam-
els’.64 But it could equally be destructive. As an omdeh of the same tribe
told an FDA agent in 1919, ‘[we] have had to pay the price of the last
[1915–16] revolt; our money and animals are all gone’.65 A gradual shift
in herd composition towards sheep, with their shorter grazing range, also
suggests the impact of customs barriers in curtailing Bedouin economic
freedom.66
But it does not follow that transnational patterns of mobility were
instantly or irrevocably circumscribed. Smuggling by nomads met with
such success precisely because legitimate Bedouin trade in livestock,
amongst which contraband was concealed, persisted across north Arabia.67
Freedom of grazing and nomadic migration was written into all major
boundary agreements in the 1920s. These terms were assiduously observed
by local desert officers, even to the point of risking conflict with demands
from the centre.68 ‘Aqilat and Howeitat from Trans-Jordan, for example,
made increasing use of the livestock market at Beersheba, and still drove
herds to the eastern periphery of the Nile Delta in search of buyers.69
Jarvis recorded ‘a considerable va et vient’ across the Sinai frontier as herds
grazed in Trans-Jordan in spring and returned to market each summer, so
much so that a group of Hedjazi rebels could slip through undetected.70
This was corroborated by that rising star of geography, Cyril Daryll Forde
(then working on his landmark text Habitat, Society and Economy), who
counted ‘thousands . . . driven annually from Arabia, through Sinai, to the
Egyptian markets’ in the early 1930s.71
Across the desert corridor, in fact, examples of trans-border grazing and
migration can be found up to the end of our period. Important musa-
bilah relationships—seasonal Bedouin journeys to buy staples and sell
63
FO 141/668/2, Ormsby Gore, ‘Agriculture and Supplies in Palestine’, (n.d. Jan. 1917).
64
WO 106/235, Sudan Intelligence Report No. 219, Oct. 1912.
65
FO 141/781, G. S.(I) Intelligence, ‘Rumoured Senussi Attack on Egypt’, 15
May 1919.
66
Chatty, Camel to Truck.
67
The ‘hairy hashish’ ruse, for example, was discovered amidst a large drove of meat
camels heading for the Cairo market: Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 600.
68
As we shall see later in this chapter. On the Trans-Jordan-Nejd frontier, Articles 4,
12, and 13 of the 1925 Hadda Agreement and Article 9 of the 1933 Treaty of Friendship
guaranteed freedom of grazing, musabilah and through-passage for trade. These agreements
are reproduced in: CO 831/32/9, Trans-Jordan Annual Report for 1934.
69
Ben-David and Kressel, ‘Bedouin Market’.
70
FO 371/16016, C. Warner, ‘Information given orally by Major Jarvis’, 28 July 1932;
FO 141/742/2, Jarvis to Wallace, 5 June 1932. See also: Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 214–215.
71
Forde, ‘Habitat and Economy’, p. 216.
livestock—remained in operation: Nejdi Shammar and Harb tended to

come to Samawah and Zubair in Iraq, the Dhafir approached Samawah,
Nasiriyah or Suq ash Shuyukh, while the Mutair, Ajman, and Awazim
traded at Zubair and in Kuwait. A recently discovered report paints a
picture of one million ‘Anaza camels grazing over a ‘vast triangle’ in the
early 1930s, straddling multiple states and trade routes (as well as the then
under-construction pipeline).72 One French officer, mapping such ‘tran-
shumance’ for 1934, found it not only spilling over national borders, but
beyond the confines of his map sheet.73 By the calculation of one of the
more pessimistic observers of nomadic prospects, Egypt imported an aver-
age 28,137 camels a year between 1929 and 1939—down on prewar fig-
ures, certainly, and out of step with population growth, but not as drastic
a contraction as some would have had us believe.74
If herd sizes tended to diminish between the wars, this was as much
the role of rebellion and unrest in disrupting grazing patterns—and bru-
tal drought in 1933–1936—as the supposed fatal impact of boundaries
themselves.75 Even then, large herds remained commercially viable in Iraq
up to the outbreak of the Second World War, and in Syria until the 1950s
or 1960s.76 It seems much more likely that trans-desert motor and air ser-
vices created a new passenger market, or competed with existing maritime
routes, than they displaced the camel trade, at least within the interwar
period.77 As late as 1938, Glubb maintained there was ‘still a large demand
for camels’ in Egypt, and as butchers’ meat more than transport. ‘The
greatest danger to the Arabian camel breeding industry’, he explained to
all who would listen, ‘is not from competitive means of transport, but
from the competition of the Sudan camels in the Egyptian market’.78
72
De Gaury, ‘Anizah Tribe, pp. 9, 16–19. Between 1920 and 1927, shaykh Nuri Sha’lan
negotiated to enable the Ruwala ‘to graze unhindered over all Northern Arabia’, while oth-
ers were ‘cramped into artificial borders which the jealousy of their rulers forbade them to
leave’: CO 831/13/11, Glubb to Peake, ‘Intelligence Report’ (n.d. 1931).
73
CADN: FBCP 991/35, De Sauvagnac, ‘Rapport de la Transhumance’, 25 Nov.
1934.
74
Epstein, ‘Correspondence’, p. 179. Russell’s higher estimate was for 30,000 cam-
els passing through Qantara alone from the east ‘in normal years’: Russell, Egyptian
Service, p. 275. Either way, these figures say nothing of the volume of unrecognized
trade. ‘Smuggling’, the RCAS were told, may be Trans-Jordan’s ‘main industry’, for its
frontiers ‘could hardly have been better designed for the evasion of guards’: Mackenzie,
‘Transjordan’, p. 263.
75
By Glubb’s calculation, the ‘disastrous’ grazing in 1933–1936 reduced Trans-Jordan’s
camel herds by as much as two thirds: CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Sept. 1937.
76
Toth, ‘Transformation’, pp. 131–134.
77
Toth, ‘Transformation’, p. 121. In many desert communities, the impact of mecha-
nized transport was not felt until the 1960s: Chatty, Camel to Truck.
78
Glubb, ‘Economic Situation’, pp. 449–450. An earlier report written in his capacity
as SSO Nasiriyah described ‘a considerable export trade in camels to Syria and Egypt’ and
There was some continuity with the pre-war years, therefore. But to
characterize nomads’ trans-border movements as conforming to ‘ancient
rhythms’ is to miss the point. Some Bedouin excelled in turning new polit-
ical boundaries to their advantage: boundaries were transformative, cer-
tainly, but not always destructive. For ambitious shaykhs, they provided
an opportunity to exploit the differences between states. The Dahamshah,
as SSO Gerald De Gaury was forced to concede, had for ten years made
the Iraq–Nejd frontier a tool in their bid for independence from the para-
mountcy of Ibn Hadhdhal, ‘play[ing] off the Iraqi Government against
the Nejdi one, in their attempt to secure preferential treatment’.79 This was
shrewd calculation at a time of political flux, not proof of the ‘notorious
fickleness’ of nomads.80 As refugees, too, boundaries offered opportuni-
ties as well as an inconvenience. Far from being baffled by the frontier,
Awlad Ali fleeing Italian repression in Libya ‘regard this [the Egyptian]
side . . . as something in the nature of a “promised land” and embrace any
opportunity of reaching [it]’.81 As pastoralists and raiders the advantages
were equally clear. Flight Lieutenant Woolley described as endemic the
Bedouin practice of shuttling across the Iraq–Nejd frontier, declaring alle-
giance so as to evade taxation. And in 1930 his colleagues fumed at the
‘impudence’ with which
raiders [into Iraq], having recrossed the Nejd frontier, and relying upon their
immunity from pursuit in virtue of Article 6 of the Bahra Agreement, halted
in the open and, within easy reach of British aircraft, proceeded to the dis-
tribution of their loot.82
Viewed from the perspective of local desert officers, it was sometimes
imperial power, not Bedouin mobility, that was frustrated by political
boundaries.
Smuggling can sometimes be the lingering survival of an age-old trade,
a stubborn or anachronistic act. But the hashish trade vividly demon-
strates how nomads could take advantage of a changed environment to
form altogether new patterns of exchange. Banning hashish—creating an
imbalance in the markets on either side of the Sinai frontier—actually
gave rise to a zone of interpenetration that straddled it. As Jarvis would
learn, the frontier south of Rafa ‘needs a surveyor to determine exactly
anticipated ‘increased profits’ from wool exports to come: MECA: JBG 1(203)/2, Glubb
to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
79
De Gaury, ‘Anaiza Tribe, pp. 24–25.
80
Contrary to Royle’s claim: Glubb Pasha, p. 135.
81
FO 141/465/6, A. W. Green, ‘Situation on Western Frontier’, 26 Feb. 1927.
82
AIR 23/51, Monteagle (Foreign Office) to Jakins (Acting Consul, Jedda), 27 Mar.
1929.
which is Sinai and which Palestine . . . a factor of which the malefactor and
merchant with smuggling propensities take full advantage’.83 After all, you
can’t have smuggling without a border to smuggle across.
* * *
So far, we have seen how hashish smuggling provided opportunities for
two different sections of society. For certain Bedouin groups, it was a
means of compensating for lost income in tough economic times. At
Geneva and in Cairo, it handed politicians a stick with which to beat
British colonialism. But on the Sinai frontier, it was the British that came
out on top. In the hands of the officers of the FDA, Bedouin mobility
became a pretext for renewing their hold on power, an ‘important task’
that could not be left to rival sources of influence.84 British desert officers
were by no means the first to exploit illicit trans-border movements in
this way: regulating contraband has long offered officialdoms a means of
entrenching their authority. But the result, across the Sinai frontier, was
the development of ‘private arrangements’ between British officers to act
as if boundaries did not exist, arresting smugglers, exchanging informa-
tion, and intercepting Bedouin parties without reference to the national
governments that they nominally served. The final part of this section
considers how these mechanisms took shape, what they reveal about the
workings of British desert administration, and what this means for histo-
rians of the region.
British influence, as we saw in Chapter 2, deepened on the fron-
tiers of the Egyptian state even as it retreated from the centre, and the
anti-smuggling campaign was crucial in shaping the extent and charac-
ter of British control. It was precisely because Sinai became ‘the smug-
gler’s highway’ that its Governor could justify raising more police than on
any other part of Egypt’s frontiers.85 Before long, these police were being
issued cash rewards for ‘zeal shown in action against the smugglers’.86
These partly sought to pre-empt police corruption, but they also helped
to cement loyalty to the Governor personally, operating ‘in contradistinc-
tion to the Government system’ of miserly, tardy incentives.87 Over the
course of the 1920s, British Governors pushed for a complete reorganiza-
tion of the police, purging them of those suspected of sympathizing with
83
Jarvis, Yesterday, p. 8. 84
85
86
£10 for every man captured, £5 for his camel. Sinai police were initially paid just £2
10s. a month, and under those conditions, Jarvis noted, ‘one did not look for “deeds that
made the Empire’s name” ’: Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, pp. 593–594.
87
FO 371/14764, Wallace, ‘Anti-Contraband Work’, CNIB Annual Report for 1929;
the enemy during the war (or with smugglers or the Wafd thereafter) and
raising new forces under their own command.88 Nile Valley recruits were
consciously excluded: by 1937, 75 per cent were Ababda or Malakat Arab,
and 25 per cent Sudanese. Sudanese representation was particularly high
among the specialist units tasked with fighting smuggling, such as the
Light Car Patrols. Talk of ‘martial races’ justified the practice, but behind
it lay the creation of a force immune to Egyptian nationalism: the FDA as
a separate service.89 Frontier anti-smuggling operations helped justify the
retention of key British personnel, even in positions away from the fron-
tier itself.90 The experience gained in intercepting hashish was also brought
to bear in preventing arms smuggling and policing political unrest.91 ‘The
Frontier Defence Force’, the High Commissioner was reassured, ‘are
good material . . . and are not affected by the Political propaganda of the
townspeople’.92
Control was not just about the numbers: who was being policed mat-
tered. Because of their mobility, Jarvis argued, ‘every nomad Arab of the
deserts is a potential smuggler’. And because of their tribal organization,
‘every member of the tribes is lock, stock and barrel with the contraband-
ists’.93 These assumptions justified exceptional practices of policing. On
one occasion, having fired upon an unarmed dhow smuggling hashish and
killing one of its occupants, the Sinai police planted weapons on the vessel
to justify their actions. ‘Whatever the rights or wrongs of the case’, Jarvis
shrugged, ‘this smugglers’ route lost its popularity after this episode’.94
More generally, and despite Jarvis’ professed intolerance of ‘old Turkish’
corruption, the Sinai police were not above ‘palming a small bit of [hash-
ish] into a pocket while making a search’ to secure a conviction, or pursue
a personal vendetta.95 Long after the threat of invasion had waned, smug-
gling helped justify the continuance of anomalous legal practices in desert
territories, and the persistence of Sinai as an ‘extra-territorial’ anomaly, a
zone outside the main customs frontier at Qantara, and regulated by its
88
FO 141/539/1, G. A. Weir, ‘The Value of the Frontier Administration Forces’, 4
June 1935.
89
FO 141/534/16, J. Marshall-Cornwall, ‘The Frontiers Administration’, 17 Feb. 1937.
90
Thomas Russell, for example, exchanged his command of the Cairo City Police (long
a nationalist objective) for control of the CNIB and the supervision of Camel Police across
the Provinces: FO 141/790/19, Russell to Keown-Boyd, 26 Feb. 1924; Anon., Residency
note on Russell’s career, 13 Nov. 1928. For the considerable powers of intervention this
afforded, see Russell, Egyptian Service, p. 226.
91
FO 141/742/3, W. L. Muir (Commandant, Suez Police) to Keown-Boyd, 28 June
1932. See also: Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 144.
92
FO 141/539/1, Weir to Lampson, 4 June 1935.
93
94
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, pp. 597–598.
95
Governor’s authority.96 Again, the parallels with ‘the invention of banditry’

are striking. Egyptian politicians had ‘discovered’ another national men-
ace in the hope of strengthening their hand, only to lose control of their
creation.97
Equally important as the numbers of police or the extent of British con-
trol, however, were the ad hoc networks and systems that anti-smuggling
work inspired and which transgressed the frontier itself. It was simply
‘impossible’ on Egypt’s desert boundaries ‘to maintain a water-tight sys-
tem of patrols’, so operations would depend on being mobile, flexible, and
well informed.98 This rested on three core elements.
The first was a remarkable investment in communications infrastruc-
ture and technology. Jarvis presided over a separate frontier telephone
network connecting outposts across the peninsula, and run by his own
personnel. This enabled the police to disperse in search of smugglers and
to re-converge ‘from every quarter’ in pursuit.99 Later, portable wireless
sets among the Light Car Patrols enabled ‘rapid communication . . . with
the most remote parts of the Desert’, while nine-inch, ‘camel-foot’ tyres
(developed directly to counter the smuggling threat) allowed patrols to
speed over areas of soft sand where smugglers once had the edge.100 In
maintaining these assets, the Administration built up a reserve of expertise
(‘the most expert and capable mechanics in Egypt’) and of topographic
information, with exhaustive route reports stored at Headquarters for
reference.101
Secondly, anti-smuggling operations made increasing use of Bedouin
personnel and their knowledge of local conditions. Jarvis initially resisted
engaging Bedouin agents, citing the ambiguity of unwritten reports and
nomads’ natural mendacity (instead it was the drug barons, in their recourse
to Bedouin runners, who first capitalized on indigenous expertise).102 That
soon changed. By the early 1930s Sinai was a ‘well policed’ terrain, with
120 ‘Arab’ (Bedouin) police serving alongside 180 Sudanese.103 Locally
recruited trackers were enlisted for every section and post, where they
demonstrated ‘what amounts to a sixth sense’, reading the speed, direc-
tion, composition and payload of smuggler groups from the tracks they
96
FO 141/443, Dowson, ‘Frontier Control, Egypt and Palestine’, 21 Mar. 1921.
97
Brown, ‘Brigands’, pp. 277–278. 98
99
FO 371/17977, McCallum, ‘Administration of the Province of Sinai’; Jarvis, ‘Sinai’,
p. 46; FO 371/17978, M. Lampson, Sinai tour diary (1934).
100
FO 141/799/5, D. J. Wallace, ‘Note on the Frontiers Administration for 1936’, 13
Dec. 1936; Jarvis, ‘Tasks’.
101
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘Annual Report 1921’.
102
Jarvis, Yesterday, p. 185; Jarvis, ‘To Petra’, p. 138.
103
FO 141/703/2, Report to Sir Lancelot Oliphant on Walter Smart’s visit to Jerusalem,
22 July 1932.
left behind.104 As smugglers attempted to hide their camels amidst grazing

herds, officers relied on Bedouin police to detect ‘the breedy blood-stock
type used by the smugglers’, and to decode other telltale signs.105 Bedouin
recruits provided their own camels and saddlery, which helped to negate
the smugglers’ advantage, while known smugglers were even encouraged to
enter their animals into Government Agricultural Shows in an attempt to
improve Government stock.106 Secret agents might have been ‘a somewhat
unsavoury fraternity’, but officers appreciated that they could go where
regular forces could not, and made ready use of smuggler informants to
build up a map of contraband networks.107 In this way, ‘cordial’ relations
developed between FDA officials like Claude Jarvis and the smuggling
communities he pursued: his real malice was reserved for those Europeans
involved in the trade.108 As scholars of other borderlands have observed,
frontier forces can seldom afford to alienate the goodwill of trans-border
communities, which can lead to implicit support for the permeability of
national borders in exchange for assistance with high-profile arrests.109
This was particularly valued on a frontier where topographic and climatic
conditions restricted the efficacy of any air support that anti-contraband
forces might receive.110
Thirdly, as FDA officials became more familiar with Bedouin networks,
their own mechanisms of information and control came to mirror the
trans-border arrangements of smugglers themselves. Bedouin smug-
glers operating between Trans-Jordan, Palestine, and Sinai benefitted
from tribal organizations, territories and customs that pre-dated postwar
boundaries.111 Groups on either side of the 1906 line remained ‘a single
social unit’, still in touch with the affairs of ‘ “parent” tribes of the not
too distant past’ like the Howeitat, Billi and ‘Adwan of Trans-Jordan and
the Hedjaz.112 When tribal disputes flared in Sinai, Jarvis recalled, ‘there
is at once an influx of distant cousins from over the border’ in southern
Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Arabia.113
104
Jarvis, Yesterday, p. 179. See also Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 272–273.
105
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, pp. 600–601. In contrast, Hamed Salim of Trans-Jordan’s
Beni Sakhr recalled having no fear of meeting with the TJFF when out raiding because ‘the
soldiers were not Beduins and if we said that the brand-marks on the camels were ours, they
would not be able to gainsay us’: Lias, Glubb’s Legion, pp. 74–75.
106
Jarvis, ‘Tasks’, p. xiv; Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, pp. 601–602.
107
108
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 601; Jarvis, review of Sea Adventures.
109
Donnan and Wilson, Borders, pp. 98–99, 102.
110
FO 141/534/16, Dowding, ‘Frontiers’.
111
Amiran and Ben-Arieh, ‘Sedentarisation’, p. 163.
112
Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, pp. 1–2; Jennings-Bramley, ‘Bedouin of the Sinaitic Peninsula’
No. 1 (1908), pp. 35–36.
113
Jarvis, ‘Empty Quarter’, p. 664.
At the start of the anti-contraband campaign, however, British officers

were poorly placed to track these trans-border networks. Not only were
their jurisdictions bounded by national frontiers, but smugglers’ routes
ran through an area ‘entirely unadministered’ and ‘a thorough nuisance
to the local officials in Sinai and Transjordan’: that ‘southern wedge of
Palestine territory’, the Negev.114 Jarvis understood that desert drug
smuggling was hardly a priority for the embattled Palestine Police, but
the extent of that Government’s weakness south of Beersheba is surpris-
ing.115 Evidence submitted to the 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine
criticized its ‘neglect of bedouin affairs’ in the Beersheba subdistrict.
Palestine’s Bedouin Control Ordinance, instituting collective responsi-
bility and enabling the direct supervision of Bedouin migrations, was
only passed in 1942.116 The extent of this Palestine Gap was exposed ten
years before, when bands of men from Sinai and Trans-Jordan passed
unchallenged through the Negev before joining Ibn Rifada’s rebellion
in the northern Hedjaz. ‘The unoccupied Palestine corridor’, Egypt’s
Walter Smart observed, ‘could have supplied recruits freely without the
knowledge of the Palestine Authorities’.117 It was ‘only recently’, Jarvis
told the RCAS in 1935, that administration over this ‘Empty Quarter’
had begun.118 Until then, British desert officers improvised to make
good the deficit.
The arrangements they devised provide an insight into the world of
British desert administration, one that falls between the cracks of discrete
national histories. Some measures had formal sanction. In 1925, for exam-
ple, following complaints about the lack of ‘effective authority’ in south-
ern Palestine, FDA patrols were granted permission ‘to exceed the frontier’
and enter Palestine in hot pursuit of raiders and smugglers (though Jarvis
appears to have been doing this long before permission was sought).119
The same year, Peake’s Arab Legion also took control of Aqaba ‘and [the]
114
FO 371/16016, Foreign Office minute, 2 Aug. 1932.
115
116
Falah, British Administration, pp. 39, 46. This is reflected in the focus of Falah’s
research itself, which concentrates on Galilee and northern Palestine.
117
FO 141/742/3, W. Smart minute, 7 July 1932.
118
Jarvis, ‘Three Deserts’, p. 536. These claims were hardly fair to Aref al-Aref, the
Palestinian District Officer at Beersheba in the 1930s, who made the local Bedouin the sub-
ject of his 1944 Bedouin Love, Law and Legend. But they do, perhaps, reflect the premium
desert administrators set on having British officers on the ground to make trans-border
arrangements work. For more on Aref el-Aref ’s career, see Wasserstein, ‘Clipping the Claws’,
pp. 180–182; Tamari, Year of the Locust, pp. 66–68.
119
FO 141/508/5, Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Palestine High Commission,
23 Aug. 1925; John Murray to Under-Secretary of State, Colonial Office, 5 Oct. 1925;
Plumer to Lloyd, 22 Oct. 1925.
surrounding desert’, making Jarvis’ lot ‘a very much easier one, for it is
most inconvenient . . . to have a government that does not function on one’s
frontier’.120
But below the radar, far from the sight of High Commissioners and
Whitehall, much depended on the personal networks built between
frontier officers and on ad hoc, unofficial meetings. By means of ‘a
purely private arrangement’ between the Governors of Sinai, Gaza,
and the Inspector of Police in Jerusalem, Egyptian patrols could chase
raiders and smugglers as far as the Wadi Araba.121 Jarvis in the west
and Peake in the east came to act as ‘next-door neighbours . . . [seeing]
more of each other than do many of the suburban residents of outer
London’. The frontiers of Sinai and Trans-Jordan ‘did not touch’, Jarvis
explained,
for the narrow strip of Palestine’s no-man’s land from Beersheba to Akaba inter-
vened, but, since during the first ten years of our rule the Palestine Government
did not function at all in that part of the world, Peake and I, to ensure the
peace and security of our mutual people, took over, unofficially and unasked,
the administration of this preserve of the outlaw and ran it as a sort of dual and
quite unrecognized mandate.122
The two men developed their own ‘special and quite unofficial system of
extradition, which required no correspondence’ (and thus is largely absent
from the official record). Prisoners were released by one force at a pre-arranged
location only to be directly arrested by the other.123 Peake would surprise
Jarvis by ‘arriving unexpectedly’ by camel, touring car or his private aeroplane
to co-operate on arrests, share information and adjudicate tribal disputes
(Jarvis’ visitors’ books, never examined before, attest to the regularity of these
visits). In this, Peake brought to bear his ‘considerable’ knowledge of south-
ern Palestine, acquired while commanding a camel corps around Beersheba
after the war.124
In the ordinary course of events, Jarvis’ ‘friendly liaison’ with his colleagues
in Palestine and Trans-Jordan comprised the essential work of frontier man-
agement. Officials were largely left to ‘deal direct’ with one another.125 As
nationalist criticism of the FDA grew, its British personnel attempted to
justify their positions by pointing to the advantages of knowing their coun-
terparts personally (even as these very same personal connections were
120
Jarvis, ‘Three Deserts’, p. 536.
121
FO 141/813/20, Jarvis to Tweedy, 25 June, 1924.
122
124
Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 67, 86; C. S. Jarvis, guest book (‘To a Perfect Host, El
Arish’, 1929–1936), private collection.
125
FO 141/718, D. McCallum, ‘The Administration of the Province of Sinai’, 30
Apr. 1934.
themselves giving cause for complaint).126 Peake, on overhearing his work

with Jarvis being likened to ‘a couple of twelfth-century Arab swashbucklers’,
did not dispute the description. ‘We have had to be swashbucklers’, he is said
to have responded, ‘the part was forced on us!’.127
Once alive to these ad hoc connections, the arid ‘gaps’ between the
familiar seats of power—Cairo, Jerusalem, Amman, and Baghdad—can
be reimagined as a unit in their own right, a British nexus of infor-
mation, communications and control, shadowing patterns of Bedouin
migration, raiding and trade (see Map 3.1). Through exclusive networks
that spanned national frontiers, desert officers sought to set the terms
of regional mobility. The Frontier Districts Administration and Peake’s
Arab Legion collaborated to explore the routes across Palestine and their
suitability for motorcars, from Kuntilla in Sinai to Petra in the east.128
The arrangements developed to monitor smuggling proved equally
important to maintaining public security. Peake and Jarvis became
‘accustomed to discuss things over the garden wall’, the former told the
RCAS: ‘[I]‌f he would let me have my two camel thieves, I would send
him back his murderer’.129 ‘Again and again’ Jarvis despatched his police
to make arrests in Palestinian territory. At the height of the Ikhwan
Revolt, Jarvis and Peake pooled the findings of their ‘secret agents’
(those of Egypt were as far east as the Wadi Araba) to monitor the move-
ments and intentions of Faisal al-Duweish.130 When it was thought the
Colonial Office ‘might well resent’ the Governor’s initiative in despatch-
ing spies into neighbouring British territories, steps were taken to ensure
that the commanding heights did not find out.131 Given all this, it was
little wonder that Britons could be confused over the precise status of
Sinai (some thinking it a part of southern Palestine), or that Jarvis—an
Egyptian official on paper—was sought out as an expert on the Negev
at the time of the Peel Commission.132 In the fluid circumstances of the
First World War, British forces had run agents through Sinai, Palestine
and Greater Syria.133 Their postwar successors did not simply continue
126
FO 141/534/16, J. Sterndale-Bennett, ‘Discussion between His Excellency, General
Officer Commanding, and Nahas Pasha regarding the future of Frontiers Administration’,
29 June 1937.
127
128
Jarvis, ‘To Petra’, pp. 140–141. See also: CAC: BGND B3, Bagnold, ‘A Journey to
Transjordan’ (n.d.).
129
Peake, ‘Trans-Jordan’, p. 395; Jarvis, ‘Tasks’, p. xiv.
130
A reminder of Sinai’s place in this story. See Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 211; FO
141/504/7, Jarvis to Director-General FDA, 2 Mar. 1928 and 17 Mar. 1928.
131
FO 371/16016, C. Warner (Foreign Office) minute, 29 July 1932.
132
Jarvis, ‘Sinai’, p. 34; Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 204.
133
See, for example: Parker, Diaries, p. 190.
Map 3.1 The Desert Corridor, c.1930. This map provides the locations of desert outposts and the approximate winter
grazing positions of some of the principal Bedouin groups featured in this book. These positions could vary considerably
according to political, economic, and climatic conditions
to bridge those boundaries—much of their influence and power flowed

from their doing so.
* * *
Bedouin smuggling in the Sinai, then, suggests more than the unlikely
persistence of an obsolete trade. As Bedouin communities adapted to
interwar realities, taking advantage of international borders, so new net-
works of British desert control were drawn across them in response. Rather
than fixate on enumerating the hashish trade, or accounting for the state’s
successes and failures, these evolving systems of contrabanding and con-
trol are themselves worthy of study. British officers and Bedouin runners
were locked in ‘a constant game of chess’, each countering the moves of the
other by redistribution of their pieces.134
In part, this experience reflects the ‘paradoxical character’ of border-
lands across the globe. Many border cultures ‘gain their lifeblood from
borders’ while simultaneously ‘providing sustenance to those state struc-
tures’ intent on stopping them.135 Policing itself, one might add, is ‘a dia-
lectical relationship between the police and the policed’, a competitive but
imitative business.136 But in a colonial context, especially one as irregular
as Britain’s Middle Eastern empire, it pays to look twice at which ‘state
structures’ actually gained from the process. In our Sinai case, and indeed
across the desert corridor, the new police powers and networks of con-
trol were not necessarily to the nation’s advantage. For the ‘state struc-
tures’ of the Egyptian, Trans-Jordanian, and Iraqi frontiers were in colonial
hands; their British personnel were determined to keep their grip over
sensitive frontiers and communications routes. For local British officers,
the anti-contraband campaign inspired mechanisms of peculiarly impe-
rial advantage: watching, policing, and moving through zones on either
side of the national boundary. As they developed closer relationships with
Bedouin tribes, engaging them as agents, informants and police, British
officers came to rely on their movements for all manner of sensitive infor-
mation: the politics and personalities of Ibn Saud’s regime, the prospects
of rebellion in Palestine and the Hedjaz, troop numbers and movements,
environmental forecasts of the grazing situation, economic intelligence on
herd conditions. When these networks broke down, as we shall see, British
officialdom was left blind. Bedouin mobility and imperial rule, it would
seem, were not antithetical, but intertwined.
134
135
Baud and van Schendel, ‘Borderlands’, p. 216; Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p. 89.
136
Omissi, Air Power, p. 108.
Even for the modern age of nation states, therefore, there are advantages
to thinking with different units and spatial configurations. They force us
to rethink established historical problems: here, trans-desert networks and
arrangements cast fresh light on the familiar struggle between anti-colonial
nationalism and imperial rule. For a number of groups, boundary-making
in the Middle East presented opportunities as well as inconvenience. For
the Bedouin, the newfound resolve to restrict the entry of a particular
product was a chance to make good their losses to drought and violence.
To aspirant nationalists, smugglers’ ‘subversion’ of national borders offered
a platform for decrying colonial rule. But for British officers on the fron-
tier itself, searching for ways and means of retaining influence in a chang-
ing world, it became an excuse to attempt a subversion of their own.
AN INTERSTITIAL EMPIRE
Over the course of the interwar years, two different forces were at work
mitigating the new boundaries between Egypt, Palestine, Trans-Jordan,
and Iraq. First, Britain’s imperial routes to the East, and its resolve to con-
trol the zones through which they passed, imposed a supra-nationalism
from above. Second, indigenous patterns of mobility and exchange—
notably the migration, raiding, and trade of Bedouin communities—
applied regionalist pressures from below. These two types of networks are
seldom examined in tandem. Their intersection, however, is what made
the desert corridor a distinct historical space.
Hashish smuggling across the Sinai frontier provides a good example
of this process at work. But it was by no means the only form of indig-
enous steppe activity that shaped imperial rule. Similar stories could be
told about any number of flows: Bedouin raids, overland pilgrimage, the
displacement of refugee tribes and the clash of dynastic ambitions all drew
discrete officialdoms in their wake.137 Space allows examination of just two
such processes in detail.
The first suggests the pre-colonial origins of new trans-desert routes: the
links, so to speak, of Britain’s desert corridor. At a fundamental level,
knowledge of former routes exerted a powerful influence on impe-
rial approaches to the region, encouraging local officers to look beyond
national boundaries and consider the corridor as an area in its own right.
137
In October 1926, for example, 200 raiders under Shibrum ibn Jabhan set out from
Syria, crossed Iraq and struck into Kuwait, an outward journey of around 600 miles. They
were attacked on their return by a mixed British, Iraqi and Bedouin force: CO 730/105/9,
Air Staff Intelligence, ‘Raid by Shammar into Kuwait on 5th October’, 29 Nov. 1926.
The physical remains of reservoirs and wells along the former Damascus–
Baghdad caravan route—at Qasr Khabbaz and Qasr Amej—influenced
the projected course of Major Holt’s trans-desert railway, just as Baghdad’s
past as ‘a great trading centre’ fed his hopes of its commercial viability.138
For Peake, the very reason ‘for the importance of Trans-Jordan’ was that
‘from the earliest times important trade routes have traversed the country’.
Britain’s current role, as heir to the Pharaohs, the Nabataeans, and Rome,
was to complete and tarmac an Iraq–Palestine road to facilitate transit
once more.139 Such awareness of the desert as an ancient hub obscured
the fact that some new links (between west and east) ran perpendicular to
older caravan flows (between north and south). For Glubb, what mattered
more was the desert’s past as ‘an inland sea, which washes the shores of
Trans-Jordan, Damascus and Iraq’, and with implications for how ‘nauti-
cal’ Bedouin should be governed.140
Existing patterns of connection and exchange shaped imperial
route-building in more concrete ways too. Take, for example, the most
famous of the overland motor services: the Nairn Motor Company. Gerald
and Norman Nairn’s imperial enterprise may have captured the imagina-
tion of the British press, but its success owed much to the enthusiasm
and advice of Hajji Mohammed Ibn Bassam, a shaykh of the Ruwala and
an experienced merchant.141 In 1918 Ibn Bassam had been contracting
for the Ottomans on a large scale, running caravans laden with cloth,
sugar, coffee, and petroleum from Kuwait, across the Syrian Desert, to
Ottoman forces in Damascus and Medina. Business remained good into
the peace: in the early ’20s it was believed that Ibn Saud received much
of his Syrian news from Ibn Bassam, and that ‘a good deal of Turkish
ammunition . . . arrived in Nejd from the same source’.142 By 1922 he
was still running contraband between Damascus and Baghdad, this time
gold, selling it in Iraq at substantial profit. The nature of his cargo set a
premium on quick passage through sparsely populated areas, and early in
1923 he began to experiment with using motorcars via Deir-ez-Zor and
Rutbah. By April, when the Nairns made their first reconnaissance of the
route, Ibn Bassam was in a position to act as their host, supplying the
Bedouin guide and representative (rafiq) that made the trip possible.143
Between May and August the Company explored a number of alternative
routes, but ‘the wisdom of old Ibn Bassam in choosing the original route
138
Holt, ‘Syrian Desert’, pp. 181, 186. 139
140
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, pp. 28–29.
141
For press cuttings relating to the ‘Nairn way’, see MECA: Nairn collection.
142
‘Traffic between Damascus and Koweit’, Arab Bulletin, No. 86 (21 Apr., 1918),
p. 129; Arab Bureau: notes on the Middle East (NS), No. 4 (24 May, 1920), pp. 119–120.
143
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, pp. 44–54; Munro, Nairn Way, pp. 36–37.
over which he led us was fully justified’, and the Company relied on it
exclusively thereafter.144
In Egypt, the car patrols of the Frontier Districts Administration also
depended on a web of pre-colonial masrabs and wells. Wartime experience
had proved these to be ‘almost invariably’ the most direct route (‘consist-
ent with good travelling’) between water supplies, grazing grounds, and
important locations. Each one worked as a navigational aid, but the whole
formed ‘a network of lines which can be made to serve as a substitute for
the conspicuous features and identifiable landmarks’ in which new offic-
ers found the environment so deficient.145 Following cairns, graves, and
masrab haramea (smuggler’s roads) afforded ‘a great sense of confidence in
travelling across unknown tracts of country’: one report for the Western
Desert plotted nineteen such routes, notably the Masrab el Khamsa, an
active trade route between Siwa (‘Piccadilly Circus of the western desert’)
and the coast.146 In the Sinai, the FDA’s main road between Suez and
Aqaba was built along the former Darb El Hajj to Mecca (though pilgrims
now went by rail and by sea).147 Even in the arid ‘wastes’ of empire, it
seems, movement was not dictated by strategy alone.
If the links in Britain’s desert corridor owed much to the specifics of
local usage, then so too did its nodes: the new geography of police out-
posts, forts and patrols that sustained imperial communications. In 1930,
Air Vice-Marshal Playfair explained how desert outposts should be sited to
square the demands of supply and ‘tactical distance’ with the movements
of Bedouin themselves. To collect information quickly, posts should be ‘on
grazing grounds frequented by Bedouin, also near the main caravan routes,
where a friendly atmosphere can be formed between the occupants of the
posts and the Bedouin in the area’. Anything too far from a water supply
‘would be avoided by the Beduin’ and hence ‘useless’ as an intelligence
centre.148 These were principles that Peake shared: indigenous movements
should be the deciding factor, not abstract military science.149 After all,
if desert posts were to be an ‘exhibition of solid unmoveable strength’ in
the tent-dweller’s midst, then they had to be where they would be seen.150
144
McCallum, ‘Discovery’, p. 50.
145
WO 33/2831, C. H. Williams, Report on the Military Geography of the North-West
Desert of Egypt, (n.d. 1919).
146
WO 33/2831, C. H. Williams, Report on the Military Geography of the North-West
Desert of Egypt, (n.d. 1919); IWM: C. H. Williams papers, Williams, Desert Memories
(1920), p. 15.
147
Jarvis, ‘Roads in Egypt’.
148
149
IWM: FGP 13 (Letter book), folio 64, Peake to Glubb, 16 Feb. 1931.
150
FO 141/514/5, W. Jennings-Bramley, note on the fort at Burg El-Arab, 24
Aug. 1926.
Many of these posts remain striking features of the landscape: some, as at

Wadi Rumm, were still in use seventy years later.
Thus the Azraq post was ‘admirably placed from an intelligence point of
view’. At the head of the great, green tongue of the Wadi Sirhan, it com-
manded the most important trade route to the east from Amman. The post at
Bair, with its two excellent wells, was the ‘keystone of the corridor for raiding
parties from the West and trade, car and camel routes’. The old Ottoman fort
at Mudawara, meanwhile, was ‘admirably situated for obtaining information
from tribes moving from the West to the South East’.151 Each of these posts
also picked up rumours from across the border—from Kaf and Syria (Azraq),
Jauf (Bair) and the Hedjaz (Mudawara).152 Other locations, meanwhile, car-
ried associations with past rulers which helped to confer legitimacy: Auda
Abu Taya’s former stronghold at Al Jafr was badly run down, ‘full of bugs
and snakes’, but still a sort of nerve centre for the Howeitat, and taken on
as such by Trans-Jordan’s Desert Patrol.153 At times, such attention to the
channels of grazing, raiding and trade even trumped those of more familiar
imperial assets. When the Iraq Petroleum Company wanted Desert Patrol
headquarters relocated to one of their pumping stations, their request was
turned down flat: the station was stuck in the middle of a lava field, where ‘no
Arab ever has any call to go’.154
Location, however, was not all. Many an outpost was designed with
indigenous flows in mind, receiving, interpreting and retransmitting
information. In Trans-Jordan Glubb’s beau geste desert forts (ever the engi-
neer, he planned them himself ) were not merely built to withstand siege
and improve the rifleman’s field of fire:
There was also the Majlis, or Council Chamber, where passing Bedouins
drank the bitter coffee . . . offered to them in exchange for gossip . . . Anything
that happened within a radius of 100 miles of each was certain to be reported
sooner or later.155
In this, Glubb adapted established principles. In 1924 he had set up tra-
ditional white guest tents outside Iraq’s Abu Ghar fort (itself a former
bazaar) to welcome passing travellers and build a map of tribal locations.156
151
CO 831/10/1, P. Playfair, ‘Report on the Siting of Desert Intelligence Posts in
Transjordan’, 20 June 1930.
152
CO 831/10/2, Glubb, ‘Policy for the Control of the Trans-Jordan Deserts’, 19
Nov. 1930.
153
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: June 1937.
154
Azraq, instead, was ‘the only place from which to feel the pulse of, and control, the
whole district and its tribes’: CO 831/29/1, Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1934.
155
Lunt, Arab Legion, p. 52. Glubb’s blueprints survive in: CO 831/10/2, Glubb, ‘Policy
for the Control of the Trans-Jordan Deserts’.
156
Glubb, War in the Desert, p. 144; AIR 23/302, Glubb, ‘Final Report on Defensive
Operations against the Akhwan, Winter 1925-6’, 18 May 1926.
Later, he specified that the Desert Patrol use the distinctive tents of the
Aqail: long-range merchants, exempt from the raiding economy, their
tents had a covered, shady space for sharing news over coffee.157 Other
SSOs improvised something similar, hosting desert hunting expeditions
(for gazelle, ibex, chukar, or mouflon) as ‘one of the best means of obtain-
ing . . . information’.158 Time was of the essence in running the desert cor-
ridor, and news sent by wireless set from among the tribes could arrive two
to four days faster than by courier.159 British visions of the future of the
Bedouin, as we shall see in Chapter 4, may have owed much to theory and
the imagination. But the groundwork done to facilitate steppe command
was practical and hardheaded. Bedouin use of the landscape, as much as
its topography and terrain, shaped the infrastructure of British control.
* * *
Recent scholarship has stressed the centrality of information-gathering to
the conduct of imperial rule.160 As the disposition of desert forts and out-
posts suggests, it was key to how the corridor was run too. But exploring
the relationship between empire and information can also uncover lost
patterns in the past, and restore otherwise marginalized groups that spe-
cialized in its provision. As studies of India have shown, there were some
whose trades generated peculiar information, and some polities ‘consti-
tuted to an unusual degree through their networks of espionage and infor-
mation collection’.161 For the desert officers of Britain’s interwar empire,
the Bedouin were one such community. Sidelined in many a national nar-
rative, their importance to this imperial undertaking was out of all propor-
tion to their numbers.
European travellers often dismissed the desert as a ‘waste’, but it was an
information-rich environment, and the Bedouin a pronounced knowl-
edge community. The complex factional rivalries of the steppe set a pre-
mium on information. Bedouin raiding parties, the RCAS heard, ‘fully
understand the value of obtaining accurate information of the enemy
while deceiving him regarding their own intentions’.162 In 1929 Glubb
got an insight into these traditions during defensive tribal operations on
the Iraq–Nejd frontier. Success in the field, he concluded, depended on
juggling environmental and strategic information, sifting ‘constant and
157
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1, Glubb, ‘Tentage for the Desert Patrol’ (n.d. 1930).
158
Anon., ‘Role of Special Service Officers’, pp. 55–57.
159
FO 371/12994, E. Ellington memorandum, 2 June 1928.
160
The landmark work is: Bayly, Empire and Information. For the Middle East, see
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence.
161
Bayly, ‘Knowing the Country’, p. 5.
162
often contradictory reports regarding the movements of the enemy’. The

key decision—when to concentrate the tribal force—was all a matter of
timing. To pitch camp too soon was to risk herd losses from restricted
grazing; postponing too long, meanwhile, risked destruction in detail.
Feuding parties used nadisa (spies) to locate enemy camps and stake out
lines of advance along grazing and wells; sabr (reconnaissance parties)
‘to capture prisoners and cross-question them’; nidhir to act like pickets;
and habr to infiltrate the target camp and report on its ‘eleventh hour
dispositions’.163
What was true in war was equally true in peace. Bedouin pastoral-
ism depended on weighing all manner of political, economic and
environmental information. Grazing conditions and water sources,
networks of khuwwa, protection and patronage, and the likely mar-
ket conditions at the end of a season all had to be considered in
advance of moving the herd. Responding to changes in these condi-
tions, too, required ‘a complex and far-flung network of social rela-
tionships’. In this, the customs of desert hospitality were not simply
a means of relieving boredom: they encouraged travellers to share
their news. 164 All this gives the lie to that well-worn stereotype of
the rootless, aimless, ‘wandering’ nomad. In truth, pastoral nomads
tend to have a very fixed sense of place, their livelihood depending
on exploiting to the full the scanty resources and opportunities of
a given area or territory. (As the anthropologist Hugh Brody has
put it, viewed globally and over the longue durée, it is agricultural
societies that have been most on the move—a fact no student of
the British World could deny.) 165 Other regional powers had rec-
ognized this before: Muhammad Ali and the Ottoman Empire, we
now know, coveted nomads’ networks and skills. 166 In Bedouin eyes,
wrote Gertrude Bell, the open steppe was ‘set thicker with human
associations than any city’. 167
It was this understanding which Britain’s desert officers sought to
tap. The routine work of desert administration depended on Bedouin
co-operation. Locating loot, for example, was essential to resolving
tribal disputes, but it was best left to the Bedouin themselves. By
allowing the owners to move freely between jurisdictions, they would
163
MECA: JBG 1(203)/3, Glubb, ‘Control and Employment of Nomad Tribes in
Desert Warfare’ (n.d. 1929).
164
Marx, ‘Political Economy’, p. 91; Forde, ‘Habitat and Economy’, p. 218.
165
Brody, Other Side of Eden, p. 7.
166
Aharoni, Pasha’s Bedouin; Kasaba, Moveable Empire; Barfield, ‘Tribe and State
Relations’, p. 153.
167
Bell, Desert and the Sown, p. 60.
‘ferret out their camels’ in no time: ‘the Bedouins’, experience taught

Glubb, ‘know each other better than we can hope to know them’. 168
Officers on the most sensitive frontiers were especially in need of
their understanding of local politics: when Frederick Peake unwit-
tingly took coffee with Sultan Atrash—then at the top of Syria’s ‘most
wanted’ list—the damage done to Anglo-French relations took years
to repair. 169 In general, officers relied on the networks of news and
gossip around the Bedouin mudif (guest tent) to carry ‘the greater
part of the inter-communication between government and the
tribes’. This was ‘of inestimable value’ during the Ikhwan Revolt,
though hardly cheap (with fifty or sixty guests a night, the hospitality
bill soon ran up).170
Crucially, the Bedouin’s trans-border skills were in particular
demand, not least because they could go where desert officers, for-
mally, at least, could not. It was Bedouin informants who kept the
FDA updated on the course of Omar Mukhtar’s insurgency in Libya,
just as conferences between tribesmen from Trans-Jordan and Iraq
allowed SSOs to eavesdrop on their ‘desert talk’, from Saudi intentions
in Northern Arabia to the attitude of the imam of Yemen.171 Bedouin
trackers assisted police work in Iraq and Kuwait as well as in Sinai.172
Disruption to desert entrepots like Zubair, meanwhile, instantly
‘restricted the transmission of intelligence news’.173 Even Peake, not
known for his fondness of the desert tribes, acknowledged their role
in this. Should Trans-Jordan’s Bedouin be so neglected as to defect to
Ibn Saud, then
all intelligence as to what is happening across the border will practically cease,
and in times of troubles in Palestine . . . a very much larger garrison must be
kept standing in Trans-Jordan, than would be necessary if the Bedwin were
our friends and Intelligence Agents.174
168
MECA: JBG 7(208)/2, Glubb to Peake, 21 Mar. 1931; CO 730/168/8, Glubb,
‘Annual Report on the Administration of the Southern Desert of Iraq, 1 May 1929–16
May 1930’.
169
‘In the Arab world’, Peake’s biographer explained, ‘people are never formally intro-
duced . . . [E]‌very Beduin appears to know, not only the identity, but the complete family
history of any dim figure that may appear over the horizon’: Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 103.
170
MECA: JBG 1(203)/3, Glubb, ‘Control and Employment’.
171
FO 141/465/6, Green to Bayly, 27 Dec. 1926; AIR 23/295, Doster to Air Staff
Intelligence, 10 Aug. 1927.
172
Dickson, Arab of the Desert, p. 33; De Gaury, ‘Anizah Tribe, p. 27.
173
AIR 23/48, Jope-Slade to Air Staff Intelligence, 23 Feb. 1929. See also: AIR 23/19,
Kitching to Cornwallis, 7 July 1925.
174
CO 831/11/1, Peake to Cox, 24 Dec. 1930, encl. in Chancellor to Passfield, 3
Jan. 1931.
When neighbouring states succeeded in blocking these border flows (the

Italians in Libya went to extreme lengths to do so), both British intelli-
gence and the rationale for desert administration suffered.175
In return, and like many border communities, the Bedouin were well
placed to exercise leverage over the state, profiting from the arrangement
in a number of ways. At a basic level, evidence of tribal co-operation
dampened British enthusiasm for settling the tribes on the land: there was
a guarded acknowledgement of the advantages of mobility. Thirsty for
information on Libyan politics, some in the FDA urged the government
to do ‘all in its power to keep its deserts as full of Arabs as the deserts will
support’, for as intelligence providers, a ‘protective fleet’ and a potential
source of ‘virile’ recruits, Egypt acquired ‘greater value from its tribesmen
than any it can get by their settling . . . ’.176 Other Bedouin profited in
more personal ways. Fahd bin Hadhdhal and Ajil al-Yawir, as we have
seen, received generous government subsidies. Further incentives came in
the form of land grants, tax breaks, or offers of exemption from conscrip-
tion.177 So in one sense, desert administration can be seen as the result
of a temporary, conditional alignment of British and Bedouin resources,
information and interests.
Underpinning the whole relationship, from Sinai in the west to the
Shamiyah in the east, were the varied provisions of so-called ‘Desert Law’.
Both the workings of Bedouin customary law and ‘the making of custom-
ary law’ in general (an imperial take on ‘the invention of tradition’) have
vast, specialist literatures of their own. But the operation of Desert Law
also rewards examination from an imperial perspective.178 Political maps
of the postwar Middle East, like political maps anywhere, would have us
believe that the law operated seamlessly within each nation’s boundaries.
Contemporary talk of ‘the closing of the world’ gave the idea credence, and
it survives today, in ‘a prominent and seductive narrative about the progres-
sive rationalization of space’.179 But as Lauren Benton has recently shown,
175
‘Now that the Italians have closed the Egyptian Frontier the Frontier Districts
Administration may not have as many sources of information at their disposal as they have
hitherto. It thus appears that the Sudan authorities in Halfa province may be in the best
position to fill the gap . . . ’: FO 141/691/16, Foreign Office (Egyptian Department) to
Cairo Residency, 19 Mar. 1931. See Chapter 5.
176
FO 141/514/5, W. E. Jennings-Bramley to Egyptian Ministry of War (n.d. Sept
1926); W. E. Jennings-Bramley to Residency, note on Burg el-Arab, 24 Aug. 1926.
177
See, for example: FO 141/514/5, Bedouin petition to Lord Allenby, 2 Sept. 1922. For
a case study of tenurial policy, see Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, pp. 233–244.
178
As John Comaroff has observed, it is one thing to insist that legal forms were crit-
ical to colonial rule, ‘quite another to explain exactly why, when and how’: Comaroff,
‘Colonialism’, p. 308. For Bedouin customary law, see Bailey, Bedouin Law; Stewart,
‘Tribal Law’.
179
Benton, Search for Sovereignty, p. 9.
imperial legal frameworks were more often disaggregated, fragmented, and

uneven; stronger in certain corridors, conduits, and enclaves, and cautious,
conciliatory, or compromised elsewhere. Moreover, distinctive legal orders
were often linked to recognizable landscapes of commerce and commu-
nication: rivers, ocean passages, islands, and hills. The evidence of British
experience in running the corridor suggests we might add deserts to this
list of geographical tropes. Mapped, the practices associated with Desert
Law would disrupt ‘national space’, revealing unfamiliar concentrations of
power and distinct legal arrangements for much of Iraq south of the towns
and villages of the Euphrates (cutting across the Muntafiq, Diwaniyah,
Karbala, and Dulaim liwas); the entirety of the Sinai peninsula; much of
Egypt east and west of the Nile and its Delta; and Trans-Jordan’s ‘Desert
Area’ to the east of the Hedjaz railway. Even this would be insufficient, for
power and influence flowed along specific conduits within and without its
designated writ. Cadastral surveys stopped at the desert edge. Beyond that
lay a very different legal order, with distinct implications for imperial rule.
The very popularity of Desert Law among the Bedouin—their prefer-
ence for being judged broadly according to their own customs—was its
central advantage to Britain’s desert officers. Generally, officers quickly
found that imposing ‘foreign laws’ on the Bedouin produced only ‘non-
co-operation’, fatal to Britain’s steppe arrangements.180 This repeatedly
outweighed reservations over the more eccentric, ‘mediaeval’ customary
provisions. ‘Although the rules of evidence are of the simplest and the
evidence often of the flimsiest’, Peake noted in 1929, ‘yet shoals of com-
plainants apply for their cases to be heard by . . . the new Bedwin Control
Board’.181 Nothing shows this popularity more than the howls of Bedouin
protest which met the abrogation of customary law by the region’s suc-
cessor states.182 (Many Bedouin in Egypt, Israel, and Jordan still consider
customary law more effective than state law, making informal use of it
among themselves).183 This alone should give pause to those intent on
seeing customary law as a convenient colonial fiction. Desert Law, like
customary law everywhere, ‘had to be perceived as legitimate to be effec-
tive’: talk of invention here is out of place.184
Yet if this all seems rather craven, it wasn’t, for Desert Law came packed
with procedures and provisions of imperial advantage too. Officers were
180
Glubb, ‘Relations’, p. 421; Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 68–71; Glubb, Story,
pp. 76, 177.
181
FO 371/13754, Peake, ‘Causes underlying racial troubles in Palestine’, 11 Sept. 1929.
182
Abu-Jaber and Gharaibeh, ‘Bedouin Settlement’.
183
Marx, ‘Political Economy’, p. 91; Cole, ‘Where Have the Bedouin Gone?’, p. 251;
Stewart, ‘Customary Law’, pp. 273–274.
184
Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism’, p. 4.
quick to recognize its immediacy and power. Until 1917, such criminal
and civil cases as come to the authorities’ attention in Egypt’s Western and
Sinai Deserts were heard by regular courts in Alexandria, Damanhour,
Tor, or El Arish. Desert Law, in contrast, convened tribal courts on the
spot: faster, more convenient, and affording local Governors considerable
autonomy.185 Trans-Jordan’s Law of Tribal Courts (1924 and 1936) and
Bedouin Control Law (1929) came to operate in a similar fashion. In Iraq,
historians have tended to assume that Bedouin disputes came under the
Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulations of 1916 and 1924—‘the
most important official instrument of British tribal policy’ and ‘another
Indian importation’.186 Local practice, however, tells a different story. By
the late 1920s, it seems that officers responsible for desert areas were aban-
doning the Regulations for something more flexible. The Regulations,
Glubb told Percy Cox at the RCAS, ‘must be tried under Government
supervision in a town’, making them ‘inapplicable to tribes which camp
out in the desert’.187 ‘A more elastic system’ was devised by which Desert
Police, despatched by the Administrative Inspector, would ‘persuade the
defendant to pay up’, arrange arbitration by ‘the nearest Shaikh’, or escort
specialist arbitrators round the desert if necessary.188 Justified in terms of
efficiency, the latitude granted to local officers is striking.
Indeed, many of the powers that desert officers accrued either drew
strength from interpretations of customary law, or were explained through
the need to control unruly nomads, ‘here today and gone tomorrow’.189
Thus officers might preside over tribal hearings as their ‘sheik’, or with-
hold the right to confirm court decisions. Practices like bisha’a (trial
by ordeal involving a red-hot spoon) met with the ‘righteous wrath’ of
reformist national governments, ‘yet I have found the process’, wrote an
unrepentant John Glubb, ‘of immense value when working as a magis-
trate’.190 Another practice, wesga, permitted raid victims to seize any ani-
mals belonging to any member of the ‘guilty’ tribe, until the actual culprits
were identified and brought to book. ‘While government cannot generally
recognise [such] an act of lawlessness’, Glubb wrote privately in 1928,
‘there are times when it may be advisable to wink at it, as the only possible
185
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘Annual Report 1921’.
186
For example: Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, pp. 11, 169–172; Dodge, Inventing Iraq, p. 92.
187
188
CO 730/168/8, Glubb, ‘Annual Report on the Administration of the Southern
Desert’.
189
190
Glubb, Story, pp. 181–182. Jarvis, more cautious, excised reference to his recourse to
the ‘confronting witnesses’ technique from the first editions of his books. Although prac-
ticed in the desert, it was not officially recognized: Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 274–275.
method of bringing an elusive defendant into court’. By 1930 he and SSO

Woolley were actively doing it themselves, confiscating 370 camels from
the Ruwala in this way.191 In all territories, officers considered the sheer
speed of trial and punishment and the ability to secure convictions ‘in the
apparent absence of any evidence whatsoever’ vital adjuncts to their con-
trol of the desert routes of empire.192 The main difference between British
rule in the desert and in Palestine proper, Glubb wrote, ‘is that they are
civilised, and we are not’. There were advantages to that.193
This is not to say that desert officers didn’t meddle with custom. To
facilitate their control of multiple Bedouin groups and large territories,
some did try to flatten divergent local readings of customary law.194 The
principle of ‘collective responsibility’ was invoked in particularly crude
ways.195 Jarvis also worked to prohibit customs that, in his judgement,
threatened stability, and expedited particular cases as and when he saw
fit.196 In general, however, British desert officers did not so much invent
Desert Law as favour certain customary practices, and make their provi-
sions work for them, too. The result was to so entrench officials’ authority
as to be near-indistinguishable from martial law—so exhaustive, in fact,
that Italian intelligence on Egypt’s western frontier refused to believe mar-
tial law had ever ended.197
Desert Law was ‘rarely a hard and fast thing’, but even its impreci-
sion had imperial advantages (it was the great flaw of ‘European law’, in
contrast, that it worked ‘to the exclusion of human initiative’).198 As one
Colonial Office hand minuted, Desert Law was ‘but a new version of the
ancient argument as to “District Officer justice” versus “legal justice” ’: in
practice, it meant that sensitive frontier zones adjacent to imperial com-
munications routes were removed from the jurisdiction of national elites,
thereby bucking the trend of the interwar years.199 ‘Bedouin Law’ formed
191
MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Police Work in the Desert’, 3 July 1928; AIR 23/84,
Woolley to Air Staff Intelligence, 17 Mar. 1930. In Trans-Jordan, the practice was abol-
ished in deference to Saudi complaints in 1933. Glubb lamented its passing: CO 831/37/3,
Glubb, TJDR: Sept. 1936.
192
For example: Kennett, Bedouin Justice, pp. 40, 46–47; IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript
draft autobiography), p. 154; Dickson, Kuwait, p. 517. Before the introduction of Desert
Law, Thomas Russell railed at judges letting suspects go because they did not recognize the
testimonies of Bedouin trackers as evidence: Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 64, 66–67.
193
IWM: FGP 5/1, Glubb, Report on the Palestine Frontier, p. 13.
194
MECA: JBG 3(205)/7, Dickson to Political Resident, Bushire, 16 Aug. 1929.
195
Kennett, Bedouin Justice, pp. 18–21.
196
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 148–150
197
FO 141/465/6, Campani to Paterno, 8 June 1928.
198
MECA: JBG 3(205)/7, Dickson to Political Resident, Bushire, 16 Aug. 1929; Glubb,
‘Arab Civilisation’, pp. 420–423.
199
CO 831/41/11, Colonial Office minute, 27 Oct. 1937, attached to Glubb,
TJDR: Sept. 1937.
‘a most useful weapon of law and order’, the FDA’s Austin Kennet wrote
in 1925, ‘yet officially, according to the Constitution of Egypt, [it] does
not exist’.200 Trans-Jordan’s Bedouin Control Law invested power in a
three-person committee in Amman, but because enforcement fell to the
Commander of the Arab Legion, Peake was afforded considerable latitude.
‘If you consider it necessary to punish [raiders] on the spot’, he advised
Glubb as he settled into his new job, ‘do so, and I will put it right here;
but if you have a case you can send here occasionally, send it along for [the
Emir] Shakir to play with; this simply for diplomatic reasons’.201 All this
was especially welcome at a time when Britain’s grip over other areas of the
law—such as the Capitulations in Egypt, for example—was beginning to
slip. Within their desert jurisdictions, local officers basked in their powers
of intervention. And with broadly common principles in place in all the
desert provinces of Egypt, across the Palestine Gap, in all of Trans-Jordan
east of the Hedjaz Railway and in Iraq’s Southern Desert Area, what a
jurisdiction this was.
Viewed together, the Bedouin’s pulsatory nomadism, moving as grazing
and water allowed from the desert fringe in summer to the desert proper
in winter, imparted a seasonal rhythm to Britain’s conduct in the steppe.
In high summer, when tribes had returned to the riverain zone, an officer
might spend ‘considerable sums on Desert agents’ and yet obtain ‘little
information’.202 That changed with the autumn rains. For the next five or
six months desert grazing and raiding augured an increased secondment
of personnel and the refusal of grants of leave; the forward movement of
police, armed forces and supplies; the deployment of wireless equipment
and the issuance of new codes; increased paperwork for Residency clerks;
more hearings for tribal courts. In time, the very names that Britons had first
inscribed on the landscape gave way to local usage, a sign both of officers’
initial disorientation and of the role of Bedouin collaboration in making a
‘vacant’, arid space a peopled, knowable place.203 Officers no longer simply
waited for information to come in, but actively made use of the desert
rumour mill, dispatching instructions and misinformation along known
pathways of grazing, raiding and trade. Thus in 1924 Glubb sent agents
to Kuwait, Zubair and Nejd ‘to spread highly coloured accounts’ of Iraq’s
desert defences.204 Later, he had armed cars patrol Iraqi nomad camping
200
Kennett, Bedouin Justice, p. 139.
201
IWM: FGP 13 (letter book), folio 63, Peake to Glubb, 15 Feb. 1931.
202
AIR 23/306, H. A. Haines, ‘A Tour in Southern Desert by SSO Nasiriyah’, 18
Aug. 1929.
203
Hill, Baghdad Air Mail, pp. 89–90; WO 33/2831, Williams, Military Geography; CO
831/28/9, A. Prain, ‘Trans-Jordan Air Survey: progress report for April, 1934’, 2 May 1934.
204
FO 371/12992, Glubb, ‘Memorandum on proposed scheme for Akhwan Defence’
(n.d. Mar. 1928).
grounds and scatter the detritus of the British infantryman behind them
(tins of bully beef, bottles of beer), knowing that rumours of a phantom
British Army would pass back across the Neutral Zone.205 Some of these
ruses may have worked. Just as easily, one suspects, they could badly back-
fire.206 Their significance, however, lies in revealing how far British desert
control resorted to and remodeled indigenous desert patterns.
* * *
Understanding Britain’s desert corridor means being open to these pat-
terns and flows, and treating the area on both sides of a border as a single
unit of analysis. It is not enough to revisit narratives of ‘the end of raiding’
or the rise of the state in Egypt or Trans-Jordan or Iraq. The workings of
British desert administration were felt in the territory of each country, but
the thing itself was the clear product of none: this was empire in the inter-
stices. For just as we found in our study of Sinai smuggling, officers relied
on trans-border arrangements that were informal, ad hoc and ambigu-
ous. Their power flowed in the spaces between nations; it is obscured by a
state-centred approach.
Raid arbitration provides a case in point. To pre-empt tribal conflict along
sensitive communications routes, officers moved to set up ‘Inter-Territorial
Tribal Tribunals’ for Egypt, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, roving across juris-
dictions as the Bedouin did, and issuing orders ‘to be carried out against
the tribes in either territory’.207 But the mechanism, discussed numerous
times in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was ‘of an essentially informal char-
acter’, and became entangled in legal technicalities.208 Arbitrating through
diplomatic channels, meanwhile, meant ‘great delay’, exaggerated claims
and confusion over the details, not to mention the absurdity of passing
messages thousands of miles ‘to bridge a gap of 100’.209
So once again, local officers improvised. At a meeting with the Palestine
Police in 1933, Glubb sought a private arrangement ‘to hand offenders
205
AIR 23/41, Glubb to Cornwallis, 10 July 1928.
206
As one Foreign Office hand observed, it was ‘hardly astonishing that the Nejd tribes
gained an exaggerated opinion’ of Iraq’s desert forces, prompting them to attack: FO
371/12992, Foreign Office minute, 11 Apr. 1928, in Glubb, ‘Proposed scheme for Akhwan
Defence’. Glubb was later reprimanded for this: FO 371/13714, Glubb, ‘Policy on the Najd
Frontier’, 17 Jan. 1929.
207
CO 733/205/12, N. Bentwich, ‘Explanatory Note to the ITT Ordinance, 1930’, 14
Sept. 1930, encl. in Young to Cunliffe-Lister, 16 May 1931.
208
CO 733/205/12, Wauchope to Cunliffe-Lister, 30 Nov. 1931. FO 371/16864,
Record of the 6th Meeting of the Jedda discussions, 26 Apr. 1933.
209
CO 831/5/1, Chancellor to Amery, 31 May 1929; CO 831/7/8, H. Dowding,
‘Report on the Raiding Situation on the Transjordan-Nejd Frontier’, encl. in Chancellor
to Passfield, 25 Jan. 1930.
directly across the frontier’ without the use of ‘circuitous diplomatic chan-
nels’. Direct wireless communication between varied desert posts and
the granting of ‘more elastic powers’ to local police would also facilitate
co-operation in trans-border affairs.210 That, after all, had been the lesson of
the failed MacDonnell arbitration:
If more weight were given to the tribal and less to the international aspect of
the case, if dynastic antipathies were not allowed to give what is really a social
and economic problem an interstate character . . . If for the foreign judicial or
arbitrarial authority was substituted the existing suitable “ad hoc” machinery of
tribal procedure, there would, in my opinion, be a chance of dealing with the
matter in an appropriate way.211
The result was to encourage direct collaboration between frontier officials
without their superiors’ knowledge. In December 1926, a ‘frontier wireless
conference’ laid the groundwork for direct communication between frontier
posts in Sinai, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, settling disputes and maintain-
ing security through officers’ own considerable authority. Steps were taken
‘to establish uniformity between the various systems’, irrespective of jurisdic-
tion: from the type of wireless apparatus and the code words used to stand-
ards of training and rates of pay.212 To focus too much on formal summits
between states is to lose sight of how the corridor was run, by its officials and
its subjects alike.
Once we are alive to the significance of these informal arrangements (and
familiar with the kinds of sources that reveal them), we find them at work
throughout the desert corridor. Over a six-month period in 1930, for exam-
ple, Trans-Jordan’s Bedouin Control Board seized animals looted in Iraq and
made restitution to its Desert Police, returned property to the Sinai Bedouin
with the assistance of authorities in Beersheba, and arranged the return of
captured animals from Nejd through the Governor of Jauf.213 Later, Glubb’s
everyday duties were so preoccupied by this work that he spoke of ‘liaison
interminable’: in February 1934 alone he met French advisers in the Jebel
Druze and nomad control officers in Damascus, the mudir of Rutbah and the
mutassarif of Ramadi, the Emirs of Kaf and Tebuk, his frontier counterpart
in Jauf, and the Assistant Superintendent of Police in Beersheba.214 These
210
MECA: JBG 7(208)/3, Glubb, ‘Meeting with the Palestine Police’, 13 Mar. 1933.
211
CO 831/12/1, M. S. MacDonnell, ‘The Hedjaz-Nejd and Transjordan Frontier
Question’, 17 Jan. 1931.
212
FO 141/508/5, Plumer to Lloyd, 29 June 1926; ‘Report of the Frontiers Wireless
Conference held at Cairo, 15th–18th December 1926’ (n.d. 1926); Sykes to High
Commissioner, Cairo, 31 Jan. 1928.
213
FO 371/14460, E.R. Stafford, ‘Report on the Bedwin Control Board’ (n.d. July
1930).
214
CO 831/29/1, Glubb, TJDR: Feb. 1934.
relationships form the appropriate, broader context for the higher-profile

‘desert diplomacy’ practiced between Peake, Glubb, and the Saudi inspectors
of the northern frontier (Abdul-Aziz bin Zeid, ‘Abdullah al-Sudairi, and Abd
al-Aziz al-Sudairi).
When even these arrangements were thought insufficient for uphold-
ing security and securing information, officers were not shy of acting as if
national boundaries barely existed. Thus in Iraq and in Trans-Jordan, offic-
ers chose to contact Nuri Sha’lan directly in tribal matters ‘and thereby
avoid complicated conferences with the French’.215 During the Ikhwan
revolt, SSOs despatched agents and Southern Desert Camel Corps per-
sonnel into Nejd (one was caught, but the intelligence returned was
thought to justify the practice).216 When raiding shifted to the frontiers of
Trans-Jordan, Bedouin agents were sent into the Wadi Sirhan and the Jebel
Tubeiq.217 And when law and order seemed gravely threatened, frontier
forces might launch their own ‘raids’ to seize and return loot: sometimes
within national territory, but sometimes without.218 Officers closed ranks
to defend such unofficial action. ‘It has been proved again and again’,
wrote Glubb in 1933, ‘that the only really successful way to run a fron-
tier of this nature is . . . to enable [frontier officers] to exchange frequent
personal visits and notes, to (so to speak) “drop in for a drink” as often
as possible’.219 Such private channels, however, could leave more formal
bodies in the lurch, unable to react or to discuss matters with national
governments for fear of revealing their sources.220
Were the boundaries between British and French territories neces-
sary fault-lines in this informal system? British officers certainly felt that
trans-border arrangements ran smoothest when their men worked both
sides. Postwar mistrust was hard to shake, and Anglo-French cooperation
inconstant (as was that with Italian officials across the Libyan frontier).
But this makes the surviving evidence of connection all the more strik-
ing, as agreements, practices and ideas spilled across imperial frameworks.
215
JBG 7(208)/1, Glubb to Peake, 12 Mar. 1931.
216
AIR 23/51, Glubb to Cornwallis, 21 Apr. 1929.
217
JBG 7(208)/1, Glubb to Peake, 13 Mar. 1931.
218
Desert’.
219
CO 831/23/13, Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1933.
220
On learning of a band of men marching through Sinai to join the Ibn Rifada rebel-
lion, Jarvis warned Peake by wireless, but not the Egyptian Government (they were ‘apt
to get . . . excited and indulge in quite unnecessary measures’). But when the Egyptians
wrongly accused the Residency of failing to detect this band, the High Commissioner
was advised to hold his tongue: ‘we were not supposed to have relations with the Frontier
Districts Administration first and the Egyptian Government afterwards’: FO 141/742,
Smart to Lorraine, 13 June 1932; W. Smart minute, 15 June 1932.
Mixed tribunals to adjudicate raids on the Syria-Trans-Jordan frontier

never functioned smoothly, but both parties accepted that investigat-
ing raids and effecting restitution were problems ‘common to the two
Administrations’.221 There was even talk of ‘combined frontier reconnais-
sances’ to ‘press home very firmly on the inhabitants of Syria that England
and France are at one in their dealings towards the natives’.222 And even
here, where relations remained fraught, co-operation was still possible.
Thieves carrying tools from the Iraq Petroleum Company’s pipeline, for
example, were tracked to the Syrian frontier and intercepted with the help
of the French adviser in Salkhad—‘a gratifying piece of frontier coopera-
tion’.223 If only mutual suspicion could be overcome, wrote Syria’s head
of the Service de Renseignements (SR), then it might be possible to reach a
common agreement over tribal subsidies, raiding and khuwwa across all
mandatory territory.224 In time, Glubb came to regard his French opposite
number, Captain Filliet, as an ally in the broader cause of tribal control.225
Beyond the initiative of individual officers, the techniques and tech-
nologies of desert control respected boundaries even less. Throughout the
period, SR officers, the Contrôle Bédouin and the many manifestations
of British desert administration all compared themselves with and bor-
rowed ideas from their counterparts.226 By the mid-1930s Saudi frontier
officials also had recourse to a growing network of armed cars, desert forts,
car tracks and wireless telegraphy.227 While Glubb’s reports jeered at this
‘mimicry’ (Ibn Saud’s forts, in location and design, were ‘an almost ver-
batim copy’ of those in British territory), he accepted that the diffusion
of desert technology would only increase the corridor’s security.228 When
in February 1934 the Saudi wireless station at Jauf made its first direct
communication with Trans-Jordan’s Desert Patrol to settle a dispute, it
was effectively plugging into Britain’s ‘frontier wireless’ network. Within
months Glubb felt that his ‘relations’ and ‘machinery of communication’
were better across the Saudi frontier than with parts of Palestine. ‘The
truth’, he confessed, is that the pacification of the desert has been carried
221
CO 831/4/8, Chancellor to Ponsot, 18 Apr. 1929; CADN: FBCP 989/2, Mortier
(Service de Renseignements, Levant), ‘Exposé de la Situation des Tribus Nomades en 1930’
(n.d. 1930).
222
AIR 23/91, J. Codrington to Air Headquarters, Amman, 4 June 1927.
223
CO 831/23/15, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1933.
224
CADN: FBCP 988/11, Mortier to Head of the SR, Levant, 4 Mar. 1926.
225
226
For example: CADN: FBCP 991/27, Anon., ‘Réorganisation du Contrôle Bédouin’
(n.d.); AIR 23/91 SSO Mosul reports, 1926-27; Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’, p. 554.
227
Philby played a prominent role in their introduction: MECA: SJPH 5/2/14; Dickson,
Kuwait, pp. 295, 572–573.
228
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Sept. 1937.
out in close collaboration by ourselves and Ibn Saud’.229 Some areas, the
British had learned, were ‘so closely connected in trade and grazing’ that
political borders were simply inconvenient. Desert administration was an
‘art’ that governments across the Syrian Desert had all had to learn.230
D I V I D E A N D RU L E R E V I S I T E D
Divide and rule looms large in the study of the interwar Middle East,
and it is not difficult to see why. European diplomats, not satisfied with
splitting the Ottoman Empire into partisan spheres of influence, invested
the process with its own noble qualities. Boundary-making, many main-
tained, was the key to lasting peace, a chance to acknowledge rising politi-
cal stars. It was over fixed borders that all ‘civilized’ states managed their
interactions. ‘The less rigidly each party is confined to its future territory’,
argued Ernest Dowson, Britain’s Financial Adviser in Egypt and future
surveyor of Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, ‘the greater will be the pros-
pect of future occasions of quarrel’.231 For the distant consul, army chief or
metropolitan clerk, trans-border nomadism was a messy inconvenience,
filled with potential for instability.232
But the officers tasked with enforcing these boundaries took a more
expansive view of things. Take, for example, Sinai’s eastern border. The
Taba Incident of 1906 had resulted in a ‘separating administrative line’
being drawn between Egypt and Ottoman Palestine. But when the time
came to make this more concrete at the Versailles Conference in 1919, the
British delegation, led by Arthur Balfour, faced a revolt from the junior
officers of the Frontier Districts Administration. The frontier, they com-
plained, was ‘quite arbitrary’. It bisected Tarabin, Tiyaha, and Ahaywat ter-
ritory, vastly complicating their police work. It ran across the trade routes
of the Azazma, and left Beersheba, an important node in the Egyptian
camel market, under a different jurisdiction. Instead, they wanted their
authority to stretch from the Canal, over the Negev, to the Wadi Araba
and the Dead Sea. The advantages to tribal control and imperial com-
munications were obvious and, significantly, went hand in hand. ‘Such a
229
CO 831/29/1, Glubb, TJDR: Feb. 1934 and July 1934.
230
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, p. 30; Anon. [Glubb], ‘Iraq-Nejd Frontier’,
pp. 88–89, 92.
231
FO 141/525/1, Dowson to Residency, 22 Apr. 1920.
232
For instance: AIR 5/397, Clayton to Colonial Office, 5 Nov. 1925; AIR 23/800,
GHQ Cairo to GHQ Baghdad, 28 Feb. 1922. More definite boundaries for the new man-
dates were ‘desirable, for diplomatic reasons, if not for practical purposes of administra-
tion’: AIR 23/797, Anon., Military Report on Transjordan (n.d.).
line’, urged Sinai’s Governor, ‘would give to Egypt all the Arab tribes up to
the Wadi Araba’ and would control ‘all the passes . . . into Sinai . . . [It] is
a good geographical and tribal line’.233
Wiring from Versailles, Balfour refused to press the point, fearing it
would alienate Jewish support for a British mandate in Palestine.234 Yet
the anti-smuggling campaign on the Sinai frontier shows how the offic-
ers charged with effecting new boundaries improvised ways of working
across them, as if they had got their way all along. This clash of outlooks
resounded along the length and breadth of the corridor. Harold Dickson
in Kuwait was never reconciled to the ‘arbitrary boundary of the Western
type’ drawn by Percy Cox in 1922, which disrupted tribal links with Iraq
and Nejd.235 Glubb never forgave the Foreign Office for granting Nejd the
Wadi Sirhan, ‘an integral part of the grazing grounds of the Trans-Jordan
tribes’. He locked horns with London over the issue thereafter, and urged
its reoccupation should Ibn Saud’s power ever falter.236 In every case, offic-
ers vented their frustration at how boundaries hamstrung their work.
Before long, most were prepared ‘to turn the Nelson eye to technical
infringements’.237 Unite and rule—informally, at least—was the order of
the day.
This changed how officers felt about nationality and territoriality; it
might change how we historians think about them too. Notionally, man-
datory officials were all signed up to harmonize ‘dissonant elements’ and
build ‘common nationality’ in each would-be nation state. Reports to
the League of Nations burst with lip-service to these ideals, ‘making’ the
Bedouin into a ‘productive’ members of territorially-bounded communi-
ties.238 But many frontier officers, unhappy with postwar boundaries, saw
no reason to prioritize the control of land over control of sets of people.
The scene was set to rehearse an old dispute between the ‘geographical’ and
‘tribal’ basis of society.
233
FO 141/664/8, Parker to Hunter, 27 Feb. 1919. On the establishment of the FDA
in 1917, Allenby believed that ‘owing to the similarity of conditions’ between Sinai and the
‘trans-frontier district’ beyond ‘there will be ample room for that reciprocity of action and
similarity of method which the circumstances demand’: FO 141/783, Allenby to Wingate,
9 Aug. 1917.
234
FO 141/664/8, Balfour to Allenby, 26 Mar. 1919, 15 Apr. 1919.
235
Dickson, Kuwait, pp. 272–280. Dickson thought the articles permitting the free
movement of nomadic tribes to be the essential provisions of the Treaty of Muhammerah
and Uqair Protocol, and did his best to honour them. See also Wilkinson, Arabia’s Frontiers,
pp. 143–158.
236
CO 831/11/5, Glubb to Kirkbride, 19 Aug. 1931; CO 831/11/6, G. W. Rendel
(Foreign Office) to K.W. Blaxter (Colonial Office), 4 Dec. 1931; MECA JBG 209/9,
Glubb, ‘Note on the Wadi Sirhan Question’ (n.d. 1934).
237
238
For example: H. M. S. O., Report for 1920–22.
In 1932, with unrest in the Hedjaz against Ibn Saud’s rule, Peake was
asked to investigate the applicability of nationality to nomadic tribes. His
report accepted that ‘nationality in its European sense’ applied to indi-
viduals, but saw ‘no reason’ why it could not also apply to whole tribes,
according to the country in which ‘the main part’ of their dira was found,
or to which they presented their petitions. Thus, for Trans-Jordan’s Hedjaz
frontier, the Beni Sakhr were clearly a Trans-Jordanian tribe, but the Beni
Atiya, complicit in the recent unrest, were not.239 So far, so conventional.
Yet Glubb took the unusual step of submitting a dissenting note, so force-
fully argued as to overshadow his superior’s recommendations. Tribal
nationality, he insisted, could not readily be fixed. It was ‘a false and dan-
gerous criterion’ that discounted broader ties ‘of custom and tradition’ and
the demands of seasonal migration. Moreover, it was ‘almost impossible to
turn back a nomadic tribe in the course of its migration without the use of
force and the shedding of blood’, and this, his fellow officers agreed, the
British position in the desert could not survive. ‘The whole idea of nation-
ality’ for Bedouin tribes, he urged, should be ‘completely discarded’. Far
better ‘to mete out exactly the same treatment to all Bedwin disturbers
of the peace . . . regardless of “Nationality” ’, and to foster co-operation
between governments so that, wherever a tribe went, the writ of Desert
Law would follow.240 This view led some into unorthodox praise of their
Ottoman forebears. They, at least, had brought ‘all the tribes comprising
one confederation under one administrative rule’.241
None of this stopped Glubb from going back on his principles, evict-
ing the Beni Atiya from Trans-Jordan when the interests of stability
demanded. But this particular act (which he came to regret) stands in con-
trast with how he and other desert officers had come to treat the steppe.242
‘Government’, Glubb declared, ‘is a central force intended principally to
compel people to conform to certain rules . . . It is therefore principally
concerned not with land, but with persons’. Because territorial boundaries
were ‘peculiarly unsuitable to nomads’, government had to move, connect
and adapt, following the Bedouin ‘wherever they go’.243 Britain could no
239
CO 831/17/9, F. G. Peake, ‘Suggestions for Determining the Nationality of Bedwin
Tribes’, encl. in High Commissioner, Palestine to Cunliffe-Lister, 10 Sept. 1932.
240
CO 831/17/9, Glubb to Peake, 20 Mar. 1932, encl. in High Commissioner to
Cunliffe-Lister, 10 Sept. 1932.
241
Dickson, Kuwait, p. 205.
242
Even then, the eviction only succeeded because ‘from the grazing point of view the
southerly move was a perfectly normal one. Had it been attempted . . . when the tribe
is naturally moving northwards, it would possibly have failed’: CO 831/23/13, Glubb,
TJDR: Nov. 1932.
243
Desert’.
more prevent their migration than it could shoot down refugees, or Canute
turn back the tide.244 Thus the FDA took issue with Ernest Dowson on
boundaries: tolerating trans-border grazing defused tension and alleviated
the difficulties of rule.245 To do otherwise risked resistance or tribal flight,
neither outcome being in the imperial interest.
Bedouin movement underpinned the mechanics of British desert
administration: its intelligence, its pathways, the generous (if anomalous)
provisions of Desert Law. Even those who favoured a more familiar con-
cept of nationality acknowledged nomads’ value ‘as potential sources of
information’ on trans-border events.246 All this made ‘the only solution of
the nationality question . . . to be to bar the use of that word’.247 As stud-
ies of other borderlands have shown, colonial officialdom played its own
part in the frustration of official boundaries. And because the Bedouin
were not citizens but subjects, such flexibility ‘posed no great philosophi-
cal problems’.248
Common as it is to decry imperial instincts ‘to demarcate “tribes” by their
geographical distribution’, therefore, the truth was more complex.249 Few
desert officers saw in the Bedouin ‘an enemy of modernisation’, a ‘threat
to the nation-state’ that ‘had to be territorialized’.250 If anything, there was
something profoundly unmodern in their outlook. It was national elites
and urban merchants, not the mandatory regimes, who sought tariffs and
barriers to defend small, protected markets.251 It was national rulers who
‘do not like the musabila system at all’, Harold Dickson observed, for
the loss of revenue it represented.252 Similarly, it was Egyptian politicians
who opposed improving desert links with Palestine, for fear of compe-
tition with state railway revenues.253 Colonial frontier officials, in con-
trast, decried any impediments to trade that might aggravate the Bedouin,
and lamented the disruption to regional commercial networks.254 As Ibn
244
CO 831/13/2, Glubb to Kirkbride, ‘Activities of Beni Atiya’ (n.d. 1931). Charles
Terrier of the Contrôle Bédouin also discerned a nomad ‘patriotism’ of custom and kin-
ship that rendered territorial boundaries irrelevant: CADN: FBCP 986, Dossier Bédouin,
Terrier, ‘Essai de legislation bédouin’ (n.d. Oct. 1924).
245
FO 141/525/1, D. J. Wallace to Residency, 14 Mar. 1921.
246
AIR 23/34, Jope-Slade to Air Staff Intelligence, ‘Situation Report—Southern Desert’,
27 Jan. 1928.
247
CO 831/23/13, Glubb, TJDR: Feb. 1933.
248
Nugent and Asiwaju, African Boundaries, pp. 5, 9. See also: Baud and van Schendel,
‘Borderlands’, p. 230.
249
Thomas, ‘Bedouin Tribes’, p. 543.
250
Robins, History of Jordan, p. 41; Massad, Colonial Effects, pp. 111, 59, 34.
251
Peter, ‘Dismemberment of Empire’.
252
Dickson, Arab of the Desert, p. 12. 253
Jarvis, ‘Roads in Egypt’.
254
McCallum, ‘French in Syria’, p. 23. Harold Dickson, for instance, warned of
the damage caused to British prestige and interests by Ibn Saud’s desert blockade of
Saud’s deputy foreign minister once stressed, when it came to the question
of tribal nationality it was his Saudi colleagues, not the British delegation
opposite, who seemed to embrace ‘European ideas’.255
So if anyone had thought to ask our desert administrators about the
region’s political future, or had taken their views on the broader task
in which they imagined they were engaged, few would have answered
with reference to ‘nation-building’. The picture of the Middle East they
shared had little relevance to a future of independent nation-states.
Neither Jarvis nor Peake thought the countries in which they worked
well equipped by geography to stand alone, but it was Glubb, ‘invet-
erate scribbler’ that he was, who took the idea furthest.256 In a series
of addresses to the Royal Central Asian Society, he set out his objec-
tions to the ‘fragmentation’ of the Middle East. While some territories
would always be too small for self-government, the broader interwar
revolution in trans-desert communications—the links and nodes of
Britain’s desert corridor—had made ‘small nationalisms’ in the Middle
East peculiarly absurd. Physical barriers like deserts and mountains
were the best guarantee of independence, but the Syrian Desert was
now a highway, and the environment favoured empire, ‘larger blocs’,
‘great nations’. ‘Continued fragmentation’ was on the wrong side of
history, ‘in exact opposition to what should be the result of modern
methods of communication’.257 The provisions and mechanisms of
desert control, the close co-operation of different desert police, even
Bedouin migration between disparate administrations were all working
towards ‘the gradual rapprochement of the Arab countries’.258 What was
needed now, a 1938 note ‘on the subject of world order’ described, was
another Antonine age, before ‘the wearisome formalities of passports or
customs’, before the modern state ‘enclosed us in hermetically-sealed
compartments’.259 What was needed, to secure the corridor for another
generation, was Arab federation.
The history of British involvement in such a scheme—an impor-
tant aspect of policy from 1945—falls beyond the confines of this
book. But it is still a surprise to see it taking shape at this time, years
before the military and economic imperatives for integration advanced
Kuwait: MECA: HRPD 3/5, Dickson, ‘Administrative Report of the Kuwait Political
Agency, 1932’.
255
FO 371/16864, Record of the 16th meeting of the Saudi-Trans-Jordanian Treaty of
Bon Voisinage, 4 May 1933.
256
Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 104; Glubb, Arabian Adventures, p. xi.
257
Glubb, ‘Transjordan and the War’, p. 31.
258
CO 831/23/15, Glubb, TJDR: Oct. 1933.
259
Reproduced in: Glubb, Britain and the Arabs, pp. 219–220.
during the Second World War.260 It had, in a sense, environmental

origins: partly suggested by desert geography, but more by the political
landscape of communications and control evolving across its surface.
This was a reading of recent history popular at the RCAS.261 ‘Modern
science’ was at work bringing the Arab states together, ‘turning deserts
into convenient motor tracks’.262 Wartime communications helped
the idea along, but built (sometimes quite literally) on interwar foun-
dations. How well it would withstand postwar realities, however, is
another story altogether.
C O N C LU S I O N : R E T H I N K I N G B O U N D A R I E S I N
THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
Current historiography has made much of oceans as loci of global history.

As practitioners of the ‘new thalassology’ have found, it is sometimes neces-
sary to invert scholarly conventions, so that neglected political peripheries
can be re-read as regional cores, and long-forgotten arenas rediscovered.263
Might thinking in terms of deserts and arid zones be an equally meaning-
ful way of approaching the imperial and global past?
Britain’s desert officers certainly thought so. Their reports, corre-
spondence, public lectures and private papers were packed with allu-
sions between the desert and the sea. To the Bedouin ‘the whole desert
is an open sea, their havens the grassy wadis’, their sections ‘scattered like
ships’.264 Their raiding resembled the piracy of Norsemen and Danes on
the Britons of old; their smuggling ‘the Channel fisherman of a hundred
years ago’.265 English, of course, is replete with such metaphors: ‘ships of
the desert’, ‘great sand seas’, ‘swanning about in the blue’. But officers
implied that they had practical uses, too. They spoke of ‘desert ports’ and
desert ‘blockades’, of mechanized ‘desert fleets’ out ‘cruising’ the wastes,
avoiding towns (as warships must forts), and engaging the enemy rather
than holding vacant ground. To understand Britain’s present role on the
steppe, they argued, one need only recall her maritime past. If the Bedouin
were ‘a nautical people’, ‘ranging at will on the high seas’, ‘pounc[ing]
260
For an overview of military hopes for a ‘Middle Eastern Confederacy’, see Louis,
British Empire, pp. 21–26.
261
See, for example: Astor, ‘Middle East’, p. 138; Toukan, ‘Future Settlement’,
pp. 203–204.
262
Spears, ‘Middle East’, p. 156. 263
Wigen, ‘Oceans of History’, p. 720.
264
CO 730/115/1, H. M. S. O., Report on the Administration of ‘Iraq for the year 1926
(1927), p. 22.
265
down upon settlements near the “shore” ’ and retreating ‘into the blue’,
then it was Britain’s task to match their
supremacy in mobility . . . as if a seafaring race had hitherto terrorized the
coast in triremes or catamarans, and a government had now arrived with
battle cruisers.266
‘Extreme mobility, initiative and enterprise’, in Glubb’s judgement,
defined both British maritime power and Bedouin desert supremacy.
Both pasts, conflated, held ‘valuable lessons’ for the present: the Bedouin’s
long ‘domination of Arabia’, Francis Bacon’s dictum on the command of
the sea.267
But there are good reasons to pause before we rush to treat deserts
as oceanic ‘spaces’, as virtual seas. For many of these parallels say less
about the realities of desert life than about the rhetorical justifications
of colonial rule. Firstly, by arguing that Britons, a fellow ‘nautical race’,
were more familiar with the desert and its people than the town-bred
effendi could ever could be, officers aimed at reserving authority over
these sensitive frontiers for themselves. Writing for the BBC at the
height of unrest in Palestine, Freya Stark emphasized ‘commerce and
danger’ as ‘the binding links . . . between the Arab and the Briton . . . the
desert and the sea’.268 Air-Marshal Brooke-Popham lauded the ‘natural
fellow-feeling’ between Britons and the Bedouin, both ‘in conflict with
the vast . . . forces of Nature’.269 On Egypt’s frontiers, disproportionate
recruitment of British personnel was justified by branding Egyptians
‘out of sympathy with the Arabs’, as terrified of the desert ‘as a cat hates
water’.270 This was, in short, a maritime variation on the hoary theme of
Anglo-Arab affinity, staple of the Victorian travel literature many officers
held dear.271
Secondly, British maritime allusions were loaded; they enabled par-
ticular courses of action. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, off
the west coast of India and in the Persian Gulf, the East India Company
deployed the category of ‘pirate’ to displace local coastal orders and
monopolize trade. Now, in the twentieth century, officers extended the
term to Bedouin raiding to justify similar applications of force. With the
desert ‘open like the ocean to pirates’, argued the High Commissioner for
266
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, pp. 28–29; Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 131–132.
267
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb, ‘The Desert as a Field of Manoeuvre in History and
Today’, 3 Aug. 1941; Glubb, ‘Proposal for the control of the Syrian Desert’, 8 June 1941.
268
Stark, ‘Two Merchant Nations’.
269
Brooke-Popham, ‘Some Notes’, p. 136. 270
271
Tidrick, Heart-Beguiling Araby, pp. 159, 210–211.
Iraq, ‘the only remedy is to rout them out in their bases, as in the case of
the pirates of China and Algiers’.272
Finally, maritime analogies could not but reassure those Britons who
found themselves operating in such an unfamiliar environment. Glubb
acknowledged as much. ‘The moral effect of familiarity with the desert
is . . . enormous’, he wrote, yet ‘to many British soldiers . . . the mere idea
of the desert conjures up visions of intense hardship, of dying of thirst and
being lost in the blue’.273 Discovering that Britons as a ‘nautical race’ had,
after all, a ready kit of techniques at their command became particularly
important when global war pitched thousands of inexperienced troops
into the Western Desert. It is surely significant that these desert-maritime
parallels spread at the same time as Basil Liddell Hart’s consoling fictions
about the maritime, ‘indirect’ and mobile essence of the ‘British Way of
War’.274
Maritime rhetoric, therefore, underwrote British authority on even the
most arid frontiers of empire. But there are deeper problems, too, to treat-
ing deserts as seas. Their histories diverge in a number of ways: the more
habitable nature of the steppe, the presence and absence of nomads, the
differing social and economic conditions that shape patterns of mobility.
Not all seas are Mediterraneans, not all deserts Saharas; we lose sight of the
specificity and contingency of connections by eliding both into a vague
vocabulary of ‘mobility’ and ‘space’. In likening the Syrian Desert to a vast
sea-lane, Glubb grossly exaggerated its freedom of movement. In more
reflective moods, he knew full well that conditions of grazing and rainfall
could render nomads ‘almost as immobile as the city of Baghdad’.275
And yet, for all this, certain methods and concepts of oceanic history
can be put to use in recovering other arenas and configurations in the past.
At heart, the ‘new thalassology’ emphasizes ‘integration over homogene-
ity’: the best work treats oceans not as normative, but as constituted by
particular, shifting, conditional patterns of connection.276 Physical geog-
raphy (‘natural facts’277) played a role in determining these, but arenas of
272
AIR 23/36, Dobbs to Sec of State CO (Chamberlain?), 22 Feb. 1928. For the discov-
ery of ‘piracy’, see Subramanian, ‘Pirates’; al-Qasimi, Myth.
273
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb, ‘Desert as a Field of Manoeuvre’.
274
Bond, Unquiet Western Front, pp. 45–46; Howard, ‘British Way’. This idea even made
it into the official history of the desert war. ‘Like China in the minds of the Shanghai for-
eigners’, Ralph Bagnold explained to its author, the desert was ‘just a painted backscene of
vague fear . . . The success of the [Long Range Desert Group] was to my mind largely due
to this very attitude on the enemy side’: CAC: BGND C26, Bagnold to I. S. O. Playfair,
23 Mar. 1952.
275
CO 730/140/8, Glubb, ‘Self Defence by Iraq Tribes’, 15 Jan. 1929.
276
Wigen, ‘Oceans of History’, p. 720.
277
For a plea for centrality of these, see Drayton, ‘Maritime Networks’.
interaction were built by human efforts, and so can be found on land as

well as at sea. As Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell acknowledge,
the Mediterranean displays a ‘unique concentration of factors that are not
themselves peculiar to the region’. A density and variety of human connec-
tions across ‘spaces of danger and variable communications’, these should
be the basis for undertaking ‘a new historiography of large areas’.278
With these caveats in mind, historians can work with other large units,
including deserts, to recover lost regions and to throw new light on old
problems.279 It may be particularly rewarding to do so when regions, like a
‘desert corridor’ of the British Empire, have had an articulated, cognitive
basis in the past.280 Talk of our desert as a pirate-infested ‘inland sea’ may
well have served imperial purposes. But it does suggest that officers both
perceived and acted on circulations and connections that we would do
well not to ignore.
* * *
This chapter began with a familiar portrait of the Middle East, dismem-
bered by colonial fiat, carved up by lines drawn boldly in the sand. But
it did so with reservations: about the need to examine imperial objec-
tives closely, to acknowledge nomadic agency and the limits of colonial
power, and to look again at how boundary formation actually played out
on the ground. In a sense, an imbalance has developed in the literature
that needs to be redressed. If anthropologists have worked to overturn
tired, determinist portraits of nomadic societies, we need to extend the
same treatment to the concept of ‘the state’. States and nomads are not
always at odds, and there are problems in implying, as have real authorities
on the Bedouin, that tribal policies exhibit ‘hardly any difference’ between
‘Ottoman overlords’, ‘European colonial rulers’ and the ‘modern develop-
ment experts’ that followed.281 The objectives and compromises of British
desert administration give the lie to that assumption.
By the early 1930s, a distinctive blend of British interests and Bedouin
mobility had lent the desert corridor a dynamic of its own. Its peoples
and practices, rhythms and timetables, straddled the region’s nation states.
Subzones of pasturage, raiding, pilgrimage and trade had, of course, long
278
Horden and Purcell, ‘New Thalassology’, p. 735.
279
Horden and Purcell, ‘New Thalassology’, p. 722. For examples of how this might
be done, alive to the similarities and interplay of desertic and maritime networks, see
Gommans, ‘Silent Frontier’; Gommans, ‘Burma’; Shaw, ‘Peculiar Island’.
280
Wigen, ‘Oceans of History’, pp. 719–720; Bose, Hundred Horizons, pp. 5, 30. For the
role of culture in the social construction and negotiation of national borders, see Donnan
and Wilson, Borders.
281
Marx, ‘Political Economy’, p. 88.
existed across the Syrian Desert, but this was not a story of straightforward
continuity. Imperial and regional currents of mobility intersected, leaving
neither unchanged. Tasked with policing the new routes of empire, thirsty
for trans-border information, and seeking assistance from colleagues in
other territories, Britain’s desert officers helped stitch these subzones into
something larger.
‘Bedouins’, Glubb complained, ‘are nobody’s children’; attempting to
approach them through ‘the most carefully sealed water-tight compart-
ments’ was doomed to failure.282 Instead, the ideal jurisdiction would not
be territorial at all, but ‘half nomadic’, with ‘the right to follow the Bedouin
wherever they go, settling their disputes and controlling them, and, if nec-
essary, camping in their midst’.283 Within national boundaries, each desert
administration did this in practice, either transgressing provincial lines or
establishing new ‘Desert Areas’. But, like the Bedouin they sought to gov-
ern, their jurisdiction could not simply stop at the border. Bedouin mobil-
ity produced cultural and customary similarities across great distances: the
foundation of a comparable Desert Law. And it invited and required the
British to reach out across those borders, along lines of grazing, raiding,
smuggling, and trade, so that the corridor took on administrative dimen-
sions too. This strengthened the process by which desert frontiers became
sites of competition between local and metropolitan Britons, indigenous
nationalists, royal courts, and Bedouin tribes: not so much ‘marginal’ to
national politics as hubs of rivalry in themselves.
Looking out across Britain’s non-settler world, this was not the only arid
frontier being approached in this way. In his 1907 lecture on Frontiers,
Lord Curzon also grasped the wider imperial advantages of overstepping
boundaries, making ‘necessary departures from the Treaty line’ in the
interests of public security, and ‘without the creation of a casus belli ’.284
So historians of empire and of the Middle East may need to develop the
terminological discipline of borderlands studies (as well as the approaches
of oceanic history), and think (as contemporaries surely did) of frontiers
(‘integrating factors’), not boundaries (‘separating factors’), even into the
modern age of nation-states.285 It may be that there are all kinds of arid
zones whose history could be recovered in this way, and consequently all
kinds of problems—like imperial rule and anti-colonial nationalism—
awaiting re-examination.
282
AIR 23/299, Glubb, ‘Memorandum on Iraq-Nejd Frontier Relations’ (n.d., Nov/Dec
1925); MECA: JBG 1(203)/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
283
CO 730/168/8 Glubb, ‘Annual Report on the Administration of the Southern
Desert’. See also: AIR 23/33, Glubb to Cornwallis, 27 Dec. 1927.
284
Curzon, Frontiers, p. 51. 285
To understand the full complexity of British activity in Middle East,

then, we need to imagine a new zone of activity, one not residing in the
longitudinal axes of ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery’, but in a shifting web of
regional connections through its arid frontiers. This desert corridor was
shaped by imperial interests and routes, but also by pre-colonial connec-
tions and ongoing Bedouin movement. For interested Britons, its reality
seemed obvious enough at the time; imagining it now requires a little more
effort. As a zone of administrative practice, hopes for a single, ‘nomadic’
administration (like RCAS visions of an ‘interchangeable’ tribal service)
never came to pass.286 But some boundaries were disregarded (recall Jarvis
and Peake, ‘swashbuckling’ across Palestine) and others circumvented,
by Bedouin agents, personal arrangements, police collaboration, and
trans-border communications. Officers defended the practice of work-
ing informally with one another, and shuddered at a future without such
‘complete understanding’.287 Britain’s desert corridor was more than the
backwoods of a number of nation-states. It was an active zone in its own
right, of which many more stories wait to be told.
286
Though some officers spent several months of the year in the saddle, camping ‘wher-
ever [the tribes] happened to wander’: Dickson, Arab of the Desert, p. 1. See also: Anon.,
‘Role of Special Service Officers’, pp. 55–56.
287
For one example among many, see FO 371/13147, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23
Mar. 1928.
4
Making the Desert Bloom?
Development, Ideology, and the
Future of the Steppe
The attitude of the Westerner is apt to lie in one of two very differ-
ent directions. Either he condemns the Bedou utterly as an abso-
lutely useless encumbrance upon the face of the earth, or he invests
the man himself and everything connected with him with a halo of
sickly sentimentality and mystery.1
The man with modern ideas of progress sides naturally with the cul-
tivator and . . . regards [the Bedouin] as an eleventh-century nui-
sance . . . If, on the other hand, the administrator has a streak of poetry
and romance in him, then to him the Bedouin is the ideal man.2
Ideas take root in the most unlikely of places. Alighting at Aden in 1930,
the erudite, urbane, and incorrigibly elitist Evelyn Waugh despaired of
what he thought he would find:
a climate notoriously corrosive of intellect and initiative; a landscape barren
of any growing or living thing; a community, full of placid self-esteem . . .
conversation full of technical shop . . .
‘How wrong I was’, he would later admit.3 And how wrong we would
be to think the same of Britain’s desert officers. For running the corridor
was not all wireless codes and armed patrols, gathering intelligence and
adjudicating disputes. ‘Peake’s work was not entirely that of chief police
officer and administrator’, wrote Claude Jarvis in recommending him to
1
Kennett, Bedouin Justice, pp. ix–x. 2
3
Waugh, Remote People, p. 97.
the Lawrence Memorial Medal Committee: ‘he opened up trade routes,

created markets, and interested himself in the improvement of agriculture
and stock’.4 John Glubb felt ‘the eternal round of Nejd intrigues’ got in the
way of development, education and training, and prayed for a respite for
‘all the real work which there is to be done’.5 Desert officers took pride in
this side of their work. They were soldiers and administrators before they
were planners or technicians, but they still threw themselves into debating
the merits of irrigated agriculture and pastoralism. In their correspond-
ence, memoranda and monthly reports, at meetings of the Royal Central
Asian Society and in the pages of its Journal, they positioned themselves
within grander narratives of developing arid landscapes and transforming
a ‘nomad race’: of ‘making the desert bloom’. Much of this went beyond
the task of monopolizing steppe authority. Purely political histories can
easily pass it by. But as security improved in the early 1930s, desert offic-
ers relished the opportunity ‘to devote ourselves to administration’.6 They
were, to borrow a phrase, in the future business.
This chapter delves into those plans for desert development. It aims not
so much to re-tell the stories of specific projects as to uncover the ideas
behind them. As such it is more concerned with perceptions of nomads
than with nomads’ own actions, though the latter were not without con-
sequence for how the former took shape. Many a vision of desert devel-
opment turned out to be a blind alley, overtaken by the cataclysm of the
Second World War, hobbled by a lack of funds, or derailed by those they
were intended to ‘advance’. But together they help substantiate the claim
that desert administration was an emergent colonial ‘profession’, and
the desert corridor a distinct historical space. Ideas about the sedentary
and nomadic ‘modes of life’—and the values and iniquities thought to
flow from them—formed the prism through which many came to make
sense of their world. By peering through, we enrich our understanding of
Britain’s ‘Tribal Question’, of how officers imagined the future unfolding,
and who they trusted to usher it into being.
Most studies of colonial development, however, dwell on neither their
ideological origins nor the interwar years.7 For the Middle East, histories
generally start with the Middle East Supply Centre of the 1940s.8 And yet
a development programme, as one scholar notes,
4
RSAA: Medal Box 1, Jarvis to Sykes, 16 Jan. 1939.
5
CO 831/23/13, Glubb, TJDR: Apr. 1933.
6
CO 831/29/1, Glubb, TJDR: May 1934.
7
For an important exception (though one which omits the Middle East): Havinden and
Meredith, Development.
8
By far the best account of British development policy in the region is: Kingston,
Modernization.
Making the Desert Bloom? 185
cannot be reduced to the sum of technical measures envisaged for one par-
ticular operation. It is above all an attempt to propose or impose a particular
world view and praxis, and it embodies a set of values . . . 9
Examining British interest in desert development, therefore, means chal-
lenging officers’ claims to their own unerring pragmatism.10 ‘The idea of
the mandate’ may have struck few Britons as being ‘a sacred duty’, as Peter
Sluglett suggests, but other aspects of their rule could still fire a sense of
moral purpose.11 For some, desert development was a great undertaking
that transcended the political arrangements of the day. Officers’ ideas, as
we shall see, were still shaping development projects long after their own
brand of indirect rule had gone.
Yet ‘development’ as it was envisaged here was quite different to that of
the 1940s and ’50s, and it is as well to acknowledge this in advance. Desert
officers’ overriding concern was to protect the overland routes of empire.
They seldom spoke of turning nomads into customers, or of meeting the
needs of British industry. They were not much concerned that their schemes
ran a profit, or widened support for British rule. There was, obviously, no
Cold War competition for hearts and minds at play. Many schemes grew out
of the personal initiative of individual officers, and were easily disrupted as
a result. Capital was scarce, and little headway made before the surge in oil
revenues after the Second World War.12 Until then, most schemes resembled
relief work, picking up the pieces after Ikhwan raids (in Iraq and Trans-
Jordan), locusts plagues (1929–1932) and drought (1932–1936).
So this is really a study of development in miniature: of model farms
and experiment stations, small grants and subsidies. Yet these makeshift
interventions were not without consequence. The ‘disastrous’ years of
drought (Trans-Jordan’s Bedouin may have lost as much as 70 per cent
of their herds) triggered a broader debate about the viability of pastoral
nomadism.13 Jarvis’ trials on a 300-acre plot led to calls for the settlement
of the entire Negev desert.14 Other small schemes—gardens, ranches,
and breeding programmes—were meant to speak to greater problems,
or set an example in productive living to the wider desert populations
around them.15 Pilot projects, as James Scott has shown, can enable more
9
Bocco, ‘Settlement’, p. 308.
10
Glubb’s published works, for example, decry ‘idealism’ and ‘dream-planning’: Glubb,
Arabian Adventures, p. 214.
11
Sluglett, ‘Mandates’, p. 120.
12
For the impact of oil on development, see Fabietti, ‘Facing Change’, p. 578; Franzén,
‘Development’, pp. 88, 90.
13
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Sept. 1937. 14
Jarvis, ‘Holy Land’.
15
‘Example is more desirable than precept’, one irrigation officer recommended after
touring southern Trans-Jordan. Introducing ‘even a small nucleus of agriculturalists . . .
ambitious ones, even as they under-prepare officials for operating in less

controlled environments.16 When miniaturization becomes a substitute
for the real thing, it remains no less revealing of official mentalities.
What did these myriad desert development schemes have in com-
mon? In prescribing the region’s future, officers looked to its ancient past.
‘Among the many activities of the Mid-East’, Jarvis recalled, ‘archaeologi-
cal work has a definite place’, so that each year the Syrian Desert was sprin-
kled with officer-turned-archaeologists.17 Others immersed themselves in
written accounts of the empires that had gone before. But whether digging
up ruins or escorting professional teams in the field, the practical applica-
tion of archaeological knowledge was never far from officers’ minds. ‘If we
could really conjure up a true and vivid picture of the past’, Glubb wrote,
‘what lessons could we not learn from it to assist in the solution of our
problems today’.18 This was not unprecedented: parallel studies of Roman
and British imperialism had long sought to be ‘instructive for the present,
and possibly significant for the future’.19 But aspects of this search for past
precedents were peculiar to the interwar, Middle Eastern context.
One was the new technique of aerial archaeology. As officers, survey-
ors and air mail pilots flew across the Syrian Desert, they buzzed with
excitement to discover new evidence of ancient habitation below. Walls,
stone formations and trenches that ‘would [n]‌ever have been discovered
otherwise’ seemed, when photographed from above, to rise up through
the very fabric of the earth.20 In 1928, for example, an aerial photographic
survey for the Government of Iraq stumbled on evidence of ‘an ancient
and dense cultivation’ over large areas of what was now desert land. Seized
as proof of the potential for irrigation, enthusiasts were soon calling for
aerial surveys of all the world’s arid regions as ‘the first essential steps in
any plan of development’.21 In part, this mirrored the flowering of field
archaeology in Britain, as aerial photographs widened popular interest in
the past and encouraged enthusiasts to think in terms of broad ‘landscapes
of settlement’.22 But beyond the British Isles, the desert corridor offered
equally fertile ground. Where else was so regularly traversed by aircraft, or
so peopled by Air Force personnel? (Some administrators, like Peake, had
would be worthwhile’: CO 831/34/8, J. Dawson Shepherd (Palestine Irrigation Officer) to

A. Tabbara (Director of Agriculture, Trans-Jordan), 19 Mar. 1934.
16
Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 198, 257–260.
17
18
MECA: JBG 209/3, Glubb, ‘Tribal Culture’ (n.d.).
19
Bryce, Studies, i, p. 4. This late-Victorian habit was still very much in vogue. See
Chamberlain, ‘Lord Cromer’, p. 84.
20
Holt, ‘Future’, p. 177. 21
Salt, Imperial Air Routes, pp. 240–241.
22
The trend was most associated with O. G. S. Crawford and his new journal, Antiquity.
See Hauser, Crawford.
even taught themselves to fly). Rediscovering the region’s antiquity from

above provoked new theories about its ‘decline’, bold claims about the
impact of geography on history, and plans for the ‘recovery’ of past levels
of civilization.
These discoveries were thrilling at the time, but they also helped elevate
the faculty of sight, granting local officers the authority to speak about the
ancient past without undertaking costly, invasive excavations. Thus the
former extent of Roman cultivation was measured ‘as far as the eye can
judge’.23 Officers did not need to have read their history to believe certain
things about the region’s past: visible ‘signs of ancient civilization’ were
proof enough.24 This was thought to be especially true in desert environ-
ments. As archaeologists Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence had argued
in The Wilderness of Zin (1915), ‘everything that has ever been made in
the desert is kept for ever for all to see’.25 Together, this helps explain the
presentism that pervaded desert development plans, the assumption that
age-old patterns of land use and terrain were still of relevance today.26 It
may also account for the remarkable interest shown in the ancient world
by men whose prior education had been more military than classical. Like
the autodidacts they were, they drew connections fearlessly across spans of
time and space.
Yet the lessons of the past did not result in a single, coherent route map
for regional desert development. After two decades of writing the ‘new’
imperial history, we must still guard against treating colonial officials as
a homogenous group. Settling nomads, it has been claimed, is ‘a peren-
nial state project’.27 Surely the British, in the interests of development and
security, also sought their sedentarization? But in Trans-Jordan, for exam-
ple, where that claim has been made, the archival record supports no such
unity of vision.28 A definite sedentarization scheme was only drawn up in
1935, and even then was met with caution.29 By talking up the idea of a
monolithic colonial world-view, we risk losing sight of something much
more interesting.
23
Glubb, ‘Economic Situation’, p. 451.
24
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘FDA Annual Report for 1921’.
25
Lawrence and Woolley, Wilderness, p. 23.
26
This assumption formed the basis of Jarvis’ new theory on the route of the Exodus, a
favourite subject: Jarvis, ‘Forty Years’ Wanderings’.
27
28
Joseph Massad and Mustafa Hamarneh, from very different perspectives, both
make this assumption: Massad, Colonial Effects, p. 59; Hamarneh, ‘Social and Economic
Transformation’.
29
Compare, for example, the recommendations of the Expert Committee on the
Economic Development of Trans-Jordan with Resident Henry Cox’s account of its
work: CO 831/34/8, Cox to Wauchope, 24 Dec. 1934.
Across the desert corridor, officers knowingly took part in a spirited

debate over the nature of nomads and the future of arid zones. ‘In the early
days of their service’, Claude Jarvis recalled, British officers . . .
throw in their lot with one side or the other, and will become either
pro-nomad or pro-cultivator in all things. It depends on the character and
personality of the administrator himself as to which side will claim him.30
That debate became the defining feature of British desert development.
The general record of interwar colonial development is also one of ten-
sion between preserving the ‘traditional’ and promoting economic and
social change, but the ambivalence towards nomadic societies does seem
to have been particularly pronounced.31 In the Middle East, the scope
for disagreement became so broad that some, like Glubb, were suspected
of ‘going native’, and new Special Service Officers were warned to ‘resist
the inclination to drift into native ways’.32 In the unsettled climate of the
interwar years, debating the ‘modes of life’ also became a proxy for some-
thing else: disagreement over the condition and direction of Britain’s own
society. The interwar steppe had become an ideological battleground, not
just an arena of politics.
So there was more to contemporaries’ search for ‘lessons’ from the past
than initially meets the eye. Officers invoked multiple, competing pasts
in support of divergent development policies. And the Middle East—that
palimpsest ‘in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran
over that’—furnished plenty of ammunition.33 ‘Pro-Arab enthusiasts’,
John Glubb remembered, ‘saw themselves rebuilding the Empire of the
Khalifs’, while ‘other British idealists visualized the revived glories of a
new Jerusalem’.34 ‘Some paint a picture of a [large] Roman population’,
Jarvis observed, while ‘others, anxious to emphasize the rights of the exist-
ing Beduin, would almost make it out to be a congested area to-day’.35
Still other colonizers may have emphasized the legacy of Rome ‘to reclaim
a European past’ for the region.36 This chapter, however, aims to move
away from studying how classical allusions shaped imperial identities,
and towards their impact on policy on the ground.37 Desert development,
30
Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 58–59.
31
Studies of policy towards the Maasai note a similar range of opinion: Knowles and
Collett, ‘Nature as Myth’; Spencer, ‘Pastoralism’.
32
33
As Lady Duff Gordon described Egypt. Cited in Reid, ‘Cromer’, p. 1.
34
35
Jarvis, ‘Holy Land’. See also: Jarvis, ‘To Petra’, p. 144.
36
Lorcin, ‘Imperialism’, p. 670.
37
For a survey of this literature, see Bradley, Classics.
most would have agreed, meant ‘reconstructing’ a lost past. It was the
choice of past that mattered.
* * *
To give a sense of the scope for debate, this chapter focuses on two con-
trasting visions of development. The first was advanced by Frederick Peake,
and much admired by Claude Jarvis. The second was most associated with
the work of John Glubb. By exploring how each became embedded in
wider attitudes towards nomadism, as well as what happened when they
came into contact, we add another dimension to our understanding of
Britain’s ‘Tribal Question’.
Scholarship seldom treats these men as thinkers. As products of the
late Victorian middle class, it was hardly a label they would have wel-
comed themselves. Minor public schools prepared Peake and Glubb for
military service, not administration (Jarvis’ school-days seem to have
made little mark at all). None had any inkling that the Middle East
would become such a large part of their lives. What they read about the
region, they read on the job, with patchy access to a wider literature, and
often on their own.
Yet each man was prolific in committing to paper his views on the
future of the Middle East, and left a wealth of written material for the
historian to explore. Peake peppered his reports and correspondence
with musings beyond his daily duties. Jarvis and Glubb both built lit-
erary careers on the back of their desert service. Their ideas, moreo-
ver, were not confined to the page. As energetic officials with expansive
jurisdictions (and far from bureaucracies that might disapprove), they
were lived out in policy, experiment, and action. Through the RCAS,
where each man became a recognized authority in the new art of desert
administration, their work provides a window onto broader debates that
they by turns caught and intensified. Running the corridor, as we have
seen, meant shuttling practices of desert control across national bounda-
ries. Through the Society, members addressed problems on a truly global
scale.
Peake, Jarvis, and Glubb were not inflexible doctrinaires, but in this
particular period they could be said to occupy both ends of a spectrum
of opinion on nomads and nomadism. That meant holding at least one
conviction in common: that nomads and settlers formed discrete ele-
ments of any given population. This idea was, as we saw earlier in this
book, as crude and inelastic as it was persistent, but for many in pursuit
of ‘the Tribal Question’ the ‘modes of life’—not race or class—came
first. ‘Three main elements in the population’, a typical military report
ran, ‘may be distinguished regardless of race or religion’: rural peasants,
urban merchants, and desert nomads.38 Peake imagined the Hedjaz rail-
way as the modern frontline in a two-thousand year conflict between
these ‘elements’, one confirmed before his eyes by Trans-Jordan’s ‘impres-
sive archaeological records’.39 Jarvis rejected The Desert and the Sown as
too ‘hackneyed’ a title for one of his books, but the revised Desert and
Delta amounted to much the same thing.40 And Glubb was so wed-
ded to this underlying structure as to draw up a list of reasons for ‘the
existence and survival of tribes in any part of the world’.41 So however
well-worn talk of ‘the desert against the sown’ may appear to us today,
it went largely unquestioned at the time, a universal, secular framework
for approaching world history, and a compelling factor in planning for
the future. It was only in its implications that the opinions of Peake,
Jarvis, and Glubb—and those of many of their colleagues—so dramati-
cally diverged.
‘THE MAN WITH MODERN IDEAS OF

P RO G R E S S ’ : F R E D E R I C K P E A K E ’ S
AGRARIAN FUTURE
Throughout this period, Peake took ‘the area under cultivation’ to be an

index of prosperity. In his lectures, memoranda, reports, and correspond-
ence he associated the region’s future with the revival and protection of
its agricultural communities. This was something which Trans-Jordan—
poised, in Peake’s eyes, between ‘the desert and the sown’—was pecu-
liarly well-placed to observe. His History of Jordan and its Tribes described
how nomad incursions into the ‘fertile fringe’ of north Arabia had ‘con-
fronted every government which has been responsible for the welfare of
those parts’, from the Assyrians, Persians, Romans, and Crusaders ‘down
through the days of the Ottoman to the British Empire’. The lesson
imparted by each seemed to Peake to be the same. Nomads, if not held
in check, would always prevent settled folk from realizing the land’s full
agricultural potential.42
For Peake, the future of Trans-Jordan ‘depended entirely on the cultivator,
who must be protected from his desert neighbour’. It was a perspective which
even T. E. Lawrence came to share after two months in Peake’s company.43 If
38
AIR 23/798, Military Report on Syria (n.d. Sept., 1928).
39
Peake, History, p. 94. 40
JM: DN24, Jarvis to Murray, 24 Mar. 1938.
41
MECA: JBG 214/5, ‘Note on the Application of the Tribal Courts Law 1936’ (n.d.
1940s).
42
Peake, History, pp. 3, 40. 43
a government could be formed from ‘the educated town and village dwell-
ers’, Peake reasoned, then the country might have a shot at ‘tolerably good
rule’, provided the Arab Legion could keep the Bedouin at bay.44 What so
alarmed him about the 1923 ‘Adwan rebellion, when the Emir despatched
‘wild Bedouin of the desert’ to silence the grievances of the semi-settled
Belqa’ tribes, was the threat it posed to this delicate balance. By ‘taxing out of
existence the most industrious and useful section of Trans-Jordan’s inhabit-
ants’, Abdullah risked perverting the course of history.45 Instead, the future
belonged to ‘a government sufficiently strong to ensure that . . . the peo-
ple could cultivate the land in peace and receive the just rewards of their
labours’—quite literally reaping what they had sown.46
That task was not, however, going to be easy. Peake believed that
throughout history, authority struggled against a natural, chaotic condi-
tion of ‘tribal rule’ when ‘the strongest notables with their tribes preyed
upon the poor cultivators’, reducing them to ‘absolute poverty’ and brig-
andage.47 This idea befitted a man who spoke of having ‘read and reread’
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall ‘cover to cover’ during an uneventful campaign.48
But because the ‘modes of life’ trumped race in his reading of world his-
tory, the idea was further confirmed by his understanding of Britain’s own
past. In a short account of the Scottish border village to which he would
retire, Peake suggested that the Celts had
behaved towards the natives very much in the same way as the Arab nomads,
up to recent times, did to the people they found living in the settled areas,
which they, from time immemorial, were wont to seize and occupy.49
In Trans-Jordan, as in Britain, Rome had had ‘the greatest success’ in pro-
tecting settled communities. But the price of progress was constant vigi-
lance, and Middle Eastern governments ever since had been too irresolute
to hold the desert in check. By the First World War the area had lapsed
into ‘tribal rule’ once more, and for the rest of his career Peake feared its
return. ‘The nomad or tent dwellers of the desert’, he wrote even in retire-
ment, ‘despise and hate the more prosperous town and village dwellers and
look back with regret to the good old days or centuries when they raided
and looted the settled Arabs without let or hindrance’.50 In 1938, with
Palestine in revolt, Peake urged Henry Cox to crack down swiftly on the
44
46
Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 105–107; IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobi-
ography), p. 125.
47
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, ‘Work of the Arab Legion’ (n.d. 1939–45).
48
49
Peake, St Boswells.
50
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, untitled article on the Middle East since 1918 (n.d. after 1945).
slightest evidence of unrest in Trans-Jordan: should any highway robbery

go unpunished, he warned, ‘from that moment on the downward drift will
be rapid and bands of brigands will be formed’.51
The concern for ‘publick security’ which punctuated Peake’s reports,
therefore, was no mere catalogue of crime and punishment. The stakes
were infinitely higher. He weighed his own command of the Arab
Legion against such yardsticks as the extent of cultivated land, the abil-
ity of the fellahin to bring their produce to market, and even the energy
and ‘disposition’ with which they toiled.52 The Legion’s strength, the
growth of ‘civilized government’, agricultural yields and the curbing of
the ‘raging anarchy’ of the Bedouin were inextricably linked. As such,
Peake imagined his men as part of a tradition of imperial outsiders
who stepped in to protect settled communities from tribal depreda-
tions. The Ikhwan attacks were a spectacular example of this threat,
but an example nonetheless—more an age-old nomad problem than
a religious innovation. As his widely circulated ‘Brief History of the
Wahhabi Movement’ explained, ‘Muslimen who [are] treading the road
of advancement and education’ had little sympathy for the movement;
it was the Bedouin, ‘untouched’ by ‘civilization’, who found its teach-
ings acceptable.53 The most ‘dangerous’ elements of the population, a
1928 report made plain, were still those nomads who ‘range on the
fringes of civilized areas’, marked by their ‘suspicion’ and contempt for
‘proper authority’.54
Peake was not alone in envisioning an agricultural future. Jarvis shared
his prognosis for the area under his jurisdiction. The cultivator lacked the
nomad’s charm (‘his natural easy manners, his aristocratic contempt for
trade’), but made up for it with ‘diligence’ and ‘his application to hard
work’.55 Like Lord Cromer before him, Jarvis was convinced that the fel-
lahin were the economic actors who really mattered.56 Defending them
from the desert’s ‘migrating masses’, whether nomadic Bedouin or swarms
of locusts (those ‘other intending invaders’) was of national importance.57
If Egypt was ‘almost entirely an agricultural country’, then Iraq’s ‘main and
abiding resources’ were also agricultural.58 Industry seemed out of reach,
51
IWM: FGP 5, Peake to Cox, 27 Aug. 1938; Peake, History, p. 3.
52
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 133; IWM: FGP 1, Peake,
‘Arab Legion Annual Report, 1928’.
53
IWM: FGP 11, Peake, ‘Brief History of the Wahabi Movement’ (n.d. Mar. 1928).
54
IWM: FGP 4/3, Peake, ‘Population’, p. 28.
55
56
Owen, ‘Lord Cromer’, pp. 131–132.
57
Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 103, 232–247.
58
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 221–222; Cole, Military Geography, p. 253.
nomadic pastoralism irrelevant. Even oil ranked far below the revival of
agriculture in many an official’s calculations.59
These ideas were by no means the product of straight colonial ‘inven-
tion’. They reflected contemporary indigenous discourses too, though
often with different ends in mind. Iraq’s poets, for example, also talked
up its agricultural bounties, not least to accuse the British occupation of
wasting its potential.60 Many of the most strident critics of nomadism
to address the Society also did so on behalf of national governments.61
Equating nomadism with stagnation and agriculture with progress was a
far cry from the cyclical view of history of Ibn Khaldûn, but it was wide-
spread among urban Ottoman elites at the turn of the century. This rhe-
torical intersection of both colonizer and colonized raised expectations of
an agricultural windfall which, in the interwar years, never came.62
Yet Peake believed nomadic pastoralism to be worse than an irrelevance.
It was, he claimed, responsible for the region’s present aridity. Here, his
reading of the ancient past—and his choice of which past to foreground—
proved central to the development of a controversial argument.
Of all the empires that had waxed and waned in the region, Peake
thought the Roman spoke most directly to his concerns. He ‘endeavoured
to imitate the Romans’, Jarvis remembered, and ‘as a student of history
and an embryo archaeologist, to put his knowledge of the Roman past . . .
to practical use’.63 Peake took ‘a particular interest’ in studying a site near
Kerak, said to be that of ‘the first battle between a Moslem Army and the
Romans’.64 His house stood on the ruins of a Byzantine church, his gar-
den nestled among the pillars of the nave (see Figure 4.1).65 Nonetheless,
many of his field observations seem to have been filtered by his reading of
Gibbon: the tendency to imagine frontier skirmishes as struggles for ‘civi-
lization’ itself; the concern that empires not overstep ‘natural’ geographical
limits; views of pastoralists as homogenous, hostile and backward, like
Gibbon’s ‘Lombards’ and ‘Goths’.66 In his duties, he looked to Rome for
all manner of advice: from how to police urban unrest (‘the Legionaries
59
Mesopotamia, Arnold Wilson urged the Society, must reclaim its title as ‘the granary
of Asia . . . It will be wise for all concerned not to bank too much on oil as the solution of
[its] financial difficulties’: Wilson, ‘Mesopotamia, 1914–1921’, p. 151. For more on this
miscalculation, see Letherdale, Britain and Saudi Arabia, p. 212.
60
Tripp, History of Iraq, p. 65.
61
For example: al-Askari, ‘Five Years’ Progress’, p. 68.
62
As Peter Sluglett observes: Sluglett, ‘Mandates’, p. 117.
63
64
65
The house is now the Darat al-Funun, in the Jabal al-Luweibdeh district of Amman.
66
For more on Gibbon’s ideas about pastoral nomadism, see McKitterick and Quinault,
Gibbon and Empire, pp. 137–161.
Fig. 4.1 ‘Peake’s Garden in the Town of Amman, the Site of a Ruined Byzantine
Church’, in C. S. Jarvis, Arab Command: The Biography of Lieutenant-Colonel
F. G. Peake Pasha (London, 1942)
were drawn up in three ranks . . . much as the triarii of the Roman Army’)
to where to place his own limes interior of police outposts and roads.67
But most of all, Peake looked to the Roman past to understand why the
region’s deserts had come to be so large.
Roman Trans-Jordan, Peake was forever observing, had been the
empire’s granary: densely populated, fertile and prosperous. He blamed
its desiccation ever since not on a change in climate or rainfall—a ‘quite
prevalent’ but erroneous ‘theory’—but on the indolence, ignorance, and
prejudice of the Bedouin themselves. The Pax Romana had ‘kept the tribes
at bay’, and so the settled population thrived, learned to conserve water
more efficiently, and expanded the cultivated zone. Then, with the fall of
Roman dominion, ‘the age old encroachment of the Beduin on the settled
people began’, driving down the population and pushing back the culti-
vated area. ‘[W]‌e are gradually beginning to emerge from the days of the
Beduin rule and chaos’, he predicted, but ‘it will . . . be many years yet,
before we see either the dense population or broad cultivated acres as in
Roman days.68 The Bedouin had brought the desert in their wake, destroy-
ing the reservoirs and dams they found. It was not the region’s rainfall that
had deteriorated over time, but the calibre of its inhabitants.
67
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 192; Peake, History,
pp. 40–41; Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 149.
68
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, ‘Water Preservation and Use in Trans-Jordan’ (n.d. 1936).
Jarvis was convinced by this macro reading of history, and set out to
prove it on a micro scale. Influenced by Peake and by his reading of The
Wilderness of Zin (which he reviewed favourably for The Egyptian Gazette),
he too believed that rainfall ‘was no greater fifteen hundred years ago than
it is today’. That led him to another explanation for the region’s desicca-
tion: nomadic pastoralism itself.69 When the walls and fences protecting
Roman orchards had collapsed, he reasoned, the Bedouin’s camels and
goats must have moved in and destroyed all trace of vegetation. To test his
theory, Jarvis enclosed a three-acre patch of desert behind the Governor’s
house in El Arish, and watched as scrub bushes and local grasses took root,
the soil recovered, and the sand began to stabilize. The experiment con-
vinced him ‘of what Sinai must have been before the Arab came to lay it
waste with his grazing flocks’. Checking desiccation now meant checking
the Bedouin, and became the higher cause that bound his career together:
I have spent eighteen years of my life fighting the desert. When I went first
into the Egyptian Government I was in the Libyan desert, and here I was
constantly fighting encroaching sand-dunes that threatened villages and
corn-land. When I left it and went to Sinai, I found myself still fighting the
desert and trying to keep it back from roads, railways and gardens. I regard
the desert as an enemy that has to be defeated . . . [I]‌f the Romans managed
to make something of this area thirteen-hundred years ago, surely we, with
all our modern improvements, can do something with it.70
‘By wantonly destroying everything for which they could find no immedi-
ate use’, the Bedouin and his herds had ‘allowed the country to slip back
to the desolation from which a more virile race reclaimed it prior to their
coming’. Jarvis believed this fervently: he had seen it with his own eyes.71
These ideas gained much currency at the time. Between the two world
wars, the relationship between climate, terrain, and human behaviour was
of marked interest to historians, geographers, and colonial officials alike.72
The Royal Central Asian Society helped propagate these ideas between
disparate territories. Irrigation and desiccation were matters of recur-
rent interest; members’ lectures, articles and reports collectively explored
whether human action or changes in climate were responsible for desicca-
tion of the soil. This was the background to Peake and Jarvis’ pronounce-
ments. Jarvis acknowledged the ‘theory’ that ploughing destroyed natural
grasslands as ‘a thing that is worrying the authorities’ in the American
Midwest, but dismissed it as a warning for the Middle East, where ‘there
69
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 129–130; Jarvis, ‘Desert Beduin’, p. 586. Lawrence and
Woolley advance the argument in: Wilderness, pp. 22, 41–42, 46.
70
Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 211. 71
Jarvis, ‘Sinai’, p. 43.
72
See Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore’, pp. 761 ff.
[n]‌ever was much natural humus’ in the first place.73 Instead, the two men
offered an alternate scapegoat and a clear course of action. Nomadic graz-
ing in general, and ‘fourteen hundred years of neglect’ in particular, had
turned Rome’s granary into a howling, waterless waste. As he watched
the sand dunes spread onto the gravel plain of central Sinai—a mile and
a half in ten years by his reckoning—Jarvis warned that the remaining
semi-arid areas of southern Palestine, Trans-Jordan, the Hedjaz, and the
Sahara would all face the same fate.74 The Bedouin, he was fond of repeat-
ing, was not the son of the desert, but its father.75
* * *
Peake and Jarvis caught and intensified a critique of nomadism common
within the Royal Central Asian Society. Many shared their conviction that
‘the desert and the sown’ was a temporal as well as a spatial distinction.
Nomads belonged to the same time-scale of development as British soci-
ety, but occupied a backward and inferior position upon it. As we saw
earlier, for those asking ‘the Tribal Question’, stage theory had never really
gone away.
A government handbook, The Arab of Mesopotamia, for example,
described ‘the conversion of the wandering camel breeder’ into ‘a cul-
tivator of the soil’ as ‘an inevitable process’ (though one which ‘good
administration’ might hurry along).76 Alec Seath Kirkbride’s experiences
in Trans-Jordan confirmed the necessary steps in this ‘sequence’, from
nomads preying on cultivators, to gradually adopting their ‘habits’, and
‘finally’ abandoning the ‘roving life’ altogether. This was a one-way trip
(‘there does not appear to be a case of a tribe ever having reversed the
process’).77 Man progressed unidirectionally along a scalar ordering of
society, from nomadism, through agriculture, to commerce and indus-
try. The inevitable decline of mobile, kin-based social systems was further
hammered home by repeated reference to General George Wade and his
‘pacification’ of the Scottish Highlands two centuries earlier.78
Society debates helped to lend this world-view an air of compara-
tive historical scholarship, but the prejudice beneath it all remains.
Understandings of the ‘modes of life’ were deeply morally charged. For
Peake, the step from nomadism to agriculture was also one from indolence
to hard work, and from torpor into life. Ideas about the built environment
73
Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 209.
74
Jarvis, ‘Sinai’, p. 34; Jarvis, ‘Goat Standard’, p. 319; Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 95–96.
75
This phrase was originally Edward Henry Palmer’s (1840–1882), but Jarvis did the
most to popularize it in the interwar years, and it was often wrongly attributed to him.
76
Bell, Arab of Mesopotamia, p. 2. 77
Kirkbride, ‘Changes’, pp. 40–41.
78
For one example among many: Jacob, ‘Waziristan’, pp. 242, 250.
were crucial to how Europeans judged societies, and nomads’ lack of

immovable property, so the argument ran, precluded the development of
an industrious, diligent and upright ‘character’.79 Property brought about
a moral transformation; nomads were ‘a definite bar to progress’.80 They
were ‘loafer[s]‌of the very worst class . . . with a dislike to honest work
amounting to aversion’.81 Physically mobile, they were developmentally
static. Most, Jarvis felt, were born with ‘a very good brain’, but it became
‘atrophied by disuse’ over a lifetime spent trailing after the herd.82 He held
goat-herding in particular contempt: ‘the ideal pursuit of a thoroughly
lazy and ineffectual man . . . The result on the character is deplorable’.83
Nomads could become conquerors and kings, but those who elected to
remain in the desert were ‘too lazy or incompetent to change their mode
of life’.84 Their movements were irrational and atavistic, ‘a migratory
instinct acquired ages ago’ but of no relevance to modern life. Jarvis told
the Society of a Sinai Bedouin who abandoned a ‘thriving’ olive orchard to
graze two goats 250 miles away. Returning to find that straying camels had
destroyed his plot, ‘he accepted the situation with equanimity’.85
Without fixed property, nomads had no means with which to measure
the passage of time, and indeed lacked a conception of the future itself. In
many settler contexts, that claim was enough to justify the dispossession and
appropriation of their land. But in Britain’s desert corridor it was more often a
concern for security, not land, that shaped imperial attitudes towards nomad-
ism. The real problem with nomads’ improvidence, Jarvis reasoned, was that
it bred criminality. Because the Bedouin ‘possess no property to be sold up to
pay a fine, and as to them time means nothing, a sentence of penal servitude
holds no terrors . . . ’.86 ‘Rootlessness’ led to violence. Peake observed that
semi-nomadic shaykhs ‘never went to the extremes [of preying on the culti-
vators] which the nomadic ones did’, because their reduced mobility caused
a ‘fear of reprisals’ which ‘set a limit to their greed’.87 Being driven by want
‘perpetually from pillar to post’ was ‘enough . . . to make anyone peevish’.88
The nomadic mode of life was thus, for many, synonymous with inher-
ent moral failings: perfidy, levity, indolence and violence. If all these objec-
tions were not enough then recent events seemed to suggest that its time
had finally run out. Many assumed—as have some historians since—that
79
See further: Buchan, ‘Subjecting the Natives’, pp. 144–145.
80
Jarvis, ‘Desert Beduin’, p. 588.
81
FO 371/1364, J. E. Marshall, ‘Public Security in Egypt’, 8 Sept. 1912.
82
Jarvis, Yesterday, pp. 21–22. 83
Jarvis, ‘Goat Standard’, p. 324.
84
Hillelson, review of Sons of Ishmael, p. 139.
85
86
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 604; Jarvis, ‘Sinai’, p. 51.
87
IWM: FGP 3 (manuscript autobiographical fragments), F. G. Peake, ‘Badawin’ (n.d.).
88
IWM: C. H. Williams papers: Williams, Desert Memories, p. 37.
the political fragmentation of Greater Syria had made ongoing migration

impossible. Others supposed that competition from the motor car would
sweep nomads away ‘on a petrol-laden air’.89 ‘Veterinary sanitation and
public security’, one military report thundered, ‘are only two of many con-
siderations which refuse a place to this romantic non-industry in the mod-
ern state’.90 So when drought struck in Trans-Jordan, decimating Bedouin
herds, Peake was not at all sure that it was such a bad thing:
The Beni Sakhr are in the process of settling down and probably the gradual
loss of their camels will hasten this process.
Naturally the intermediate stage is a difficult one, and very hard on those
who have to bear it, but if it hastens the settling down of these Beduin then
much good will have come of it. The period of change is the difficulty, but
not much more difficult than the period of the introduction of machinery in
England, when many who would not or could not change disappeared from
the arena.91
This was a subtle variation on the ‘extinction discourse’ applied to indig-
enous societies across the nineteenth century.92 Unlike the Maori and the
‘Red Men’ with whom nomads like the Bedouin and the Maasai were
often compared, it was their mode of life, not their racial make-up, that
had left them so exposed. Government need not start ‘smoothing the pil-
low’ just yet, but further progress had become impossible, and something
had to give. It was not their fault. It was their mode of life. Nomads, as
nomads, had no future.
All this inclined Peake and Jarvis towards a policy of sedentarization.
‘The only way to save the Beduin from extinction’, Jarvis urged through
the Society, was ‘to slowly wean him from his present haphazard nomad
existence and gradually settle him on his own land’—to get him ‘off the
goat standard’.93 Because nomads lived ‘so entirely in the present’, there
was little point in consulting them on the matter.94 Tilling the soil would
set the Bedouin right, teaching them the value of the land (rather than
passing over it inconsequentially) and the dignity of labour. In time, it
would make the tribesman ‘a more useful member of the community, and
a more peaceful one’.95 Yet Britain’s desert officers never commanded the
resources—or, as we shall see, the consensus—to initiate a comprehensive
89
90
AIR 23/796, Military Report on Palestine, 1928 (n.d. Dec. 1928).
91
CO 831/23/13, Peake to Cox, 7 Jan. 1933.
92
Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings. The idea that nomadism is ‘destined’ to disappear
remains a favourite of popular travel literature.
93
Jarvis, ‘Desert Beduin’, p. 593; Jarvis, ‘Goat Standard’, p. 318.
94
95
Jarvis, ‘Desert Beduin’, p. 587. See also: Bell, Arab of Mesopotamia, pp. 139–140.
scheme of forced sedentarization. Instead, we must look elsewhere for

evidence of this idea in practice. Two forms of activity call out for explo-
ration: experimental agricultural settlements, and selective recruitment
policies.
To bring about his agricultural future, Peake looked to the Roman
past once more. He identified ancient, disused irrigation systems in
Trans-Jordan’s ‘so-called desert areas’ which, once cleared, would enable
population growth, the settlement of the Bedouin and the recovery of
lost areas of cultivation.96 In a 1936 report on water preservation, Peake
suggested a list of potential projects. New water tanks could be built on
the side of wadis which were known to come down in spate, catching
and storing the annual runoff. This scheme had ‘unlimited’ possibilities
in Trans-Jordan; it had been ‘in vogue’ in Roman times too.97 Each tank
would water a small orchard nearby, and after two or three years, once those
trees had taken root, another batch could be placed under cultivation.
A grander project would depend on the Colonial Development Fund, but
offered ‘a very conspicuous way of helping the Beduin’. Restoring ancient
irrigation channels would save vast quantities of spring water and revive
lost plantations. In the hills east of Ma’an, where the Howeitat had begun
to cultivate only to lose their crops to drought, re-cementing these irriga-
tion channels might maintain the momentum behind their settlement.
A similar project further south at Rumm might promote garden cultiva-
tion of date palms among the most destitute Howeitat sections. By these
means, Peake hoped to double or treble the size of the country’s agricul-
tural zone at minimal cost.98 Little wonder, then, that by his retirement
Peake had earned the sobriquet ‘farmer Pasha’.99
Peake’s proposals must be seen in the context of Trans-Jordan’s land
reform programme, which ran from the late 1920s into the 1950s, becom-
ing ‘the most significant and intrusive state policy ever carried out’ under
the mandate.100 It brought additional land under cultivation and increased
government revenue, even if its impact was blunted in central and south-
ern areas, where the Ottoman administrative legacy offered less of a plat-
form on which to build.101 Nonetheless, Peake’s proposals engaged with
themes, policies, and ideas that transcended even this ambitious national
programme.
96
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, ‘Water Preservation’, p. 12.
97
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, ‘Water Preservation’, pp. 9–10.
98
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, ‘Water Preservation’, pp. 16–18.
99
IWM: FGP 2 (press cuttings), ‘From Desert Sand to Border Soil’, The People’s Journal,
26 Mar. 1949.
100
Fischbach, ‘British Land Program’.
101
Rogan, Frontiers; Alon, Making of Jordan, p. 127.
Firstly, many across the desert corridor were equally inclined to view
restoring ancient irrigation works as something of a panacea. An early
report by Egypt’s Frontier Districts Administration remarked on the
‘strong presumption’ among its ranks that ‘the Romans understood a sys-
tem of dry cultivation that is at present lost to the inhabitants of that area’.
Peake was persistent and detailed in describing that ‘system’, but was one
of many to do so.102
Secondly, Peake saw nomads’ recent misfortunate as an historic oppor-
tunity. His plantation proposals for Ma’an and Rumm specifically tar-
geted those tribesmen whose herds had been most depleted, whether by
Ikhwan raids or by drought. Their present suffering merely confirmed the
broader argument in circulation that nomadic pastoralism everywhere
had had its day.
Thirdly, Peake continually prioritized low-cost, low-tech development
schemes that avoided the expense of bringing in overseas experts and which
operated, as he put it, ‘well within the limited intelligence of the people’.
‘Very simple’ schemes could be rolled out by local personnel, while ‘expen-
sive foreign machinery’ soon broke down and could not be repaired by the
villagers.103 To the modern reader, steeped in the language of ‘conservation’
and ‘sustainability’, this seems reasonable enough. And yet Peake makes
an unlikely apostle for the cause of ‘appropriate technology’: there were
other considerations at work here. Notwithstanding the shortage of funds,
Peake may have acquiesced in a more limited scale of development because
his agricultural plans were as much concerned with social engineering and
‘publick security’—teaching nomads the discipline of work—as they were
with rapid economic take-off. After all, with no great Malthusian pres-
sure in the country, ‘the needs of Transjordan [were] plain and simple’.
Throughout, Peake focused on bringing new areas under cultivation (and
new people into cultivation), rather than on increasing productivity per
acre. This too suggests that his interests lay in transforming the Bedouin
as much as kick-starting growth. The result was to further the idea of ‘the
desert and the sown’ being locked in a zero-sum contest.104
Most of all, Peake’s plans suggest just how readily ideas about deserts
and the future of nomadism circulated around Britain’s desert corridor.
Expertise in desert development grew as it moved between disparate ter-
ritories; it was not neatly transmitted from ‘metropole’ to ‘periphery’. To
prove the possibilities of localized and inexpensive irrigation techniques,
for example, Peake ‘[could not] point to a better example’ than that being
102
FO 141/799/5, Hunter, ‘FDA Annual Report 1921’.
103
IWM: FGP 4, Peake, ‘Water Preservation’.
104
Hamarneh, ‘Social and Economic Transformation’, p. 169.
set by his ‘next door neighbour’, Claude Jarvis in Sinai. Peake referred to
‘the Jarvis Scheme’—using water tanks to collect wadi runoff—and fol-
lowed his suggestions on their location and construction. Peake even pro-
posed that on Jarvis’ retirement
he be persuaded to come here for a short time to explain to the Transjordan
Government some of his methods. I think we should benefit from his experi-
ence and advice more than from that of an Englishman from England or one
of the richer colonies.105
Jarvis, in turn, sought advice on managing arid zones and pastoralism
from even further afield. His strictures against the goat as an agent of des-
iccation, and his use of fences to keep pastoralists’ livestock at bay, drew
on the work of A. H. Unwin, by turns Conservator of Forests in Nigeria,
Cyprus and Palestine.106 Another contact in Adelaide supplied him with
four different kinds of salt scrub bushes to help stabilise Sinai’s soil (one
took to the coastline and, proving ‘extremely prolific’, was soon found
sprouting hundreds of miles inland).107 Varieties of Australian wheat, and
olives from Tunis, Cyprus, Italy, and Palestine, were also trialled in a series
of agricultural experiments. Jarvis’ flagship project, however—and the one
that most caught Peake’s eye—was the Wadi Gedeirat irrigation scheme.
When Jarvis first laid eyes on Ain el-Gedeirat on the Sinai–Palestine
frontier, it was a small stream in a deep valley, soaking away into the
ground. A mud dam kept about six acres under cultivation, and clouds
of malarial mosquitoes in rude health.108 After stumbling across ancient
water-courses and an old Roman reservoir—and assuming that the Arab’s
‘ingrained loathing of hard work’ meant water was almost certainly being
wasted—Jarvis allocated £700 to reconstruct the Roman irrigation sys-
tem. Work began in 1926. A new dam was built and the Roman reservoir
restored. Pipes were laid and cement channels dug to extend irrigation to
the most promising plots. Orchard walls were rebuilt and garden fences
erected to keep herds out. To encourage the local Tiyaha tribe to take up
agriculture, Jarvis issued grants of olive, vine and other trees. Those reluc-
tant to take up cultivation, meanwhile, were threatened with forfeiting
their access to the land altogether. At the centre, Jarvis opened a govern-
ment garden to provide ‘an object lesson’ to surrounding plots, and when
Bedouin gardens failed to meet his standards, he brought in experienced
cultivators from El Arish to set them right. By 1936, 300 acres were under
105
106
Jarvis, ‘Goat Standard’.
107
108
This section draws on Jarvis’ account of the scheme: Desert and Delta, pp. 242–276.
Fig. 4.2 ‘Arab Garden in the Wadi Gedeirah. Reconstructed from the old Roman
irrigation and now yielding fruit value about £70 annually’, in C. S. Jarvis, ‘The
Desert Yesterday and To-Day’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 69 (1937)
cultivation, and over four thousand fruit trees planted (see Figure 4.2).109
Jarvis’ only concern was for what might happen should an Egyptian ever
become Governor of Sinai, for ‘the dam may crack with a heavy flood, the
fencing will wear . . . and waiting patiently outside the garden walls are
those Philistines and iconoclasts of the cultivated world—the goats and
camels of the Arabs’.110
Jarvis knew that his irrigation scheme was dwarfed by the likes of the
Aswan dam and Palestine’s Hula Valley project. Yet it was not, to his mind,
without significance. ‘I have definitely succeeded in settling some hundred
nomads of the Teaha tribe on the land’, he told the Society in 1936.111 This
proved ‘that the Beduin can be settled on the land after a time if conditions
are favourable’, and that, Jarvis’ publisher wrote, had been his ‘aim and
object during the whole of his eighteen years service’.112 It mattered espe-
cially because Jarvis, like Peake, viewed agriculture in moral as much as
material terms. Hard work and better food made the Bedouin more ener-
getic, more enterprising, and morally sound.113 That wider sense of what
was at stake—the ongoing contest of the desert and the sown—shaped his
approach to one last controversy.
If the Wadi Gedeirat scheme was but ‘the first attempt to reconstruct the
many disused irrigation systems’ left behind by the Romans, then the most
logical place to continue seemed to be the Negev desert in Palestine.114
There, another ‘thriving’ Roman settlement had been brought low by
nomadic negligence: man was responsible, not the climate. Restoring the
Negev—like the Wadi Gedeirat—would take hard work, some capital,
109
Jarvis, ‘Southern Palestine’, p. 214. 110
Jarvis, Desert and Delta, p. 269.
111
Jarvis, ‘Beduin Future’, pp. 588–589.
112
Jarvis, ‘Beduin Future’, pp. 588–589; JM: DN 24, J. Murray, notice on the occasion
of C. S. Jarvis winning the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal, 29 Apr. 1938.
113
Jarvis, ‘Desert Beduin’, p. 590. 114
Jarvis, Desert and Delta, pp. 268–272.
and much self-discipline. If the Arabs had ‘allowed this land to go back to
desert’, then why should the Jews not be given a chance to do better? Their
leadership and example might even inspire the remaining nomads to take
up agriculture themselves.115 By the time he retired, Jarvis had become a
leading advocate of Jewish settlement of the Negev, arguing for it in The
Times, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, the Society’s Journal and elsewhere,
and cited with approval by other advocates of colonization.116 There was
some political calculation here: Jarvis hoped that the Negev might meet
Jewish migrants’ demand for land with ‘no question of hardship to an
existing population . . . for in a sense there is none’.117 But by thinking in
terms of the ‘modes of life’—prioritising the conflict between the desert
and the sown—Jarvis had allowed the potential implications for commu-
nal strife to become a secondary consideration. By the 1940s, when the
future assignation of the Negev was thrown wide open, Jarvis’ conflation
of agriculture with ‘progress’ would be mobilized anew to advance one
community’s claims at the expense of another.118
* * *
Peake feared that his agricultural future would wither and die if it could
not be protected. Picking the right people to do so formed the second part
of his proposals.
Policing, soldiering and recruitment seldom feature prominently in
studies of colonial development, but they were central to its desert variety.
European empires had long drawn links between a people’s ways of warfare
and its degree of ‘civilization’. How societies fought revealed their politi-
cal and social organization; conduct under arms became indicative of the
whole.119 This was particularly true for those inclined to divide the world
according to contending ‘modes of life’. ‘In studying the characteristics of
the nomadic and agricultural communities’, John Glubb addressed the
Society, ‘we may begin with their attitude to war’.120 Moreover, recruit-
ment was an area over which soldier-officials like Peake, Jarvis, and
Glubb—whose development projects proper were so often strapped for
cash—had more say. It rewards close examination.
115
Jarvis, ‘South of the Holy Land’.
116
For instance: Gottmann, ‘Pioneer Fringe’.
117
‘In a sense’ because, as Jarvis saw it, Bedouin inhabited the area without using it: Jarvis,
‘Empty Quarter’, p. 668.
118
Jarvis, Desert and Delta, p. 272. See further the arguments used by Eliahu Epstein and
Chaim Weizmann in seeking Truman’s support for granting the Negev to a future Jewish
state: Epstein, ‘Al Jezirah’; Elath, Israel and Elath; Louis, British Empire, pp. 484–485.
119
On this phenomenon, see Porter, Military Orientalism.
120
Glubb, ‘Arab Chivalry’, p. 6.
Throughout our period, Peake employed a very deliberate policy of

recruiting for the Arab Legion exclusively from sedentary communities.
As the Legion was fast becoming the most visible symbol of the state, its
composition had a significance to which he was very much alive. Initially,
he relied on the support of former Ottoman soldiers and police sergeants,
whose ‘power and prestige’ he greatly admired. He also favoured villag-
ers from Trans-Jordan’s Circassian and Turcoman settlements.121 The
Bedouin, however, he judged to be
of little [military] value. He is not amenable to discipline, devoid of personal
bravery and apt to throw in his lot with the winning side . . . In victory or
defeat he is equally impossible to control, in the former case from an irre-
pressible love of loot, in the latter from a tendency to desert.
As desert scouts, Peake found nomad recruits ‘incapable of making any
accurate report, or estimating time, distance, or number’. Even as camel
corps he thought it ‘preferable to use the more settled elements of the
population’.122 Between 1926 and 1928 Peake tightened literacy demands
for all ranks, effectively precluding Bedouin applications. He increasingly
recruited from among ‘the better educated youth’ of Trans-Jordan so that
all but the Legion’s most senior positions might be filled locally.123 His
reading of history further affirmed his belief in the ‘impossibility’ of form-
ing a disciplined army from Bedouin tribesmen, given the fractiousness
and internecine violence characteristic of their mode of life. It was only
by settling nomads into military colonies, Peake concluded, that Ibn Saud
had finally acquired trustworthy, skilled fighters to command.124
In common with many of his contemporaries, Peake may have owed his
scepticism of the Bedouin’s military value to his wartime experiences.125
During the final stages of the Arab Revolt he had commanded an Egyptian
camel corps recruited largely from the fellahin. While he came to respect
their conduct under fire, the Bedouin he encountered made a less favour-
able impression. On sabotage missions along the Hedjaz railway, Peake
recalled T. E. Lawrence being forced to keep the Bedouin two miles away
from the line as the train approached (such was their ill-discipline), while
Peake’s fellahin commenced their attack. When the Bedouin did arrive
121
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 142; Jarvis, Arab
Command, p. 70.
122
IWM: FGP 4/3, Peake, ‘Population’, p. 30.
123
IWM: FGP 1/5, Peake, ‘Annual Report 1928’, pp. 16–17; FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript
draft autobiography), pp. 138–139. The rule stood until Glubb’s formation of the Desert
Patrol in 1930.
124
FO 371/13015, Peake, ‘Brief Outline of the Wahabi Movement’, 24 Apr. 1928.
125
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 1 (typescript autobiographical essays), Peake, ‘Command of an
Egyptian Camel Corps’.
‘they flung themselves from their camels and started tearing open the trucks
and hurling out the contents’, leaving the enemy to slip away unscathed.
Shaykhs like Nuri al-Sha’lan promised guides that never arrived; tribes-
men only showed up when rations were being issued and ‘fell to looting’
at the slightest opportunity. And yet ‘the most embarrassing thing for me’,
Peake remembered of the campaign, ‘was to see Lawrence pouring golden
sovereigns into the hands of the Bedouin, while the Egyptians only had
a few piastres added to their meagre pay’.126 Enlisting the Bedouin—pay-
ing for such questionable performance—not only risked public security.
It threatened the balance of ‘the desert and the sown’ in fragile, fledgling
states.
Peake’s scepticism of the Bedouin at war was shared by other veter-
ans of the Palestine and Iraq campaigns, such as Hubert Young and A. S.
Kirkbride.127 The Bedouin made ‘very good ten-minute fighters’, Claude
Jarvis thought: willing to harass a weakened enemy, but incapable of driving
‘a few disciplined infantry out of a trench’.128 Reports on the Mesopotamia
campaign also concluded that Arab ‘fickleness’ made ‘their co-operation of
doubtful value, as both the Turks and the British found to their cost’.129 Yet
Peake, Jarvis, and many others besides were quite wrong to conclude that
the violence and ‘fickleness’ they encountered in the war years was a pris-
tine reflection of Bedouin society, evidence of ‘the normal state of affairs in
Arabia’.130 Few took into account the unusually disturbed conditions into
which the British had crashed—the wartime dislocation of trade and grazing
patterns—and for which they themselves were in no small part responsible.
Shifting allegiance within a global war—‘throwing in their lot with
the winning side’—may have made sense from the perspective of weak
and vulnerable tribes.131 But it only reinforced a negative impression of
nomads common within the Royal Central Asian Society. Martial assess-
ments of nomads at war reflected moral judgements of their mode of life.
The nomad might make a good guerilla, but ‘lacks determination and
never shrinks from deserting a cause he believes to be lost’.132 Their ‘inde-
pendence’, ‘abhorrence of discipline’ and ‘stupidity in realms outside their
own world’, an officer of the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force concluded, made
126
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 1 (typescript autobiographical essays), Peake, ‘Command of an
Egyptian Camel Corps’; IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiography), p. 14.
127
Young, Independent Arab, p. 194; Kirkbride, Crackle, pp. 14–15.
128
129
AIR 10/1426, Anon., ‘Military Report for Iraq, 1936’ (2 vols, London, 1936);
Fitzgerald Lee, Military Geography, p. 166.
130
131
For Bedouin efforts to navigate the war, see Fletcher, ‘Amarat’; Toth, ‘Last Battles’,
pp. 64–65; Tell, ‘Guns, Gold and Grain’.
132
Sheppard, ‘Mesopotamian Problem’, p. 15.
them ‘unsuitable for enlistment’.133 The nomad’s ‘contempt for manual

labour’ was reflected in his conduct on the field, where they were ‘short
sighted, totally unreliable partizans . . . ever ready to swing round, with-
out shame, to the winning side’. Even their reputation for predation was
overblown, the ‘raiding instinct’ having ‘degenerated into a penchant for
petty thieving’.134
Far better, then, to recruit agriculturalists, those ‘lusty fellaheen’, Jarvis
enthused, ‘standing five feet ten inches in their socks’.135 He too saw
cultivators as ‘sturdy’ and ‘virile’, whose ‘propensity for hard work’ kept
their minds disciplined, their bodies strong and the desert at bay. ‘If it is
a question of a tight corner’, Jarvis argued, ‘I would rather have a com-
pany of farmers and farmers’ men with me than double the number of
nomads’.136 Although he relied on Bedouin trackers, agents and police on
anti-smuggling operations, he never shed his suspicion of their services,
and turned to his Sudanese units for the most dangerous and demanding
jobs. Sudanese villagers were ‘not a match for the Arabs in brain or cun-
ning, perhaps, but very redoubtable fighters’, keen ‘to get to close quarters
and use that bayonet’.137 The villagers of Trans-Jordan were equally ‘tough’
material, and quite ‘capable’ (with British encouragement) ‘of meeting a
nomad Beduin in hand-to-hand combat’.138 Talk of ‘martial races’, then,
does not quite fit here. For many concerned with the conflict of the desert
and the sown, it was a group’s mode of life, and not its ‘race’ per se, that
conferred martial worth.
Peake did not remorselessly denounce the Bedouin as the embodiment
of barbarism. Few Britons could afford to do so, given that a ‘hatred and
fear of the Beduins and the desert’ were traits most associated with the
loathed ‘effendi class’.139 Moreover, much as fascism in Germany would
discredit scientific race theory, so fascism in Libya gave advocates of forced
sedentarization pause for thought. In the 1930s implacable hostility to
nomadism became distasteful in light of Italy’s campaigns against the
Senussi, and ‘Italian methods’ a byword for cruelty and brutality.140 Yet
criticism of nomadism, and of nomads’ suitability for military service,
133
Captain Lockhart, cited in: Lunt, Imperial Sunset, p. 56.
134
AIR 10/1426, Anon., ‘Military Report for Iraq, 1936’ (2 vols, London, 1936).
135
136
Jarvis, Three Deserts, pp. 135–136; Jarvis, ‘Yesterday’, p. 122.
137
Jarvis, ‘Drug Smugglers’, p. 594. See also: Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 27–28; Jarvis,
Three Deserts, pp. 182–184. For the association of bayonet drill with masculinity and mar-
tiality, see Bourke, Intimate History of Killing, pp. 77–80.
138
139
CO 730/158/21, Woolley (SSO Sulman) to Air Staff Intelligence, 24 May 1930.
140
Perhaps as many as three-quarters of Libya’s nomadic population died during the
struggle for the interior, 1922–32: Ahmida, Modern Libya. British officers in the Western
persisted across the period. Few still urged that the Bedouin be ‘treated
in the way that America has treated her Red Indians and put in a reserva-
tion, out of which he could not emerge without being shot on sight’.141
But their morality and martiality was frequently found wanting, and con-
trasted poorly with that of other forces, like the Assyrian Levies, who were
deeply invested in the British regime. Thus, touring Iraq in 1924, one
former minister described to the Society the ‘fierce, fine-looking Levies’,
but felt it would be
an exceedingly difficult matter to make a really good army out of Arabs under
Arab officers. There is something Nomadic and unruly about these people.
They are fine to look at, very picturesque; but . . . I should be very sorry to
confide the destinies of any country to their safe-keeping. They have but one
idea really, and that is wandering about with occasional looting.142
That tendency—to use supposedly ‘nomadic’ traits to pass judgement on
the Arabs as a whole—continues today.143 By the 1930s, some feared that
the depiction of the disciplined Assyrian against the ‘Nomadic’ Arab had
become so widespread as to lend the former ‘a swaggering conceit’, actively
fueling communal tension in Iraq.144
* * *
Talk of ‘making the desert bloom’ had great rhetorical power, and some
did deploy it instrumentally. Officials brought before the League of
Nations, for example, went to great lengths to assure its Permanent
Mandates Commission that they took their mandatory responsibilities
seriously. ‘Mak[ing] the Bedouin tribesman a useful citizen of the state’
in a struggle ‘between progress and stagnation’ perfectly fit the bill.145
Likewise, when the controversial St John Philby wanted to sell a favour-
able impression of his new master, Ibn Saud, to the Royal Central Asian
Society, he knew which motifs would arouse interest. Heaping praise upon
the Saudi regime for ‘making fields out of the desert’, Philby’s account was
less striking for its factual accuracy than for the warm reception it received
from a potentially hostile audience.146 Even D. G. Hogarth—long suspi-
cious of Wahhabism and of Ibn Saud—conceded that such ‘settlement
Desert followed events anxiously: WO 287/27, Military Report on the North-Western

Desert of Egypt, 1937, esp. section ‘Feeling of the Desert People towards Italy’.
141
FO 371/1364, J. E. Marshall, ‘Public Security in Egypt’, 8 Sept. 1912.
142
Thompson, ‘My Impressions’, pp. 207–225.
143
For a notorious example: Patai, Arab Mind.
144
Main, ‘Assyrians’, p. 665. On the Anglo-Assyrian relationship, see Omissi, ‘Assyrians’.
145
CO/730/150/3, Bourdillon, draft statement representing Iraq before the Permanent
Mandates Commission (n.d. 1929), fo. 5.
146
Philby, ‘Triumph’, pp. 297–300.
of the Bedouins upon the land’ would, if true, mark ‘a tremendous social
revolution’, and eagerly awaited further details.147
Yet it would be a mistake to view all this too cynically: decades on, the
enthusiasm remains palpable. British desert officers were bursting with pet
projects to rebuild agricultural settlements and remake desert populations.
The scale of their experiments hardly matched what they felt to be at stake.
Throughout the interwar period, the reformative power of agriculture was
lauded in development projects across the world’s arid zones: both a precon-
dition for national economic development, and a morally-uplifting force in
their subjects’ lives. In the Punjab, the British supervised the largest irrigation
and settlement schemes in the world, and it may have been during his early
years of service here that Peake first acquired his strong emotional attach-
ment to the welfare and preservation of village communities.148 In Nejd,
Ibn Saud’s agricultural settlement schemes ran far ahead of British efforts
in the region, but were relayed to Society audiences with no less fervour. In
Iraq, prominent Society members such as Arnold Wilson and A. C. Yate had
hoped to introduce an Indian agricultural settlement scheme, though the
diplomatic realities of war’s end precluded it.149 Nonetheless, Ernest Main,
an influential commentator on Iraq, spoke for many in the Society when he
saw cultivation as ‘tackling not only the economic deficiencies of the king-
dom, but also the psychological weakness of its people . . . creating [in them]
a constructive spirit and a love for law, order and civilization.’150 ‘Talking
shop’ about land use could easily elide into discussing something loftier. The
‘modes of life’ hummed with moral and ideological significance.
Peake and Jarvis made as much recourse to the provisions of Desert
Law as anyone else: it was central to the conduct of their daily work. But
they never forgot that it was a compromise solution. They lambasted those
colleagues who became too enamoured with its workings, and who lost
sight of the greater goal: settling nomads and protecting the cultivators
on whom the future would really depend. Jarvis was even moved to qui-
etly admire his French and Italian counterparts, who seemed less precious
about their subjects’ customs and laws. In attempting ‘to teach our native
races to develop along their own lines’, Britain only encouraged ‘a back-
ward and uncivilized race to remain backward and uncivilized’. Progress
was inevitable, and however attractive the ‘unspoilt, uneducated native’
might seem, it was better to grasp development by the horns and ensure
that Britain’s ‘subjects races’ became ‘useful citizens of the Empire’.151
147
D. G. Hogarth [discussion], in Philby, ‘Triumph’, p. 314.
148
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 1 (typescript autobiographical essays), Peake, ‘India’.
149
Blyth, Empire of the Raj, pp. 132–169.
150
Main, ‘Water Supplies’, p. 267. 151
This voice prefigures that of Lord Hailey’s African Survey; it has reached
the same stark realization that ‘indirect rule’ was on borrowed time. For
nomads across the Middle East it meant an equally stark choice, between
‘impoverishment and degeneration, or gradual and constructive transition
from nomadism to agriculture’.152 And that, Peake and Jarvis would have
agreed, was really no choice at all.
J O H N G LU B B A N D T H E F U T U R E
OF NOMADISM
While Peake was serving in Trans-Jordan, John Glubb’s experiences in

Iraq—as an air force intelligence officer, and later as a civil administra-
tor—were feeding a very different vision of desert development. By the
time he arrived in Trans-Jordan to serve as Peake’s subordinate, their opin-
ions on the future of nomadism were already far apart.
From the mid-1920s, Glubb poured scorn on the ‘retrograde, turkified atti-
tude’ of his colleagues who dismissed nomadic pastoralism as merely a primitive
stage in human development. Instead, his reports and correspondence increas-
ingly praised what he saw as Bedouin virtues and values, and attributed them
to the nomadic ‘mode of life’. His draft ‘Handbook of Desert Administration’
explained how nomads’ isolation from ‘the infectious deterioration in mor-
als [that accompanies] initial contact with civilisation’ had preserved them as
‘simple and straightforward’.153 A widely circulated administrative report for
1930 even praised nomadic raiding as ‘an excellent school of leadership, cour-
age and endurance’. Nomadic mobility acted as a guarantee against ‘tyrannical
rule’, tribal leaders instead having to earn the trust and respect of their follow-
ers.154 ‘Nomad customs’, he told the Royal Central Asian Society, formed ‘a
distinctive but practical and everyday system of life and government, just as
much as democracy or communism’.155 They had a future too.
While Peake was frustrated by the persistence of a nomadic society in
his midst, Glubb increasingly aspired to future-proof the Bedouin, to
cement their admirable, distinctive characteristics. In a heated exchange
with a colleague in Iraq, Glubb insisted that ‘the grazing lands of a coun-
try are an asset just as much as the arable land’, its camels as valuable
as its date trees and wheat.156 If Iraq’s Southern Desert was no more
152
Epstein, ‘Bedouin of Transjordan’, p. 229.
153
IWM: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb ‘Handbook of Desert Administration’ (n.d. 1920s).
154
Desert of Iraq, 1 May 1929—16 May 1930’; MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, ‘Handbook’.
155
156
MECA: JBG 1(203)/2, Glubb to Kitching (Administrative Inspector, Hilla liwa), 5
June 1926.
inhospitable than the arid parts of South Africa and Australia, then it
too might export large quantities of meat, wool, and hides. The Bedouin
already conducted a ‘considerable export trade’ in camels and wool to
Syria and Egypt ‘which . . . with improved methods, promises increased
profits in the future’. Mechanized transport constituted a competition of
sorts, but camels, sheep, wool and butter ‘will still find a ready market’.157
What was needed was ‘a more progressive policy’ in the steppe and a more
progressive attitude towards nomadic pastoralism.158 New wells and ‘sci-
entific’ breeding programmes would increase grazing range. Better roads
and desert markets would foster the revival of trade. The desert economy
would remain an important source of national revenue. ‘To ensure good
and safe grazing [for] nomads’, Glubb explained to the Colonial Office in
1929, was ‘as much a productive measure as to ensure good irrigation for
crops.’159 The idea that the Bedouin would ‘die out like the Red Indians’,
on the other hand, was ‘entirely false’. With government support, they
would prove ‘quite capable of holding [their] own in modern life’.160
The viability of their mode of life made the Bedouin themselves an
asset worth retaining. Peake believed that if a group of nomads ignored his
warnings, grazed too far from his line of police outposts and were raided
as a result, then that was their misfortune. For Glubb, it was a loss to the
wider community.161 Allowing whole tribes to ‘go over to Nejd’ might
be ‘a convenient and simple solution’ to Trans-Jordan’s frontier problems,
Glubb wrote on arriving in the country, but Ibn Saud would not fail to
exploit the opportunities that these mobile populations presented.162
Nomads’ allegiance was worth fighting for.
Like Jarvis and Peake, Glubb developed his views towards nomadism
through a dialogue with the ancient past. But the past he invoked and
the conclusions he reached were quite different. Rome could only teach
so much, Glubb believed, because by the late 1930s ‘the limits of Roman
cultivation’ had already been reached. ‘The edges of settlement in Roman
times’ were ‘almost identical with those of to-day’; further extension was
‘unlikely’.163 Advocates of desert settlement schemes ridiculed this claim,
157
Glubb, ‘Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, p. 30; Glubb, ‘Economic Situation’, pp. 449–450.
158
MECA: JBG 1(203)/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
159
CO 730/140/8, Glubb, ‘Permanent Administration in the Desert’, 12 June
1929, p. 4.
160
MECA: JBG 3(209)/2, Glubb, untitled note ‘the route to the East . . . ’ (n.d. 1936).
161
IWM: FGP 13 (Letter Book, 1922–39), folio 62, Peake to Glubb, 15 Feb. 1931.
162
CO 831/11/1, Glubb, ‘Situation on the Southern Frontier of Trans-Jordan’, encl. in
Chancellor to Passfield, 3 Jan. 1931.
163
Glubb, ‘Economic Situation’, p. 451; MECA: JBG 3(209)/2, Glubb, untitled note
‘the route to the East . . . ’.
mobilizing archaeological evidence of their own in support.164 Others

attributed the changed climate to a decline in rainfall (not to the advent
of ‘indolent’ Bedouin), so that ‘in the remote past the climate was less dif-
ficult than it is to-day’.165 But by casting doubt on the extent of Roman
agriculture, and on allegations that nomadism had caused its desiccation,
Glubb opened the way to consider other pasts, and other paths to desert
development.166 He ‘read with some alarm’ Jarvis’ ‘effusions’ on the large
populations that the Negev was presumed to have supported, and the
possibility, through Jewish immigration, of recovering that past. ‘These
fables of great ancient populations are actually somewhat mythical’, he
sniffed. ‘We hear similar tales . . . in Trans-Jordan, but no real evidence
exists . . . ’. If anything, Greek and Roman civilization had lacked ambi-
tion, clinging to the coast and leaving the rural population ‘comparatively
little affected . . . and the bedouins of the desert not at all’.167 Rather than
agricultural colonization, Glubb urged that plans for the future of the
Negev acknowledge its character as a ‘tribal area’, part of a ‘tribal world’
between Sinai and Trans-Jordan which, ‘if well handled [may] be kept
loyal and contented’.168
Instead, Glubb drew inspiration from the empire of the Arabs.
‘Familiarity with the Arabs’ imperial history’, he would later claim,
‘changed my career’—he urged his colleagues to bear it in mind when
discussing their subjects’ ‘present weakness’.169 Like Peake, Glubb invoked
his chosen past in a variety of ways, but above all he looked to it for an
alternate model of desert development. ‘The last Government to control
and exploit the desert’, Glubb wrote in 1929, ‘was that of the Abbasides’,
who by ‘artificial means’ had improved grazing for herds across the Syrian
Desert. The Ottomans had allowed this system to break down, but it now
fell ‘to another Arab Government to re-develop the grazing desert, as it
is re-developing the cultivation areas’.170 In September 1936, Glubb was
granted £P250 to begin repairing these ancient cisterns and wells: not
much, but a step towards ‘the complete rehabilitation of the system’ which
‘would revolutionize the grazing possibilities of the country’ (see Figure
4.3).171 Glubb had ‘no doubt’ that the Roman wells and storage cisterns
164
Epstein, ‘Correspondence’, pp. 181–182. 165
Holt, ‘Future’, p. 261.
166
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Apr. 1938. For more on the disagreement over the
extent of Roman cultivation, see Hamarneh, ‘Social and Economic Transformation’,
pp. 168–169.
167
Glubb, Mixture of Races, p. 14.
168
CO 831/51/10, Glubb, TJDR: Jan. 1939.
169
Glubb, Story, p. 22; FO 905/18, Glubb, TJDR: July 1935; MECA: JBG 214/5, ‘The
Arab Legion: Historical’ (n.d., revised 1944).
170
CO 730/140/8 Glubb, ‘Permanent Administration in the Desert’.
171
CO 831/37/3, Glubb, TJDR: Sept. 1936.
Fig. 4.3 ‘Bedouin Watering Places. Considerable work was done on reclaiming
wells during the month under report. This photograph shows Howeitat watering
a flock of camels’: CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: October 1938
found on the edge of the desert were in fact a system to support nomads’
summer grazing without forcing them to encroach on the farmers’ fields,
and not (as Peake and Jarvis assumed) the remnant of a greater cultivated
zone.172 Building new desert markets, as at Sulman and Shabicha, would
recover a golden age of desert trade.173
Glubb’s views on nomadism built on his reading of the past, but a set of
interwar events further encouraged him in his pastoral version of develop-
ment. The first was the terrible warning provided by ecological disasters
in other semi-arid parts of the world. For the ‘desert-minded’ colonial
official, the Dust Bowl disaster on the North American Great Plains was
only one such phenomenon in the mid-1930s. Chinese colonization of
the Inner Asian steppe was also damaging natural grasslands, loosening
the topsoil to be blown away by the wind. Parts of Australia, East Africa,
and South Africa faced a similarly ‘dirty thirties’. In each case officials
scrambled to consider other ways of using the land, and where nomadic
pastoralism was still practiced, some even began to reconsider it as a sen-
sible economic practice. ‘It has become obvious’, wrote Owen Lattimore
172
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Dec.1936; CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Apr. 1938.
173
CO 730/140/8, Glubb, ‘Permanent Administration in the Desert’.
in 1935, ‘that thousands of square miles [of Inner Mongolia] have been
colonized that ought never have been opened to farming colonization at
all’.174 In East Africa the Dust Bowl prompted an outpouring of literature
on soil erosion, and while some blamed overstocking, others targeted ‘the
menace of over-cultivation’, and considered sponsoring native pastoralism
or promoting new stock routes as a viable alternative.175 A 1940 report on
nutrition among the Bedouin also pointed to the Dust Bowl, and warned
against promoting further sedentarization if it meant opening up tracts of
virgin soil in treeless country.176 Jarvis had insisted that rootless, selfish pas-
toralism, not over-ploughing, caused desiccation of the soil. Others—Glubb
included—wondered if a mixed economy that embraced migratory pastoral-
ism might not be better for long-term economic growth. In many cases it
was not until the 1980s that this argument (dressed in the new language of
environmentalism and economic security) would be heard again.177
The second phenomenon was equally unexpected, and is testament to
how service in even the most arid parts of empire could be an intellectu-
ally formative experience. By the mid-1930s, Glubb was accumulating
demographic evidence of a surprising increase in nomadism under British
rule. In the winter of 1935–1936, for example, the rains failed in parts
of western Trans-Jordan, but fell in the desert further east. ‘Remarkable
scenes’ followed when villagers, long thought to have ‘progressed’ to agri-
culture, set out in search of grazing: an ‘exodus to the desert’ such as had
‘probably not occurred for hundreds of years’.178 With drought in the
Ma’an hills, but excellent grazing over the border in Saudi Arabia, Glubb
thought 1936 ‘a year which will favour nomadism and result in a definite
setback to bedouin cultivation’.179 Nor, when he came to think about it,
was this necessarily an isolated occurrence, the result of a ‘blip’ in the
weather:
Rather unexpectedly . . . the establishment of law and order in the desert has
increased, not decreased, nomadism. Many people thought that with the ces-
sation of tribal raiding, the nomads would all build houses and settle down.
The reverse has actually taken place. Formerly afraid to move into the desert
for fear of the Bedouins, many villagers have now bought tents and camels,
and have migrated with their flocks to the east. Thus not only Beni Sakhr,
174
Lattimore, ‘Wickedness’, pp. 47–62.
175
CO 533/486/7, ‘Opening Stock Routes in the Native Pastoral Areas’ (n.d. 1937).
For the East African consequences of the Dust Bowl—‘the first global environmental prob-
lem’—see Anderson, ‘Depression’.
176
CO 859/117/8, S. Avery Jones, ‘Nutrition of the Trans-Jordan Bedouin’ (n.d. Feb.
1940).
177
For example: Stiles, ‘Desertification’.
178
CO 831/37/3, Glubb, TJDR: Jan. 1936.
179
CO 831/37/3, Glubb, TJDR: Apr. 1936.
but portions of the Beni Hamida, an agricultural tribe, and encampments of
Belqa villagers, are now [grazing] in the Wadi Sirhan.180
Better public security had proved a boon to mobility. In the long term,
Glubb told the Society, it would more than negate any limitations imposed
by new international boundaries. In fact, as the fellahin became ‘more
nomadic’ (and as the Bedouin dabbled in cultivation), the dividing line
between these age-old rival groups might even lose its edge.181
This argument provoked stinging critiques of its own.182 But Glubb
was not alone in observing the phenomenon. Syrian méhariste Albert de
Boucheman also identified sedentary groups which, facing dire economic
circumstances in the interwar years, took up nomadism to supplement
their income.183 In Iraq, Special Service Officer Ernest Howes noticed
how poor rainfall on the edge of the riverain zone pushed shepherds to
graze deep in the Southern Desert, ‘in some cases for the first time for a
generation’.184 The geographer Philippe Arbos watched as Algerian tribes
extended the range of their migrations under the umbrella of the pax
gallica.185 The economic and ecological crises of the 1930s, in northern
Arabia and elsewhere, were simply not conducive to any narrative that
privileged a single trajectory of development.
Demography had long been central to European imperial attitudes
towards subject peoples. Discovering populations in decline—all those ‘van-
ishing races’—confirmed imperial prejudices about societies demonstrably
different from themselves. For Glubb, the unexpected increase in nomad-
ism emboldened his critique of the unidirectionalism of development, from
nomadism to agriculture and industry. With more experience of the steppe,
he began to re-imagine the ‘modes of life’ not as conforming to a scalar order-
ing of society, but as flexible, complementary economies between which
groups swung as if on a ‘pendulum’.186 He discovered that the Howeitat,
for example, had a long history of cultivating the land west of Ma’an: their
emphasis on pastoral nomadism had developed ‘in latter days alone’.187
From the other side of the Eurasian arid zone, Owen Lattimore also began
to argue that a people’s mode of production did not necessarily correlate to
its degree of civilization. He dismissed ‘the usual preconception that a settled
180
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Feb. 1938.
181
Glubb, ‘Economic Situation’; CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Jan. 1938.
182
For example: Epstein, ‘Correspondence’, pp. 180–181.
183
Boucheman, ‘Sédentarisation’. De Boucheman, however, still understood this as a
‘regression’ from sedentarization.
184
AIR 23/35, Howes (SSO Nasiriyah) to Administrative Inspector, Nasiriyah, 7
Feb. 1928.
185
Arbos, ‘Geography’, p. 561.
186
CO 831/37/3, Glubb, TJDR: Sept.1936.
187
MECA: JBG 209/3, Glubb, ‘The Sword and the Plough Share’ (n.d. 1930s).
life is in some mysterious way “higher” than a nomad life’: if anything, he

would later suggest, agriculture may have preceded an adaptive, mixed pas-
toralism.188 Lucien Febvre also tackled stage theory at this time, finding
‘no compulsory passage’ from one stage to another, and plenty of examples
in which ‘the order of succession’ was scrambled or ‘reversed’. For a new
generation of scholars, as for Glubb himself, the ‘modes of life’ remained a
persuasive lens on the world. What had changed was the necessary relation-
ship between them and familiar standards of ‘civilisation’, sophistication and
morality; the idea, as Febvre put it, ‘that nomadism means retrogression’.189
Such praise of the positive virtues of nomads did draw on older literary con-
ventions. But it also engaged with a peculiarly interwar Neo-Romanticism,
explored by a number of scholars in recent years.190 The cultural impact of
the First World War remains open to debate, but it is clear that the economic
unease, social change and corrupt politics of the peace, quite as much as the
war’s human cost, left many feeling bewildered, disorientated and dismayed.
For some, this manifested itself in a more relativistic approach ‘to the thought
and organisational patterns of different peoples’, and in a search for alterna-
tive, often spiritual indices of human worth.191 More broadly, interwar debates
over the future of Britain itself—whether modernist or anti-modernist, left
or right—drew on a heightened interest in the countryside (and in idealized
rural communities) in support of various prescriptions.192 John Glubb’s views
on the Bedouin merit consideration in this light. Peake and Jarvis were bit-
terly critical of the empire’s nomadic societies. Glubb, born in 1896 but living
to see female enfranchisement, the rise of welfarism and the fall of formal
empire, was increasingly critical of his own. He was not seriously suggesting
that Britain ‘return’ to tribal ways: as he acknowledged much later in life,
that was ‘manifestly absurd’. But his accounts of the Bedouin did serve to
hold up a mirror to his own society, to ask if Britain itself had not ‘taken the
wrong turning’ somewhere, and to offer ‘an indication of the extent of our
decline’.193 After all, he told the Society in 1937, ‘the study of primitive men
or of distant countries becomes merely an academic exercise unless we can
connect it to some extent with our everyday life’.194
188
Lattimore, ‘Wickedness’; Lattimore, Studies, pp. 471–472.
189
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, pp. 241–245, 266–267.
190
For example: Trentmann, ‘Civilization’; Cannadine, Churchill’s Shadow; Mellor,
Paradise Lost.
191
Cannadine, Churchill’s Shadow, pp. 160, 180; Adas, Machines, p. 356. For balanced
reflections on the cultural impact of the Great War, see Smith, ‘Paul Fussell’; Bond, Unquiet
Western Front.
192
The available literature is vast, but I have found the following particularly use-
ful: Lawrence and Mayer, Regenerating England; Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness” ’; Perry,
‘H. V. Morton’; Hauser, Crawford.
193
Glubb, Way of Love, pp. 123, 127. 194
Glubb, ‘Arab Chivalry’, pp. 5–26.
Thus Glubb’s depictions of the Bedouin drew upon class ideas of a ‘safely’
hierarchical society, just as Britain itself embarked on an unsettling experi-
ment in mass democracy. The political order of continental Europe may
have undergone a startling bouleversement, but being ‘of good family’ was
still ‘of enormous importance amongst bedouins’.195 His account of ‘tribal
organization’ echoed concerns for the survival of an organic community
back home. Countless references to ‘pure Bedouin blood and breeding’,
and to the nomad’s timeless authenticity, drew selectively upon notions of
racial purity and martial races.196 Bedouin raids offered a chance to recall
the comradeship of pre-industrial battle; their ‘war of movement’ con-
tained lessons for a European military establishment lately (and tragically)
‘hypnotised by “trench warfare” ’.197 Bedouin gender relations seemed
reassuringly static; their lives ‘endowed with virility and simplicity [and]
ideals’.198 Crucially, nomads like the Bedouin stood as the antithesis of
the ‘hybrid’, urban, degenerate ‘Levantine’, symbol of ‘a moral and intel-
lectual condition’ to be neutralized at home and away.199 Glubb’s reports,
memoranda and correspondence were often built around this opposition,
scorning ‘the “smart” men’, urban ‘pretty boys’, and those whose educa-
tion had ‘sacrificed wisdom to cleverness’.200
Not all members of the Royal Central Asian Society shared this enthusi-
asm for introspection; much writing about tribes was dismissed as ‘unpracti-
cal sentiment’.201 Claude Jarvis also thought the war a caesura in his life—he
titled his memoir of the ‘lost world’ before 1914 Half a Life—without rush-
ing to celebrate nomad ways.202 But just as Peake and Jarvis drew on tradi-
tions of discussing nomadic societies, so Glubb’s conclusions also engaged
with a wider intellectual climate. Historians of empire readily identify inter-
war trends in imperial politics and economics; they are less likely to dwell
on the impact of the period’s cultural traits. Rehabilitating the interest in
the ‘modes of life’, however, may offer a way of bridging the gap between
the intellectual and cultural history of Britain and its empire. Concerned
to debate the future of his nomadic charges, Glubb also expressed unease
about the society he had, temporarily, left behind. Glubb’s take on the
195
Desert of Iraq, 1929–30’.
196
MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Pacification of the Iraq Deserts’ (n.d.).
197
McCallum, ‘French in Syria’, p. 24.
198
Glubb, ‘Arab Chivalry’, p. 9; Rutter, ‘Holy Cities’, p. 205. Glubb later blamed ‘the
reversal of the sexes’ for Britain’s declining status in world affairs: Glubb, Fate of Empires.
199
Kedourie, England, pp. 72–78. See further: Adelson, Mark Sykes, pp. 207–209.
200
MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Note on the Southern Desert Force’ (n.d. 1928);
MECA: JBG 206/10, Glubb, ‘Report on the Dulaim Desert Force’, 17 Mar. 1923;
MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb to Kirkbride, 31 Dec. 1942.
201
Montagu, ‘North West Frontier’, p. 145. 202
Jarvis, Half A Life, p. viii.
Bedouin was a kind of ‘politics of the exotic’, an expression of unease about

Britain’s own future not uncommon in the age of the National Trust, grow-
ing interest in folk culture, and the emollient politics of Stanley Baldwin.203
***
Ecological crisis, demographic change, and shifting sensibilities had
cleared a space for a nomadic alternative to Peake’s vision of development.
In practical terms, some began to treat nomadism as a serious economic
proposition. ‘Shorn of their romantic habits’, Glubb wrote in 1938,
nomads were ‘economically sheep and camel farmers’, their migrations
driven by ‘economic necessity’.204 Logical and efficient—not irrational or
atavistic—nomadism was worthy of government support, and while the
funds spent on sponsoring Bedouin pastoralism remained modest until
the institution of emergency drought relief in the 1930s, Glubb’s hopes for
the measures remain clear. Between 1930 and 1932 he requested a special
grant of £P6,000 ‘to re-establish tribes suffering from loss of livestock’,
though the High Commission refused to consider this an appropriate
use of funds.205 In 1933 Trans-Jordan successfully applied to the Colonial
Development Fund for money to sink water bores in the desert, increasing
the grazing range of Bedouin herds. The following year Glubb reserved
£4,000 out of a British Government aid package of £15,000 to replenish
Bedouin herds, having convinced the High Commissioner that this gave
the tribes ‘some basis of existence for the future’.206
This is not to deny Glubb’s efforts in encouraging Bedouin cultivation
as well—a more familiar theme in the historiography of Trans-Jordan.
At Azraq, for example, Glubb hoped a date farm would support needy
Bedouin families and ‘inspire’ others, and even sunk some of his own
funds into the venture.207 In Iraq, too, he had identified sites for Bedouin
cultivation at Safwan, Buswa, Shabicha, and Sulman.208 Glubb believed
that a vibrant, mixed economy would spread the risks the Bedouin faced,
while allowing them to exploit the semi-arid environment to the full. But
203
Indeed, there is a venerable historical tradition of writing about ‘nomadic’ or ‘tribal’
societies as a way of exploring imperial corruption and decline, from Tacitus’ Germania
to the recent Chinese bestseller Wolf Totem (2004). For more on this concept, see Porter,
Haunted Journeys.
204
205
CO 831/11/1, Glubb, ‘Situation on the Southern Frontier’; CO 831/19/8, Cox to
High Commissioner, Palestine, 20 May 1932; CO 831/19/8, Wauchope to Cunliffe-Lister,
30 July 1932.
206
CO 831/27/8, Wauchope to Cunliffe-Lister, 2 Mar. 1934.
207
MECA: JBG 7(208)/3, Glubb, ‘Application to Cultivate at Azraq’, 29 Dec. 1932; CO
831/23/15, Glubb, TJDR: Oct. 1933. See further: Alon, Making of Jordan, pp. 128–129.
208
AIR 23/44, Glubb, ‘Monthly Administration Report, Southern Desert Area, September
1928’; Glubb, ‘Monthly Administration Report, Southern Desert Area, October 1928’.
the tolerance of nomadism that this implied represented the real innova-
tion, and caused the most conflict with his colleagues. ‘Nomadism’, he
insisted, ‘is not a relic of barbarism destined to disappear’.209 It remained
‘the most profitable (or indeed the only possible) way of breeding consid-
erable flocks’. There was nothing to gain, and much to lose, by making the
Bedouin ‘give up the profession he knows to be an inferior fellah’.210
Glubb was not alone in re-approaching nomadic pastoralism in this
way, and the Royal Central Asian Society gave this developmental vision
an airing too. Owen Lattimore, for example, increasingly argued that
nomadism in Inner Mongolia was a viable economic activity. As Chinese
industrialization increased, Lattimore believed Mongol herds could meet
its demands for wool, milk, butter, and leather—if only the Chinese,
Soviet, and Japanese authorities could be made to see it.211 In East Africa,
voices began to be heard calling for greater support for the Maasai ‘to
become commercial pastoralists’, though white settler fears of competi-
tion continued to frustrate policy.212 In Sinai, Wilfrid Jennings-Bramley
took a dim view of the Peninsula’s agricultural prospects, but saw a future
for large-scale camel pastoralism.213 Some of those who warmed to the
‘pastoral possibilities’ of the Syrian Desert still preferred fixed ranching
to an ‘inefficient’ migratory pastoralism, which, they alleged, relied on
poor quality herbage and wasted precious feeding time on the march.214
But by the late 1930s, Glubb shared his views with a coherent minority
who challenged the remnants of ‘stage theory’ with talk of complementary
economies instead. Surveying North Arabia, Cyril Daryll Forde took the
Bedouin’s migratory ‘camel-breeding economy’ seriously, a shrewd ‘adap-
tation’ to the ‘divergent resources’ of desert, steppe and oasis. ‘Peoples do
not live at economic stages’, his groundbreaking Habitat, Economy and
Society would later conclude. ‘They possess economies’.215
Glubb’s take on nomadism approximated modern understandings
much more closely than that of Jarvis and Peake. Pastoral nomads practice
a multi-resource economy, shifting their energies between breeding and
other pursuits, including settled agriculture, as environmental, market,
and other conditions allow. They do not require outside intervention to
209
CO 841/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1937.
210
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1938.
211
Lattimore, ‘Wickedness’. 212
James, ‘Kenya Masai’, pp. 69–70.
213
Jennings-Bramley, ‘Bedouin of the Sinaitic Peninsula’, pp. 9–18.
214
CO 831/34/8, J. Dawson Shepherd (Palestine Irrigation Officer) to A. Tabbara
(Director of Agriculture, Trans-Jordan), 19 Mar. 1934. A similar logic ran through Soviet
state approaches to reindeer nomadism at this time, supporting ‘nomadism as a way of pro-
duction’ but not ‘nomadism as a way of life’: Habeck, ‘Sedentarisation’; Vitebsky, Reindeer
People, p. 43.
215
Forde, Habitat, p. 461.
teach them how to settle down. As one anthropologist has put it, people
become pastoral nomads ‘only in a limited sense and at particular times’.216
There were still problems with Glubb’s analysis: a tendency to overstate
ecological explanations of behaviour; to reduce migration to an environ-
mentally induced ‘reflex’; and to overlook the wide range of non-economic
reasons—social, political, cognitive, even ideological—why groups might
move.217 But it broke decisively with perceptions of nomadism as an irra-
tional, atavistic ‘instinct’, and accepted the possibility of its economic future.
In the process, understandings of the desert itself began to change. At
the start of the interwar period, British accounts of the desert still drew
on the impressionistic remarks of Victorian literary travel. The Sinai, for
example, was a galling mix of sand, rock, ‘sombre mountains’ and ‘arid
plateux’, ‘the whole forming a scene of absolute desolation’.218 As offic-
ers came to know these deserts better, and as they observed the Bedouin
exploiting their potential, they saw something else altogether. The deserts
of Iraq were not ‘the great wastes of rolling sand’ many took them to be, but
more like ‘rolling downs’, with ‘valleys and hollows . . . often gay with wild
flowers’, and ‘clothed with grass’ each winter and spring.219 Sinai was not
a ‘waste’ but a variegated landscape with ‘resources’ that the Bedouin had
learned to tap.220 Even Jarvis acknowledged that the desert was not quite
the ‘gross sterility’ that it seemed at first sight.221 In a sense, this shift in
sensitivities mirrored the growth of desert administration itself, away from
assumptions about ‘natural’ barriers, and towards ‘scientific’ frontiers that
rewarded knowledge, management and conservation. In the years before
oil transformed perceptions of the desert forever, some had already begun
to see them as resources awaiting exploitation—as places in their own right.
***
Redeveloping the desert ‘as it was in the times of the Caliphs’ was going
to take more than a few cisterns and wells. Glubb poured his energies into
three tasks in particular: fighting ‘tribal disintegration’, providing educa-
tion (of the right sort), and military recruitment and security.
Like Peake and Jarvis, Glubb’s development plans were as much about
social engineering as profitability. His first area of activity—boosting
shaykhly authority—revealed the type of society he had in mind. As his
influence grew in Iraq, Glubb lobbied the authorities to restore a ‘natural’
216
Marx, ‘Political Economy’, p. 78.
217
Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, pp. 17–18; Ahmad,
‘Nomadism’.
218
Edward Henry Palmer, cited in WO 33/1085, Military Report on Egypt (n.d. 1926).
219
MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Pacification’.
220
Jennings-Bramley, ‘Bedouin of the Sinaitic Peninsula’ series (1914, No. 1), p. 18.
221
Jarvis, Gardener’s Medley, p. 55.
tribal social hierarchy that he felt Government activity had undermined.

In a private note, Glubb recorded
the lamentations of the Bedouin chiefs over the passing of the good old days,
and the uprising of a class of ignoble tribes, who since the war have acquired
money and begun to give themselves airs.222
Many shaykhs, like those of the Dhafir, were now ‘so poor that they could
no longer entertain, give presents, or keep paid retainers’. Whole tribes
faced ‘disintegration’, Glubb reported to the Ministry of the Interior;
if nothing was done, they would soon be ‘broken up . . . into a mob’.
A revived desert economy and careful government intervention could
arrest their decline. In 1926, Glubb proposed instituting a new desert
tax to subsidise recognized shaykhs, thereby ‘restoring gradually to some
extent [their] prestige and authority’.223 All shaykhs ‘performed definite
services’ to their communities; all deserved some form of government sti-
pend in exchange. In his police work, Glubb took care to enlist the sons
of shaykhs into his desert police forces, ensuring that ‘men of good family’
benefitted from the remunerative advantages and social status of service
under arms.224 Marshalling ‘tribal rallies’ on the frontier provided a further
opportunity to bolster shaykhs’ authority, issuing ‘banners [bairaqs] as a
symbol thereof ’, promising shaykhs support ‘in leading their sections’,
and even reminding them of their obligations as leaders.225 Government
expenditure, however, seldom matched Glubb’s aspirations. The annual
Secret Service Fund of £2,000 set up in 1930, with which Glubb hoped to
restore some shaykhly fortunes, was halved in 1933 to cut costs.226 In 1931
Glubb was forced to spend over £500 from his own salary just to relieve
the most distressed Bedouin families ‘from acute hunger and distress’.227
Glubb’s aim was to ‘resuscitate’ tribal society while keeping it in the
desert, where tribesmen could assist imperial forces in monitoring and
222
MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Bedouins of the Syrian and Arabian Deserts’ (n.d.
1928).
223
CO 730/137/9, Glubb, ‘Plans for the Forthcoming Raiding Season’ (n.d. Sept.,
1926), pp. 6–12.
224
CO 730/168/8, Glubb, ‘Annual Report on the Administration of the Southern Desert
of Iraq, 1929–30’. Glubb continued the policy in Trans-Jordan. ‘The Desert Patrol have
become very aristocratic lately’, he reported. ‘Only the sons of sheikhs are now accepted as
recruits’: CO 831/23/13, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1932.
225
CO 730/137/9, Glubb, ‘Forthcoming Raiding Season’.
226
CO 831/37/3, Cox to Wauchope, 8 May 1936.
227
CO 831/13/3, Glubb to Peake, ‘Situation on the Nejd Frontier’, (n.d. Dec. 1931).
Subsidies were substantially increased during the Palestine revolt to pre-empt unrest, but
even then Glubb failed to secure a regular system of peacetime subsidies, and many sec-
tional shaykhs, like Muhammad abu Taya of the Tawayha (Howeitat), ‘never had a brass
farthing’: CO 831/39/14, Wauchope to Ormsby-Gore, 27 June 1936; CO 831/41/11,
Glubb, TJDR: Nov. 1937; CO 831/37/3, A.R. Thomas minute, 21 Jan. 1937.
checking potential threats from across the border, and particularly from
Nejd.228 He begged his superiors to remit fines imposed for raiding lest
they drive shaykhs into debt, thereby threatening tribal hierarchy even
further.229 Glubb even wrote in defence of khuwwa in this early period,
not seeing ‘anything immoral in the payment or exaction of such trib-
ute, in view of definite services rendered’.230 Glubb knew his plans were
controversial, and steeled himself against criticism. But when he began
using Secret Service Funds to ‘pay regular sums to responsible Sheikhs’—
to maintain their standing as much as reward them for information—he
received a sharp slap on the wrist.231
Nonetheless, Glubb’s concerns struck a chord with many between the
wars. His anxiety for the future of ‘traditional’ authorities will be instantly
familiar to scholars of Indirect Rule. At the Royal Central Asian Society,
a number officials and commentators concerned themselves with the ‘dis-
integration’ of ‘tribal organization’ wherever it was found: an empire-wide
concern for the ‘established’ and ornate, not so dissimilar, perhaps, to the
work of the National Trust at home.232 In Iraq Glubb’s colleague, SSO
Guy Moore, also urged the Government to support shaykhly authority
by returning any looted camels it recovered to them and not, as it had
been doing, to sectional leaders directly. That had only served ‘to recog-
nize [them] as people of importance, which [they] are not, and moreover
increase their independence’.233 In Trans-Jordan the MacDonnell arbitra-
tion also recommended annual subsidies to increase the standing of the
paramount shaykhs (and make them more subject to government con-
trol).234 This was Robert Groves Sandeman territory, his memory invoked
to admonish and inspire in equal measure. ‘Sandy’ had found ‘the tribal
organization’ in decay and had ‘proceeded to rebuild it’; the ‘error’ his suc-
cessors were committing today was ‘to graft on to semi-barbaric tribes a
purely Western administration’.235 When Glubb sought to make the case
228
229
As in the case of Araif (Dhafir) raiders in 1928: AIR 23/41, Glubb to Kitching, 25
June 1928.
230
Desert of Iraq, 1929-30’.
231
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1, Glubb to Peake, 2 Apr. 1931.
232
Bruce, ‘Tribal Problems’, p. 226. This concern transcended the bonds of empire. In
the United States, for example, the 1934 Indian Reorganisation Act also envisaged a more
collective future for whole tribes, overturning the established policy of granting land to
individual Indians. For calls to reconnect this Act with the broader history of Indirect Rule
and interwar imperialism, see Limerick, ‘Going West’, pp. 16–17.
233
AIR 23/22, Moore to Administrative Inspector, Diwaniyah, 30 Oct. 1925.
234
CO 831/12/1, M.S. MacDonnell, ‘Report of the Trans-Jordan-Nejd arbitration mis-
sion: Annexure No. 4’, 17 Jan. 1931.
235
for regular subsidies (rather than emergency ‘bribes’ or relief payments),

he pointed to ‘the close parallel’ between Baluch and Bedouin tribes, and
distilled ‘Sandeman’s policy’ into a triptych applicable everywhere, of
‘Sympathy, Subsidies, Tribal Law’.236
Glubb may have sincerely believed that his subsidies were restoring a ‘natu-
ral’ hierarchy that had only recently been eroded. Those who objected, he
claimed, were ‘crashing into a carefully balanced system, the result of experi-
ence and trial’.237 But others were not so sure that all shaykhs were as estab-
lished or deserving as Glubb took them to be. Our dependence on British
written sources complicates the recovery of a ‘Bedouin voice’, but one set of
records is particularly suggestive. Upon hearing of the annulment of author-
ized raiding, Ajaimi bin Suwait of the Dhafir wrote to SSO Ernest Howes
to complain that ‘Anaza-Dhafir raiding was ‘hereditary’, and that enforcing
prohibition would be ‘difficult’.238 ‘He paints a despondent picture of the
tribe’, Howes noted somewhat tongue-in-cheek, ‘with no efficient head to
keep them together, breaking up, some working in Basra as coolies, some as
fellahin, some emigrating to Nejd, etc’. Howes doubted whether Ibn Suwait
really ‘lacked the power to control [his tribe’s] actions’, and suspected him of
exaggerating his plight in a shrewd bid for a subsidy and official recognition.
But Glubb may have been more easily convinced. Ibn Suwait’s account con-
forms closely to Glubb’s grave warnings of tribal ‘disintegration’ circulating at
the time. The section had previously come under Glubb’s jurisdiction where,
the shaykh made plain, they had met with more sympathy.239 It seems quite
possible that shaykhs may have played up the extent and the harmony of
their former authority in an effort to secure external resources. Howes’ report
remind us that British ideas about nomads—as with those other forms of
colonial knowledge—cannot be seen as ‘too one-sided a happening’.240
Education, broadly defined, formed the second strand of Glubb’s desert
development platform. Glubb accepted that the Bedouin would ‘fall into
insignificance, if not destitution’ without a basic level of education. He
instinctively recoiled at the sight of ‘influential posts and lucrative posi-
tions’ being given to those whom the Bedouin ‘have always regarded as
their inferiors’. In 1932, Glubb dipped into his own pocket to pay for
the Desert Patrol jundis based at Azraq to be taught basic literacy.241 By
236
CO 831/37/3, Glubb, TJDR: July 1936.
237
Desert of Iraq, 1929–30’, ch. 3, p. 8.
238
AIR 23/375, A. bin Suwait to Howes, 2 Aug. 1926; AIR 23/375, Howes to Air Staff,
25 Aug. 1926.
239
AIR 23/375, Ibn Suwait to Howes, 2 Aug. 1926.
240
Ranger, ‘Invention of Tradition Revisited’.
241
CO 831/23/13, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1932.
December, 1933 forty-five Bedouin boys (mostly the sons of shaykhs)

and thirty jundis were receiving free lessons in reading and writing at the
Desert Patrol posts around Azraq, Bair and Mudawara. Yet Glubb was no
advocate of education for education’s sake. He had been ‘moved to assist’
only because of the dire circumstances of the tribes as drought gripped
the region, and because to educate the townsmen and fellahin but not the
Bedouin was ‘to condemn [them] to increasing and perpetual poverty and
insignificance’.242 Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, further education
of nomads was an ‘exceedingly difficult’ proposition, and forbidden in his
desert schools. ‘Any form of even moderately advanced education’, Glubb
declared, ‘seems to involve the pupil in the desire to mimic European man-
ners’, producing a contempt for ‘the manner of life’ of their peers. It pro-
duced effendis, and Glubb had no desire to add an ‘educated Shaikh’s son’
to that ‘disgruntled, politically-minded and over crowded class’.243
The notion that nomads’ capacity for education was easily fulfilled was,
of course, politically convenient. One British Report to the League of
Nations noted that ‘an educated tribesman seems almost a contradic-
tion in terms’, thereby washing its hands of ‘an insoluble problem’.244
Glubb’s objections, however, ran deeper. Like Peake and Jarvis, his devel-
opment plans were as much about moral uplift as material improve-
ment. If nomadic pastoralism, in his eyes, nourished attractive, upright
qualities, then to remove Bedouin boys from this environment was ‘to
expose [them] to the possibility of corrupt moral influences’. Thus Glubb
opposed sending students to urban boarding schools, as Abdulmecid II
had done with his ‘Imperial School for Tribes’, or as Harold Ingrams was
proposing at Aden.245 Their basic education complete, Bedouin pupils
should—quite literally—‘return to [their] muttons’.246 For Professor Paul
Monroe, the American educationalist who toured Iraq in 1932, educa-
tion that failed to ‘assist the tribes in transition from a nomad to a settled
agricultural life’ was a wasted opportunity—a charge that his student, a
future Prime Minister of Iraq, would echo with even greater force.247
The same reluctance about wholesale transformation of the Bedouin
ran through Glubb’s approach to agriculture. Both ‘were rather forced
upon us than sought after’, and risked . . .
242
CO 831/23/15, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1933.
243
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1936.
244
CO 730/107/2, HMSO, Report on the Administration of Iraq for the Year 1925
(London, 1926), pp. 138–139.
245
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1938; Rogan, ‘Asiret Mektebi’.
246
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1937. See further: Bowman, ‘Rural Educat
ion’, p. 406.
247
CO 730/177/2, Anon., ‘Education in Iraq’ (n.d. 1932); Jamali, New Iraq.
transforming [the Bedouin] into perjurors [sic] or politicians, but the alter-
native is to hand them over to be fleeced by other perjurers and usurers.
The pity of it is that simple primitive tribesmen cannot apparently be trans-
formed into an officer and a gentleman, without passing through many gen-
erations of intervening knavery and caddishness. Unfortunately we cannot
send all the Huwaitat to Eton and Oxford.248
In the limited cultivation schemes that he supervised, Glubb ensured
that sectional shaykhs received larger allowances than ‘lesser’ Bedouin
families, thereby shoring up hierarchical differences. ‘I am by no means a
fanatical advocate of the transformation of bedouin into fellaheen’, Glubb
explained with reference to his support of Howeitat cultivation. ‘The truer
form of help’ would have been to rebuild nomads’ herds, but ‘in the pre-
sent crisis . . . the only immediate solution appeared to be cultivation’.249
Morality runs through each strand of Glubb’s development proposals.
Educational and agricultural initiatives were hedged by the concern to
maintain pastoral nomadism because of the moral benefits it was believed
to confer. Nowhere were the implications of this worldview more provoca-
tive than with reference to the third and final element of Glubb’s develop-
ment platform: military recruitment and security.
Tribes could only access the very best grazing, Glubb reasoned, if they
could move without fear of being raided.250 He reached this conclusion
in the context of growing Ikhwan pressure on Iraqi tribes in the mid-
1920s. While his superiors were concerned to defend Najaf and Karbala
from the Ikhwan, or to pre-empt King Faisal from taking the initiative in
frontier policy, for Glubb ‘the object of defensive measures [was] to enable
the Iraq tribes to graze’.251 The ‘unprecedented’ influx of tribes into Iraq’s
Southern Desert following the prohibition of inter-tribal raiding—from
across the Euphrates, the Wadi Sirhan, Syria, and Jauf—further suggested
what increased security might achieve.252 After his transfer in 1930, Glubb
wanted Trans-Jordan’s tribes to have the same advantages. Improved secu-
rity would encourage merchants to venture deeper into the desert. Police
posts would offer traders water and shelter. By the late 1930s, Glubb even
extolled the economic advantages of his desert wireless network, allowing
248
CO 831/29/2, Glubb, TJDR: Aug., Sept. and Oct. 1934. This should temper existing
claims about Glubb’s enthusiasm for cultivation, at least for much of the 1930s: Bocco and
Tell, ‘Pax Britannica’, pp. 123–124.
249
CO 831/29/2, Glubb, TJDR: Aug., Sept. and Oct.1934.
250
CO 730/140/8, Glubb, ‘Permanent Administration’.
251
AIR 23/32, Glubb to Cornwallis, 11 Dec. 1927. See also: MECA: JBG 1(203)/2,
Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
252
AIR 23/46, Glubb, ‘Monthly Administration Report for the Southern Desert Area,
December, 1928’.
merchants to ‘ask the market price of livestock’ and ‘communicate with

their partners in the cities’.253 In short, it was no good concentrating all the
government’s efforts on policing the agricultural zone. If that conclusion
set the stage for a clash with Peake over the allotment of resources, Glubb’s
preferred recruits proved even more controversial.
Peake discounted nomads’ military value, but Glubb considered their ‘ini-
tiative’, ‘common sense’ and expertise ‘invaluable’.254 Bedouin qualities of
‘self-reliance and initiative’, he reported in 1923, made them ‘the most excel-
lent military material’, and ‘a great opportunity was missed during the Great
War in not making more use of [them]’.255 Moreover, their masculinity and
martiality flowed from their ‘mode of life’ (he spoke of ‘nomadic warfare’ as an
accepted unit of analysis).256 Nomads were not indolent. They ‘lead a strenu-
ous life, constantly coming and going with grazing flocks’ and toiling at wells,
while shaykhs were ‘constantly collecting reports’ about grazing and riding out
‘to reconnoitre for grass or rainpools’.257 ‘Townsmen and cultivators’, in con-
trast, were ‘unsuitable’ for service in the steppe: ‘only bedouins’ had the requisite
know-how and ‘endurance’.258 Indeed, Glubb’s enthusiasm helped perpetuate
the idea that nomads’ mobility and hardiness conferred a permanent military
advantage over settled folk—an ahistorical assertion still heard today. It was
only later, once he had become responsible for all of Jordan’s security forces,
that Glubb came to treat Trans-Jordan’s ‘villagers’ as competent soldiers too.259
In his struggle to secure resources for Iraq’s new desert police, Glubb
became the foremost propagandist of Bedouin martiality, selectively
mobilising romantic images of nomads at war. (As he put it at the time,
‘if we do not blow our own trumpets, nobody else will do it for us’).260
Thus generations of raiding provided ‘an excellent training for war’.261
Air Ministry fears that his camel corps would be too weak to defend
itself were brushed aside: ‘these men are all natives of the desert and
have lived by raiding and fighting all their lives’.262 The Iraqi Army, in
253
254
MECA: JBG 1(203)/3, Glubb, ‘Control and Employment’; CO 730/168/8, Glubb,
‘Annual Report on the Administration of the Southern Desert of Iraq, 1929–30’.
255
MECA: JBG 206/10, Glubb, ‘Dulaim Desert Force’.
256
For example: Glubb, ‘Arab Chivalry’, p. 11ff.
257
258
259
Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, p. 41; Glubb, Soldier,
pp. 369–370.
260
FO 371/13714, Glubb to Cornwallis, ‘Monthly Administration Report for the
Southern Desert Area, for the Month of December, 1928’.
261
CO 730/137/9, Glubb, ‘Forthcoming Raiding Season’.
262
AIR 23/33, Glubb to Cornwallis, 21 Dec. 1927.
contrast, ‘cannot be used for independent patrolling . . . because being

townsmen they consume vast quantities of water’.263 ‘Bedouin person-
nel’ were ‘better value than any other in the desert’ because ‘they never
rest or want to go into a town’.264 The discursive elevation of nomad
forces at the expense of urban recruits (‘pretty boys’) prompted the
resentment of the Inspector General of the Iraqi Army, who main-
tained that Glubb had ‘disappeared into the blue’ with a ‘quite inad-
equate’ force.265 Their disagreement is a reminder of the fluidity and
instrumentality with which concepts of ‘martial race’ were made and
unmade.
Because Bedouin martiality flowed from their mode of life, securing
their services meant making concessions over dress, drill and deployment.
This was something that Peake (fastidious about the appearance of his
men, he affected ‘an Edwardian, if not a Victorian, military style’) was
unlikely to appreciate.266 Glubb requested larger-than-regulation ammu-
nition belts for his desert jundis, because carrying more rounds than the
average Legionnaire ‘makes them proud of their turn out’.267 Nomads’
conditions of service were more favourable than those of their settled
counterparts: ‘we could not get bedouin recruits if we insisted on a fixed
period of years from the start’.268 Too great an emphasis on foot drill,
meanwhile, might drive Bedouin recruits to resign.269 Most of all, secur-
ing Bedouin participation in defensive operations meant bending before
the conventions of ‘nomadic warfare’. Glubb’s first ‘tribal rally’ to see off
the Ikhwan—at Al Abtiyya in February, 1929—taught him that a stand
could only be made where grazing and water supplies were adequate for
massed herds over a number of days. The key decision now became where
and when to arrange this concentration, and in this conventional military
wisdom ‘must be subordinated to the needs of the tribes’.270 Choosing to
fight for other reasons, insisting on withdrawing to imperial garrisons, or
263
AIR 23/43, Glubb, ‘Intelligence from Nejd’, 12 Aug. 1928.
264
AIR 23/46, Glubb, ‘Evacuation of the Shabicha Post’, 16 Dec. 1928.
265
MECA: JBG: 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Southern Desert Force’; AIR 23/46, Loch to
Cornwallis, 24 Dec. 1928.
266
Glubb, Story, p. 199. To ensure there were no ‘irregularities’ in his Legionnaires’
appearance, for example, Peake gave each recruit a small book listing every item in his kit.
‘The book was put in a special tin case and every man had to carry it with him at all times.
The result was up to my expectations’: IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiogra-
phy), p. 50.
267
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1, Glubb to Peake, 18 Feb. 1931.
268
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1, Glubb to Peake, 11 Mar. 1931.
269
MECA: JBG 206/10, ‘Dulaim Desert Force’. Governor Bayly in Egypt’s Western
Desert agreed: FO 141/514/5, Bayly to Lloyd, 28 Aug., 1926.
270
MECA: JBG 1(203)/1, Glubb, ‘Movements, Control and Employment of the
Tribes’, (n.d.).
rallying too soon all risked herd losses and desertion.271 Glubb did not
straightforwardly hijack Bedouin warfare for imperial purposes. (As he
and other desert officers observed, Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan had shown how
tribal practices could be modified). But a view which ascribes to him
a freedom to ‘invent’ traditions, to make his soldiers a ‘spectacle’ and
the Bedouin ‘a fetishized commodity’ is equally misleading.272 Despite
Glubb’s claims to be the first ‘to train or discipline Bedouins’, tribes had
long resorted to soldiering in tough economic times. When they did
so again in the interwar years, they brought their own expectations of
service.273
If nomadism produced the best recruits, then Glubb was going to pri-
oritise it above all else, even nationality. He wanted ‘the best men in the
desert’, a colleague later remembered, ‘no matter . . . which of the Arab
countries [they came from]’.274 This led to a final distinguishing feature
of Glubb’s recruitment policies: a preference for nomads before nationals.
In the late 1920s, and for much of the 1930s, Glubb recruited person-
nel transnationally across the desert corridor. Perhaps half the men of
Iraq’s Southern Desert Camel Corps were actually Nejdis, hailing from
tribes ‘with a tradition of service’ across North Arabia under Ottoman
rule.275 When he moved to Trans-Jordan, Glubb formed the new Desert
Patrol around a core of men brought over with him from Iraq. Later,
his practice of recruiting Ruwala from Syria and Ahl al-Jabal drew pro-
tests from French officials.276 Even with the Desert Patrol up to strength,
a sizeable number of recruits still came from outside the country, and
special sanction was obtained to enlist up to 40% of the force from
non-Trans-Jordanian tribes.277
Was there more to this than ‘divide and rule’? Glubb did hope
that recruiting Bedouin ‘unconnected with the local tribes’—Nejdi
Shammar, perhaps, or Kuwaitis—would ‘avoid all suspicion of parti-
ality’.278 It was also practical policing: trans-border recruitment helped
cement the wider networks and ties on which, as we have seen, run-
ning the corridor relied.279 But it also reveals how, when tasked with
271
MECA: JBG 1(203)/3, Glubb, ‘Control and Employment’.
272
Massad, Colonial Effects, pp. 119–121.
273
Glubb, War in the Desert, p. 227. 274
275
276
MECA: JBG 7(208)/3, Glubb, ‘Protest by the French Liaison Officer’, 26 Feb. 1933.
Glubb thought their protest absurd: Syrian camel corps also made ready use of Nejdi and
Iraqi tribesmen, and ‘nationality’ was of questionable relevance to nomads anyway.
277
FO 905/18, Glubb, TJDR: Aug. 1935.
278
AIR 23/300, Glubb (SSO Nasiriyah) to Air Staff Intelligence, 18 Feb. 1926.
279
CO 831/23/13, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1932.
building a force for the future, Glubb’s commitment to the nation

jostled with a wider framework built around ‘the desert and the sown’.
Although there were ‘quite a good number of applicants’ from Trans-
Jordan, Glubb tried to explain to Peake, ‘there were none at first from
Trans-Jordan bedouins’. ‘We can always get men who are completely
down and out’, he continued, ‘ . . . but the good men are doubtful
about it . . . [T]‌he bedus are waiting to see how it will turn out’. 280 So
rather than settle for mere townsmen or cultivators, Glubb told Peake,
Nejdi tribes (available in ‘infinite supply’ from Syria, Iraq, and Nejd)
should be recruited. Were it not for the potential political backlash,
he added, he would happily have taken more.281 By the 1940s, Trans-
Jordan’s Desert Patrol even become a net exporter of personnel, loan-
ing non-commissioned officers to the fledgling Hadhramaut Bedouin
Legion, and sending others to occupied Libya to establish a Senussi
desert police.282 War, Glubb hoped, might set in train measures for
a permanent peacetime scheme of ‘swapping local forces between
Middle East colonies and Mandated territories’, thereby producing a
‘greater unity of effort’. His approach to recruitment, like the conduct
of desert administration itself, made him think ‘the whole dream-
fabric of “federation” ’ more plausible than it really was.283
Glubb’s recruitment policies—like his approach to the desert and
its inhabitants in general—have long been viewed through the prism
of state-building. His ‘military project’, so the story goes, aimed at
‘the integration of the Bedouins into the nation-state’ and ‘national-
izing them . . . through territorialization’.284 And yet, once again, the
careers of Britain’s desert officers demand a wider perspective: that
idea of a ‘tribal frontier’ of the world as a meaningful unit of analy-
sis. Foregrounding the nation risks obscuring how officers formed
policy, and why they disagreed. As Glubb’s career progressed his views
towards recruitment, drill and discipline became progressively more
conventional. But it took time for the national to crowd out alternate
mental maps, and until then, historians may find other, less familiar
stories to tell. Colonial recruitment was not always based on ‘race’ or
280
281
282
Lias, Glubb’s Legion, pp. 167, 170–171; Hutchison, ‘Hadhrami Bedouin
Legion’, p. 62.
283
Harold MacMichael’s take on Glubb’s growing enthusiasm: MECA: JBG 214/5,
MacMichael to Stanley, 12 Dec. 1942. For Glubb’s military proposals, see CO 831/51/10,
Glubb, TJDR: Oct. 1939.
284
Massad, Colonial Effects, pp. 102, 111.
nationality alone. The ‘modes of life’ cut across existing frameworks

in unexpected ways.
* * *
If Peake and Glubb really sat on opposing sides in a pertinent debate over
nomadism, then why have historians failed to notice it before? Part of the
problem may lie in our habit of falling back on the two men’s published
works, privileging material with a tendency to efface intra-British con-
flicts. Both men retired (only one by choice) at acutely sensitive moments
for British influence in the Middle East, Peake with the embers of the
Palestine Revolt still glowing (and the shadow of world war looming),
Glubb amidst the fallout of the Baghdad Pact. Contexts like these did not
quite seal lips, but they did push criticism into private channels. By delv-
ing into unpublished material, by focusing on the moments when these
two careers overlapped, and by placing each man’s approaches in a wider
context, we get a better sense of the scope for conflict.
Glubb’s preference for nomads before nationals gave his superior cause
for concern. As he went about setting up the new Desert Patrol, Peake
reminded him to recruit only from Trans-Jordanian tribes: ‘people here
watch these matters’, he warned.285 Peake was particularly sensitive to this
issue—his experiences in the 1920s had taught him how quickly resent-
ment could build when outsiders received government jobs.286 Glubb
stood by his recruitment policy nonetheless. Even once Trans-Jordan’s two
main tribes—the Beni Sakhr and the Howeitat—had started to enlist,
Glubb continued to bring in non-nationals to balance their numbers,
so that no particular tribe would dominate the force.287 ‘Peake’s whole
object’, Jarvis remembered, ‘had been to raise a force from the local inhab-
itants, and not to engage mercenaries from neighbouring countries’.288
While his Legionnaires were all Trans-Jordanian, Glubb resented ‘sugges-
tions, or demands . . . that the Desert Patrol should be bound by the same
rule’ well into the 1930s.
This disagreement spilled over into the related problem of education.
Peake believed that appointing Arab officers to responsible positions wher-
ever possible was central to pre-empting discontent, but it could only hap-
pen if they were sufficiently educated for the job. Teaching basic literacy
was a start, but the government needed to pay more attention to higher
education in future, perhaps sending young men away to university in
285
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1, Peake to Glubb, 26 Jan. 1931.
286
Hamarneh, ‘Social and Economic Transformation’, pp. 210–211. See further: FO
141/672/1, Philby, Monthly Report on Trans-Jordan, Dec. 1923.
287
FO 905/18, Glubb, TJDR: Aug. 1935. 288
England.289 But for Glubb, as we have seen, ‘intellectualism’ risked com-

promising the manners and morals that made nomadic recruits so attrac-
tive.290 ‘You are absolutely right’, a colleague wrote to Peake soon after
Glubb’s dismissal,
in saying that he [Glubb] would not allow the Arab officer to be trained . . .
[A]‌lthough he lived in the Middle East for thirty-five odd years I think it true
that he remained absolutely ignorant, and indeed careless, of the character of
the educated Arab . . . [T]he very people whose criticisms were most damag-
ing was the educated man whom he had utterly neglected.291
Because Bedouin martial qualities lay in their mode of life, Glubb saw ‘the
chief problem’ of any tribal force to be ‘finding Arabs sufficiently educated
to be an officer, yet sufficiently a tribesman to be in sympathy with . . . the
fighting men’.292 His concomitant mistrust of educated Arabs led him to
fall back upon European officers, to Peake’s evident frustration. Indeed, it
was around this issue that Peake understood the ‘entirely different lines’
dividing British and French colonial policy.293 When asked by the BBC to
contribute to a radio programme on his old colleague, Peake recalled his
objections to this ‘fatal policy’—one ‘entirely contrary to my own’—and
declined.294
Most of all, Peake was increasingly afraid for the balance of ‘the desert
and the sown’ in an Arab Legion under Glubb’s command. Peake believed
his men did vital work, protecting and extending the agricultural wealth
of the nation. They did it with inadequate funding, outdated equipment,
and in insufficient numbers.295 With the creation of the Desert Patrol and
Glubb’s transfer to Trans-Jordan, Peake began to wonder aloud if his col-
leagues had not got their priorities wrong. In 1931, when Glubb requested
an increase in the size of the Desert Patrol, Peake refused to recommend
it. It was ‘unwise’ to increase expenditure ‘on the wholly unproductive
desert . . . while the part of the Arab Legion which is responsible for polic-
ing the productive area of Transjordan is starved’. If this continued, he
would not be able to afford the new police posts required to sustain the
289
Peake, ‘Trans-Jordan’, pp. 392–393; IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (typescript draft autobiog-
raphy), p. 132.
290
Glubb developed this theme further in retirement: Glubb, Way of Love, pp. 135, 137;
Glubb, Britain and the Arabs, p. 458.
291
IWM: FGP 12, R.J.C. Broadhurst to Peake, 21 Mar. 1956.
292
MECA: JBG 206/10, Glubb, ‘Dulaim Desert Force’.
293
IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2, p. 87.
294
IWM: FGP 7, Peake to Christopher Sykes (BBC), 27 June 1956.
295
At one stage, Peake had even been reduced to recruiting carpenters and builders as
Arab Legion soldiers, so that he could afford to repair the decrepit outposts his men had to
use: IWM: FGP 3 (miscellaneous essays), Peake, ‘Attempted economies’ (n.d.).
expansion of the cultivated area. Bedouin raiding, he complained, ‘has

lately been taken far too seriously’, and so much time, energy and money
lavished on ‘the far distant South Eastern boundary of Transjordan, that
we are running a grave risk of losing sight of the far more important prob-
lems nearer to us . . . ’.296
The Bedouin, in short, had ‘no just complaint against the
Government’, costing a fortune in police work, but bringing in a neg-
ligible amount in tax.297 For a man who remembered the earliest days
of the state, when ‘only the peaceable population [were] made to con-
tribute’, this seemed worryingly familiar.298 Crucially, Peake could not
but wonder if an expanded Desert Patrol did not ‘call into question
the reason for its formation’. When the idea was raised, Peake had
envisaged ‘a small mobile force’ to ‘go about among the Beduin’ in
‘normal times, but ultimately relying on the RAF and [Trans-Jordan]
Frontier Force’ for support. He could only express alarm that it was
‘now meditated forming a strong fighting unit instead’.299 This went
beyond any simple budgetary jealousy. As Peake confided to Jarvis
soon after his retirement, such a development threatened nothing less
than the return of ‘tribal rule’. Because Glubb’s Bedouin police were
established after Peake’s Legionnaires had brought peace to ‘the settled
part’ of the country . . .
we soon saw the British Government providing money with which to subsi-
dise tribes—the old evil of the surra under another name; giving them armed
cars with machine guns, wireless sets, forts and other adjuncts to militarism,
which had been denied to the old Arab Legion, who had had to carry on its
task without them . . . [G]‌radually we saw the desert nomads being turned
into soldiers with modern arms and transport, while the old Arab Legion
formed from the dwellers in the towns and villages remained for the most
part mere police.
. . . [S]‌hould, in the future, [Britain withdraw] . . . then we shall have
given the tribal sheikhs an arm with which they can once again dominate the
settled people, and such domination can only lead to poverty and misery. My
policy was always to prevent power from getting into the hands of the tribal
chiefs as the country could not prosper if this occurred.300
Glubb’s dismissal further soured Peake’s memory of his former subordinate,
but their relationship had long contained underlying, and occasionally
296
MECA: JBG 7(208)/2, Peake to Cox, 15 Apr. 1931.
297
298
FO 141/440, Peake to Samuel, 1 Feb. 1921.
299
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1 Peake to Cox, 15 Apr. 1931.
300
Cited in Jarvis, Arab Command, pp. 60–62. See further: IWM: FGP 3 Reel 2 (type-
script draft autobiography), pp. 191–192.
open, ideological tensions.301 An opponent and an advocate of tribal

recruitment, each man mobilized powerful ideas about nomads in sup-
port of divergent visions of the future, building up a stock of contradictory
images that are still with us today.302 This happened across the interwar
empire, but was particularly marked when—as in Trans-Jordan—officers
faced difficult choices over the allotment of meagre resources. Britain’s desert
officers not only occupied a spectrum of opinion on desert development and
the future of nomadism. Their ideas led them into conflict on the ground.
C O N C LU S I O N : D E B AT I N G D E S E RT
DEVELOPMENT—A STEPPE IN THE
RIGHT DIRECTION?
The interwar debate over desert development produced no master tem-

plate for the postwar projects that followed. As the divergent visions of
men such as Peake, Jarvis, and Glubb suggest, ambivalence may even
have been its defining characteristic. Nonetheless, the very act of debating
desert development shaped its subsequent course in a number of ways.
Firstly, it cemented the idea that government had an active role to play
in developing arid zones. Viewed charitably, many British officers had
come to believe it the proper responsibility of Government to ‘improve’
the lives of their desert subjects. Viewed less charitably, they now resolved
that nomads could and should have their resources managed for them.
As we saw in Chapter 2, it was by no means self-evident at the start of
our period that controlling the arid ‘wastes’ of empire was necessarily
worth the candle. One result of this shift was to promote a more ‘agentive’
outlook on deserts. Outside intervention, many assumed, was the prime
motor of change in a ‘timeless’ desert landscape; nomads would not set-
tle (or improve their pastoralism) on their own. For much of the rest of
the twentieth century, these claims were repeated by the region’s successor
states in defence of the expansion of bureaucratic power in the steppe.303
Secondly, if British desert officers were increasingly prepared to inter-
vene in the desert, they still tended to think that that the best government
schemes were simple ones, using appropriate technology, local resources
and local personnel. This was partly necessitated by interwar British
301
At the very least, there was surely more to it than mere ‘professional jealousy’: Royle,
Glubb Pasha, p. 169.
302
Reportage of the recent conflict in Iraq, for example, veered between romantic images
of the Bedouin, and suspicion of his ‘fickleness’ and ‘treachery’: ‘Shepherds by Day Turn
into Warriors by Night’, The Times, 28 Mar. 2003.
303
Hobart, Anthropological Critique, p. 2; Fabietti, ‘Facing Change’, pp. 590–591.
parsimony, but it was also a political calculation: a fear of backlash, as

Peake himself put it, against projects ‘too heavily stamped with the marks
of foreign initiators’.304 As Paul Kingston has shown in his insightful study
of the period after 1945, the same considerations continued to guide the
work of the British Middle East Office, and formed a striking contrast
with the more grandiose, high-technology schemes of the American Point
IV programme.305
A third aspect of the interwar inheritance relates to how the next gen-
eration of desert development experts conceived of their subject. As dis-
parate desert officers came together to debate development between the
wars, they elaborated more standardized units of analysis. The movement
of ideas, practices and analogies across the boundaries of the desert cor-
ridor, and extended further through institutions like the Royal Central
Asian Society, worked to reinforce common vocabularies and specialized
terms of reference. This prepared the ground for later international organi-
zations, like the Arab League, UNESCO and the International Labour
Organization, to make claims to a specialist body of knowledge about
nomadic societies and development, and to fashion global approaches to
their sedentarization.306 They too would translate policies between vary-
ing sites, develop comparative models of universal applicability, and see
‘nomads’ everywhere as having similar societies.307 Interwar desert admin-
istration was at best an emerging colonial profession, very much at home
in what Harold Perkin called the ‘halfway house’ of English society (some
at the RCAS celebrated Jarvis’ desert gardens, for example, as a triumph
of experience over ‘theories of science and textbooks’).308 And yet, as we
have seen, British desert officers were not as coolly pragmatic as they imag-
ined themselves to be. Jarvis, Peake, and Glubb seldom disagreed over
what ‘nomads’, ‘peasants’, ‘villagers’ or ‘tribes’ were, only whether their
characteristics were desirable or not. Each believed that the modes of life
formed distinct social ‘types’ and drafted special administrative measures
accordingly. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain’s colonial
officers and the networks of desert administration had already gone a long
way towards establishing the ‘transnational legitimacy’ of postwar devel-
opment policies towards nomads, even if they were themselves divided as
to how to proceed.309
304
305
Kingston, Modernization.
306
For an overview of postwar sedentarization programmes, see Bocco, ‘Settlement’.
307
As one postwar study of Egypt’s Bedouin put it, the gradual sedentarization of
nomads was ‘a well-known social phenomenon common to many parts of the world’: Awad,
‘Assimilation’, p. 240.
308
Ingrams, Review of Three Deserts, p. 696.
309
Bocco, ‘Settlement’, p. 307.
Systematizing knowledge does not necessarily make it inaccurate.

But interpreting local information in terms of a simplistic opposition
of ‘the desert and the sown’ reinforced an unsuitable paradigm: impres-
sionistic, reductive and ahistorical. Lucien Febvre remarked how often
his colleagues became captured by this terminology, building rickety
arguments based on the evidence of ‘the nomads of all times and all
countries’.310 Of equal importance, however, was how this practice
relocated knowledge to new institutions and organizations. Over the
course of the period, as Britain’s ‘Tribal Question’ matured, so claims
to authority were increasingly made in arenas and at levels which all
but precluded Bedouin participation. By 1939, even an authority like
John Glubb could be criticized for failing to support his field obser-
vations ‘by reference to reports, books or statistics . . . a somewhat
unreliable basis for a scientific study’.311 Modernization theory may
have been nourished by the superpower rivalries of the postwar world.
But many of its central assumptions and frameworks—at least as they
related to mobile peoples and arid zones—had been set in train over
the preceding decades. As development planning increasingly drew on
a vocabulary of economics, technology and management, so indig-
enous knowledges were ignored, or dismissed as ‘irrational’, or recast
as ‘obstacles’ to progress.312 It is only recently that the gap between
the practices and perspectives of arid zone ‘experts’ and their nomadic
subjects—already widening in the 1920s and ’30s—has begun to be
addressed.313
Fourthly, British debates over the nature of nomadism cast an equally
long shadow over scholarship. In the 1970s, anthropologist Neville
Dyson-Hudson complained of a notable ‘lag’ in ‘nomadic studies’: com-
pared with other branches of anthropology, it was mysteriously untouched
by ‘the Malinowskian impulse’. Part of the problem, Dyson-Hudson sug-
gested, was that much of the literature had been written by men ‘whose
main skills and principal duties were other than anthropological’: men like
Austin Kennet of Egypt’s Frontier Districts Administration, G. W. Murray
of Egypt’s Desert Surveys, and Harold Dickson of the Kuwait Political
Agency (not to mention Claude Jarvis, Frederick Peake and John Glubb).
Their observations were all too often ‘incidental’ or suffered from a ‘theo-
retical shortfall’; even Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949) was
310
Febvre, Geographical Introduction, pp. 96, 270–271.
311
Epstein, ‘Correspondence’, p. 177.
312
Hobart, Anthropological Critique, p. 2.
313
A principle enshrined in the 2002 Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and
Conservation. See further: Hobbs, ‘Guidelines’; Colchester, ‘Indigenous Peoples’,
pp. 33–51.
‘based on information gleaned while upon other duties’.314 Britain’s ‘Tribal

Question’ must take some of the responsibility for these shaky foundations.
Ironically, the enthusiastic attentions of its desert officers had retarded the
development of a separate academic literature on nomads: as one scholar
later put it, ‘the overall outlines of Arab Bedouin society are well known
to anthropology, despite the lack of detailed studies’.315 Many of the
assumptions and preconceptions about nomads advanced in the pages of
the Society’s Journal survived to skew scholarship into the 1960s, includ-
ing the belief that the ‘modes of life’ determined moral characteristics and
behaviour, the notion that nomads formed bounded, autonomous groups,
and the tendency to dismiss those that deviated from an idealized ‘type’ as
somehow inauthentic or contaminated.316 Even the most insightful com-
mentators felt the pull of this intellectual climate. Some of his early papers,
Owen Lattimore reflected, ‘have an unmistakable partisan bias—a little
reminiscent of the Englishman of half a century ago, writing about . . .
his favourite tribe in the Hindu kush’.317 Conspicuously absent is any seri-
ous discussion of the role of Bedouin women, partly because officers’ sex
restricted their observation of women’s quarters, but as much because their
interest in Bedouin society clustered around topics (like raiding and adjudi-
cating disputes) which they assumed were exclusively male affairs.318
Finally, a number of interwar arguments about nomads—particularly
the more trenchant critiques by men like Jarvis and Peake—would be
repeated almost verbatim by the next generation of development experts.
Again, this serves to question how far modernization theory was a Cold
War child: it had an often unacknowledged genealogy. Assumptions about
nomadism as a primitive stage of development and new ideologies of
modernization were equally unidirectional, advocating a single route to
development.319 New hierarchies based on ‘levels of social development’
owed much to the ‘stage theory’ of old. Influential texts rehearsed a host
of familiar themes: that nomadism turned fertile lands into wastes; that
agriculture only thrived when a ‘firm hand’ kept ‘the plundering nomad’
at bay; even (Jarvis’ clarion call) that the Bedouin was ‘not so much the
“son of the desert”, but its father’.320
314
Dyson-Hudson, ‘Study of Nomads’, pp. 2–7.
315
Cited in Cole, ‘Where Have the Bedouin Gone?’, p. 235.
316
Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson, ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, pp. 15–16.
317
Lattimore, Studies, p. 30.
318
A ‘male bias’ persists in much planning and research involving pastoral nomads: Hobbs,
‘Guidelines’, p. 793.
319
Chatelard, ‘Desert Tourism’, p. 734. For the ‘core of common conceptions’ towards
nomadism within postwar development aid agencies and international organizations, see
Bocco, ‘Settlement’, pp. 308–313.
320
Reifenberg, Struggle.
Into the 1960s, other advocates of ‘de-nomadization’ continued to cite

Claude Jarvis and his colleagues for proof of the hopeless indolence that
nomadism induced, and of government’s obligation to shake the Bedouin
from its grasp.321 The UNESCO series of Recherches sur la zone aride also
rehearsed recognizably interwar assumptions on an ambitious, global
scale.322 Most of all, the idea of an eternal struggle between nomads and
settlers, the desert and the sown, remained a meaningful framework for
approaching development. Because it so saturated officers’ discussions,
much of the later development literature took its zero-sum assumptions
for granted. The theory advanced by Jarvis and Peake—that an irrational
nomadism caused desiccation and had betrayed the agricultural legacy of
the ancients—proved particularly tenacious. Shrouded in the new lan-
guage of ‘the tragedy of the commons’, it remains in circulation today.323
* * *
That critique of nomadism, however, tells only half the story. Looking back
across the twentieth century, what really sets the interwar period apart is
its diversity of opinions on nomadic societies: both richer and less assured
than what came before 1914, or after 1945. Until the First World War,
the late Ottoman state had grown steadily more assertive over its southern
semi-arid frontiers, with settlement schemes and land registration pro-
grammes extending cultivation and developing infrastructure as never
before. Behind it all lay a revived sense of mission, a heightened impa-
tience with those who lived ‘in a state of nomadism and savagery’.324 After
the Second World War, at the hands of the region’s successor nation-states,
similar ideas returned with a vengeance. The new national governments
were much more likely to view nomads as candidates for land expropria-
tion and displacement, to think of ‘the economy’ as a peculiarly national
space, and to deny the economic viability of untidy, trans-border migra-
tion.325 Nomadic mobility was met with official suspicion: ‘full social
integration must await sedentarisation of the tribes’.326 Indeed, colonial
officials’ apparent reluctance to see sedentarization schemes through even
led to accusations of conscious underdevelopment: an arid zone variation
on a familiar postwar theme.327
321
Awad, ‘Settlement’; Amiran and Ben-Arieh, ‘Sedentarisation’.
322
Dyson-Hudson, ‘The Study of Nomads’, p. 7.
323
For example: Fratkin, ‘Pastoralism’.
324
Rogan, Frontiers; Deringil, ‘State of Nomadism and Savagery’.
325
Gardner and Marx, ‘Employment and Unemployment’, p. 22; Mitchell, Rule of
Experts, pp. 82–84.
326
Awad, ‘Settlement’, pp. 25, 32, 54.
327
See, for example, Mustafa Hamarneh’s damning verdict on British Trans-Jordan as ‘the
Stand Still Society’: Hamarneh, ‘Social and Economic Transformation’, pp. 205–206, 209.
This interwar interlude reminds us of the conditions that nourished

Britain’s ‘Tribal Question’ in the first place: the absence of a consistent
settler voice for much of their jurisdictions; the role of institutions like the
RCAS in disseminating ideas and broadening the scope of debate; the pre-
mium set on flexibility by the imperial and financial crises of 1919–1922;
and the resulting preparedness to re-examine relationships with nomadic
societies. To run the corridor, officers had come to depend on varying
degrees of Bedouin co-operation and consent, and these interwar arrange-
ments (however grudging) had intellectual consequences. It may also have
mattered that Britain’s ‘Tribal Question’ coincided with a heightened
debate over the state of Britain itself. Visions of the empire, historians have
long known, ‘often involved criticism of conditions at home’.328 Thinking
in terms of the ‘modes of life’ encouraged this further: it put officers’ tribal
charges and an imagined British past within the same frame. If debating
tribal futures became so common, it was in part because it offered officers
a way back to thinking about themselves, whether they were unsettled or
assured by what they found.
Ambiguity and introspection, however, were luxuries that aspirant
nationalists could not afford, not when national productivity and the form-
ing of a citizenry were at stake. Sedentarization seemed to solve both, and
became the orthodoxy among independent states in the area in the years
after the Second World War. Sedentarization offered a future in which
taxable economic activity was increased, and new reserves of manpower
were tapped; it would force mobile populations and desert ‘peripheries’
to reconcile themselves with the fate of the national community. In the
1940s and 50s, as soon as oil revenues permitted, governments across the
region embarked on agricultural schemes and sedentarzation policies on
an unprecedented scale: a real turning point in the history of the Bedouin
and the state. For the nationalists of the 1930s, however, that future would
have to wait. It was not yet theirs to command.
328
Mendilow, Romantic Tradition, p. 237.
PA RT I I I
5
‘Somewhat Light Soil’
The Eclipse of British Desert Administration
I think the time has come to look at Bedwin affairs in their proper
proportion to the rest of the Country.1
I think our generation has nearly shot its bolt.2
At times, the officers who made up British desert administration must

have wished they could stop the clock. There was just so much to be done.
For even as their work gathered momentum between the wars, there
remained a nagging suspicion that events out there, beyond the desert
horizon, might yet come crashing in and spoil it all.
Many were all too aware of how exceptional their administrative powers
were: the ‘curious anomaly’ in a region in which the British were scaling
back that sort of thing. Viewed from the desert, the 1920s had not, after
all, proved to be ‘the dying days’ of British colonialism.3 Special Service
Officers in Iraq presided over ‘the forward march of desert control’, moni-
toring the corridor, generating intelligence (‘entirely independent’ of the
civil authorities) and sending agents to ‘watch the internal administra-
tion’.4 In Trans-Jordan Glubb was granted powers ‘so extended as to ensure
respect’ for the Bedouin Control Board’s decisions, and to take ‘immediate’
punitive action in the desert.5 In Egypt, officers of the Frontier Districts
1
MECA: JBG 7(208)/1, Peake to Glubb, 11 Apr. 1931.
2
MECA: STJPH 2/3/1/6, Glubb to Philby, 22 Apr. 1955.
3
As Toby Dodge has claimed them to be: Inventing Iraq, p. xii.
4
AIR 23/46, R. Brooke-Popham, ‘Notes on Policy of Desert Defence’, 19 Jan. 1929;
AIR 2/1196, MacGregor, ‘Air Intelligence in Iraq’, 1 Dec. 1929; AIR 2/1196, Air Ministry
minute, 6 June 1931.
5
CO 831/7/8, memorandum on the Bedouin Control Board, 2 Oct. 1930; CO 831/10/2,
Freeman to Chancellor, 2 Dec. 1930, encl. in Chancellor to Passfield, 20 Dec. 1930.
Administration, Residency staff, and High Commissioners alike became so

assured of British frontier control as to consider relocating all British forces
to Sinai: a desert which ‘Egypt does not want’, ‘one of the points of vantage
of the world’ from which Britain may ‘re-enter Egypt at a moment’s notice’,
and where ‘no nationalist movement will ever disturb the peace’. Some even
dared to hope that the peninsula could be annexed altogether.6
But the world did not stop turning. From the mid-1930s a series of devel-
opments combined to threaten the foundations of this system. By the end
of the decade, its fortunes had been considerably reversed. British officers
faced growing criticism of their activities from national governments and
subordinate officials. The geopolitical order on which desert administration
rested was disturbed, and its logic thrown wide open. Senior Governorships
struggled to attract candidates, and officials in London thought twice
before pledging further support. Desert administration—once held to be
‘an essential British interest’—had become an embarrassing liability.
This chapter examines the internal and external crises that worked to
bring the British experiment of desert administration to an end. It com-
pletes our study of an unofficial imperial system that straddled the deserts
of the Middle East, from its origins in the wake of one world war to its
eclipse after the next. But as well as looking at what changed, it considers
what survived to influence the region, and Britain itself, in the decades
that followed. In sickness, as in health, local administrative arrangements
(as much as diplomatic agreements or military deployments) offer an
insight into the workings of empire.
* * *
The eclipse of British desert administration confirms the pivotal impor-
tance of the events of the mid-1930s in redirecting British priorities in
the Middle East. Events in the desert still took a distinct path, of course,
but even here British freedom of action was increasingly constrained. To
understand why, we need to step back a little, and remind ourselves of the
general conditions that prevailed.
During the 1920s Britain’s empire in the Middle East had been
buoyed by the relative absence of geopolitical rivals. Without serious
external threats to weaken their hand, the British were able to concen-
trate their efforts on containing anti-colonial feeling. In this benign
strategic environment a broad set of diplomatic assumptions came into
6
FO 371/10071, R. E. Fisher, (untitled) Scheme for withdrawing all British troops to
Sinai, (n.d. Autumn 1921). See also CAC: GLLD 14/18, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 31 May
1927. The idea resurfaced across the interwar years. Even John Murray, later a staunch advo-
cate of sacrificing administrative control to secure diplomatic treaties of mutual interest,
considered it at one time: FO 371/10071, J. Murray minute, 6 Oct. 1924.
Somewhat Light Soil 243
play, as advanced by the Foreign Office, in particular. To counter the

unrest exhibited in the postwar ‘crisis of empire’, and to sidestep the
vagaries of what it meant to be a ‘mandatory’ power, British diplomats
sought to build alliances and sign treaties with individual territories,
guaranteeing British interests in exchange for measures of independ-
ence. Iraq exemplified what might be done: treaties were produced
in 1922, 1926, and 1930. Trans-Jordan signed its treaty with Great
Britain in 1928. An Anglo-Egyptian treaty proved more elusive, for
it required the British Residency, the nationalist Wafd and the chiefs
of the armed forces to march in step (however briefly). Instead, inde-
pendence was foisted on the country in 1922 in exchange for four
‘reserved points’, the intention always being to resolve the position
later by treaty.
The circumstances varied, but a common picture emerged. Putting
Britain’s relations with the Arab world on a firmer legal footing would
allow British ‘advisers’ to be recalled, and British troop levels to fall.
Budgets, to Westminster’s palpable relief, were quickly reined in. Desert
administration took root in this environment because it was cheap, effi-
cient and unobtrusive, and because it met a central British interest: com-
munications. As the Syrian Desert was traversed by new imperial routes,
and Britons were drawn into more complex relationships with the
Bedouin, the store set by desert administration remained high. In 1935,
Glubb reflected on the extent of the transformation when he remarked
that unless the Bedouin were ‘carefully handled’, the new trans-desert pipe
line might ‘become for us what the Hedjaz railway was to the Turks in
1916–18’—a hostage to Bedouin raids.7
The task of maintaining the corridor fell to various units and forces, but
officers developed unofficial networks and ‘purely private arrangements’
to exert a considerable degree of control. This tight lock over horizontal
regional connections would increasingly draw nationalists’ ire. The unique
conditions of nomadic life were made to justify unusual powers of inter-
vention and separate legal codes. Britain’s desert officers also became adept
at stressing the technical nature of their ‘profession’ so as to freeze out rival
claims to authority. But beyond their own powers and rhetorical strate-
gies, the British position in the desert rested on a stable geopolitical order
and the low ebb of Arab nationalism: disappointed with the outcome of
the Great Arab Revolt, depressed by the failure of the Syrian rising of
1925–26, and disparate for want of a common issue or outside backer
around which Arab energies might rally.
7
FO 371/20032, Glubb, ‘Reactions in Trans-Jordan in the event of a European war’,
19 Sept. 1935.
The Italian conquest of Abyssinia shattered this state of affairs.8 Before

1935 no branch of Britain’s armed forces had been seriously considering
the prospect of a major war in the Mediterranean; thereafter, the possibil-
ity demanded a hearing in fresh evaluations of Britain’s presence in the
Middle East. Having to deal with an arriviste Italian empire was one thing,
but the problem was compounded by mounting evidence of German
expansion in Europe—Hitler chose this moment to reoccupy the demili-
tarized Rhineland—and by a resurgent Japanese Empire. Faced with a
potential combination that outstripped British capabilities, the Middle
East was slotted into the agenda of appeasement. This meant a growing
voice for Whitehall in determining shape of British commitments in the
Middle East, and a privileging of military provisions and assets over civil
undertakings.
The Abyssinian crisis not only raised the spectre of a Mediterranean
front in any future general conflict. It stripped away the aura of perma-
nence surrounding British regional paramountcy, providing a tonic to
would-be nationalists across the Arab world. In Iraq, admiration of Italy
among Sunni military circles helped to crystallize anti-British feelings in
the officer corps. Among Egyptian youth groups, too, fascism inspired
new forms of anti-colonial organization, eroding the preeminence of the
more moderate Wafd.9 Others in Egypt were less enamoured of Italian
Fascism, but the British still looked weak by comparison, and certainly
no protector of smaller nations: now was the time to press for a more
meaningful independence. When the British High Commissioner, Miles
Lampson, appeared to cavil over the return of constitutional government,
riots broke out along the length of the Nile Valley, and a United National
Front was formed to bring the British back to the table. In August, 1936
Britain finally recognized Egyptian sovereignty, and the elusive Treaty of
Friendship and Alliance was signed. ‘An allied friendly Egypt’, Lampson
now judged, was preferable to ‘continuing on the present lines with an
unfriendly Egypt and an encircling Italian Empire’.10
The crisis also interlocked with another in the region: the grave rebel-
lion that took hold of Arab Palestine from 1936 to 1939. This was the
most serious internal challenge to Britain’s position in the Middle East
since the Iraq Revolt of 1920: at its height, it absorbed the energies of
some 25,000 British troops. The causes of the rebellion ran deep, but were
8
For wide-ranging discussions of its fallout, see Omissi, ‘Mediterranean’; Pratt, East of
Malta.
9
Erlich, ‘Egyptian Youth’; Lukitz, ‘Axioms Reconsidered’.
10
FO 371/20109, Lampson to Eden, 13 May 1936. For two important examinations
of the 1936 treaty negotiations, see Morewood, ‘Appeasement’; Morsy, ‘Military Clauses’.
Neither, however, explores the treaty’s peculiar consequences in Egypt’s desert provinces.
further actuated in the new international environment. Britain’s inability

to prevent the subjugation of Abyssinia, and its apparent preparedness to
renegotiate its position in Egypt, fed the sense that the time was right to
make a move against British rule. Nazi anti-Semitism also played a part,
causing Jewish refugees to flee for Palestine in unprecedented numbers,
thereby putting even greater pressure on the land and exacerbating com-
munal tensions. The rebellion further contributed to the revision of British
priorities. So grave was the risk of losing control that the British garrison
had to be remobilized, and calls began to be heard to address the socio-
economic demands of a new and disenchanted generation. It complicated
Britain’s military position in Iraq, made them begin to worry about politi-
cal unrest in Trans-Jordan, and was vital in sustaining the momentum
behind the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations. Most of all, the plight of the
Palestinian Arabs gave a shot in the arm to pan-Arabism as a political
force: perhaps its greatest boost since 1916–1918 and the early days of the
Faysali regime. From the Syrian and Iraqi volunteer bands formed to fight
in the Palestinian countryside, to the demonstrations denouncing British
policy on the streets of Cairo and Baghdad, the British were being forced
as never before to address the fact of Arab resentment in a coordinated
manner.11
All this meant that British assets and undertakings in the Middle East
were up for review from the mid-1930s. Where might concessions be
made to win back a degree of Arab compliance? Which levers of gov-
ernment were local hands now judged competent to pull? In the event,
the British got through the return of anti-colonial agitation and geo-
political strife, and in some style: the arrangements they erected would
see them through the Second World War. But the British position had
to be reframed in order to survive, with a renewed round of diplomatic
bargaining and greater sensitivity to nationalist affronts; doubling down
on the most essential provisions, while letting others go. Faced with these
pressures, desert administration began to look as if it belonged to an ear-
lier age.
Nonetheless, the eclipse of British desert administration was not imme-
diate, and how it came to pass remains to be told. Six months after the
1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, as Egypt prepared
to enter the League of Nations as a sovereign member state, Mohammed
Wasfi still despaired for his country’s ‘national movement’. We know
little about this Egyptian FDA officer, though he had certainly served
long enough to feel aggrieved at his lack of promotion, and vented his
11
On pan-Arabism, see Dawisha, Arab Nationalism; Khalidi, Anderson et.al., Origins.
frustration in the newspaper Al Masri. From his vantage point among the
Desert Police of Kharga, that ‘starkly horrible’ outpost to which Jarvis had
once been sent, British imperialism seemed alive and well. His superiors,
the British Governors of the Western Desert and Sinai provinces, retained
‘a freedom of action . . . beyond control’. They wielded ‘martial law’ and
decided tribal disputes, raised and commanded local forces, monopolized
the channels of foreign relations, and blocked the promotion of ‘hon-
est and experienced Egyptians’. When they opened religious ceremonies
and took the salute on Independence Day, the very trappings of state-
hood were reduced to ‘ridicule’.12 Across the 1930s, similar complaints
could be heard in the Southern Desert of Iraq, and even from quiescent
Trans-Jordan. Whatever politicians had agreed at the negotiating table, it
seemed, events on the region’s frontiers told a different story.
Wasfi’s frustration speaks to the unevenness of what historians would
eventually call decolonization, and encapsulates the historical problem
that this book has sought to address. While conceding a degree of politi-
cal control in the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile, the
British had sought to hang on in the desert. There, a lopsided advance
had taken place in the 1920s in Britain’s capacity to move, operate and
exchange intelligence along the boundaries of would-be nation-states.
But a number of vulnerabilities had been exposed by the following
decade, giving hope to fellow critics of this unofficial imperial system.
To continue to satisfy British objectives, desert administration had to
remain more acceptable and less conspicuous than the central govern-
ment ‘advisers’ already recalled. In Egypt, because of its irregularities,
no treaty or formal arrangement could be called to its defence (‘an
anomalous position such as this’, the Foreign Office were warned as
early as 1921, ‘reacts badly on the state’).13 In Iraq, the Air Ministry
acknowledged being ‘on rather thin ice over the position of our SSOs’,
for ‘the Iraqi government have never acknowledged our right to retain
[them]’.14 Even in Trans-Jordan, Colonial Office staff were disconcerted
to find that the agreement regulating the numbers of British officials in
the Emir’s service had ‘never been concluded or even discussed’, so that
Abdullah only consented ‘reluctantly’ to Peake’s replacement by another
British officer.15
12
FO 141/534/16, Anon. (M. Wasfi), ‘Where are the Signs of Independence on the
Egyptian Frontiers?’, Al Masri, 13 Feb. 1937.
13
FO 371/6322, Lindsay to Curzon, ‘The Frontier Districts Administration’, 12
Feb. 1921.
14
AIR 2/1196, A.T. Harding minute, 27 Sept. 1933.
15
CO 831/53/8, N.S. Andrews minute, 25 Jan. 1939; MacMichael to Macdonald, 13
Jan. 1939.
Instead, British influence in the desert rested on the willingness of dip-

lomats and civil servants to insist on directing desert administration’s net-
works and personnel. The more astute desert officers knew this only too
well. ‘I have always understood that the British Government wished to
retain us in our desert jobs’, Jarvis prompted the Residency, ‘but unless we
are adequately protected, the situation is hopeless’.16 Renewed departmen-
tal rivalries might constrain officers’ activities, just as the profusion of units
and forces involved formed ‘an excellent foundation for intrigue, jealousy
and back-biting’.17 Some continued to think of deserts as ‘natural’ buffer
zones, rather than as sites requiring active administration, and wondered
how well the system would operate when independent governments were
‘left to [their] own devices’.18 To others, British efforts to control desert
affairs remained ‘a wicked waste of British taxpayer’s money’, needlessly
provocative, or at best something that should await definite construction
of the trans-desert railway (‘if this railway ever materializes’, a Foreign
Office hand sneered).19
There was also a personal dimension to this story: landmark events in
the imperial careers of our three desert authorities that disrupted the run-
ning of the system. In 1936, Claude Jarvis finally retired from Sinai, indig-
nant at Egyptian attempts to reduce his salary. His ‘next door neighbour’,
Frederick Peake, contracted hepatitis and for the next three years went on
leave for the duration of the hot season. He retired to Scotland in 1939,
with ‘no regrets in exchanging desert sand for good Border soil’.20 Peake’s
illness and retirement, the death of another British officer in the Arab
Legion, and the return of geopolitical tensions raised Glubb’s profile and
broadened his responsibilities. ‘I was able to devote less and less of my time
to living completely amongst Arabs’, Glubb recalled of this ‘second period’
of his career, being ‘obliged to live in the capital, to meet with royalties,
presidents, cabinet ministers and ambassadors, and to consider the poli-
cies . . . of other governments’.21
These changes in circumstance mattered because the personnel base of
British desert administration, whether in Egypt, Trans-Jordan, or Iraq,
had always been narrow. ‘Desert administration is handicapped’, Glubb
16
FO 371/14636, Jarvis to Scrivener, 26 Mar. 1930.
17
IWM: R.F.G. Jayne papers, letter to father, 8 July 1930.
18
FO 371/13715, G. W. Rendel minute, 21 July 1929.
19
AIR 23/295, West, ‘Comments by SSO Ramadi on the Administrative Inspector
Dulaim Liwa’s report dated 13th June 1927’; FO 371/12992, unknown Foreign Office
minute, 13 Apr. 1928.
20
CO 831/53/8, N.S. Andrews minute, 25 Jan. 1939; IWM: FGP Reel 1, ‘From Desert
Sand to Border Soil’, The People’s Journal, 26 Mar. 1949.
21
Glubb, Soldier, p. 6. In many ways, Glubb’s first book is an elegy to his time with the
Desert Patrol: Glubb, Story.
complained in 1930, by ‘a lack of staff ’. Even at the height of the Ikhwan

revolt, Glubb was informed that ‘no experienced SSOs exist to fulfill all
your present requirements’.22 Such low visibility (and low cost) was con-
sidered fundamental to its success. But given the centrality of personal
relationships and informal arrangements to its workings, and the short
contracts on which many of its officials served, desert administration was
peculiarly vulnerable to disruption by changes to its personnel.23
Still, the eclipse of the whole cannot be explained away by interruptions
at a purely personal level. By the mid-1930s a combination of broader
strategic, political and economic constraints were working to undermine
the effectiveness of British desert administration, and to devalue its impor-
tance in the eyes of many in London. Specific pressures also began to be felt
in different constituent parts of the corridor, whether the growing military
threat from Libya, anti-colonial revolt on the borders of Trans-Jordan and
Sinai, or the need to revise commitments in Iraq, so that politics con-
ducted at the national level also acquired a greater significance. Jarvis and
his colleagues in the Frontiers Administration had grown used to having
attacks against them ‘crumple at once at the first sign of backing from the
Residency’.24 Just how long they could continue to do so was about to be
made clear.
* * *
Looking back from his retirement, Claude Jarvis felt his final years in Egypt
had been ones of ‘studied neglect’. In 1921, he was one of forty-five Britons
in the Frontiers Administration. Allenby himself declared thirty-two to be
the ‘minimum establishment’ acceptable. But by the time war returned
to the region and to the world, Jarvis’ successor in the Sinai was the only
British administrator left. In the Western Desert, Mohammed Wasfi had
become Governor at last.25 Events became particularly acrimonious in
Egypt, but a comparable history could be written for Iraq at this time.
By disentangling the various influences that led to this state of affairs, the
conditions that sustained Britain’s desert officers in the first place can be
better understood.
22
CO 730/168/8, Glubb, ‘Annual Report on the Administration of the Southern Desert
of Iraq, 1 May 1929–16 May 1930’; AIR 23/47, Air Headquarters to Glubb, 16 Feb. 1929.
23
Of the seven British Governors and senior officials of the Frontiers Districts
Administration in 1928, for example, three were on annual and four on biennial contracts.
Threatening to allow these to lapse was a tactic used by the Egyptian government in negoti-
ating greater independence: FO 371/13147, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 23 Aug. 1928.
24
FO 141/604/1, Jarvis to Lampson, 17 June 1936.
25
Jarvis, Three Deserts, p. 3; FO 371/6322, Allenby to Curzon, 12 July 1921; FO
371/23366, Lampson to Halifax, 8 May 1939.
By the mid-1930s, the personal nature of officers’ rule—so critical to

the operation of its informal networks—was itself becoming a liability.
As early as 1923, King Fuad had voiced complaints about his lack of con-
trol over frontier affairs.26 Displays of officers’ powers of intervention (as
during Sinai’s anti-locust campaign of 1930) caught the attention of the
Egyptian press, reminding readers of ‘obvious infringements of Egyptian
sovereignty’ in the desert, and ‘the existence of the Sinai anomaly’.27 It was
on Frontier Districts Administration turf that some of the conspirators in
Sir Lee Stack’s assassination were finally caught, a fact not lost on national-
ist critics.28 Further rumours that British officers were preparing to annex
the Sinai also provoked ‘an angry outcry’ from the press.29 Public criticism
increasingly fixed on individual Governors, the most conspicuous compo-
nents of this system. ‘The Governor [of Sinai]’, Wasfi complained,
is in touch with the Government of Palestine, with some secret means
unknown to us and to the Egyptian Government . . . Imagine that he took
his English guests from Arish to Taba (near Akaba) to pass [the] Christmas
holiday, under the name of inspection . . . [W]‌e do not wish the channel
between us and . . . the frontiers, to be a British Official.30
From Amira in the Western Desert, officer Mohammed Habib also
bemoaned the ‘tyranny’ of Governor Green, imprisoning, blackmailing and
torturing at whim, ‘and all this . . . under authority of his Egyptian post’.31
In Iraq, too, the obscured nature of British frontier control had been its
greatest asset. ‘There is no doubt that [the Government of Iraq] are aware
of the existence of the SSOs’, the Air Ministry observed, ‘although they
may not realize how many of them there are’.32 Despite efforts to keep
things that way, desert administration increasingly became an expression
of Iraq’s attenuated autonomy. In 1928 Al Istiqlal charged Glubb—‘the
Ruler of the Desert’—with working ‘to exalt the hand of his Government
under the blue canopy of this land’. He moved without restriction on the
frontiers of the state, enforced a de facto desert liwa that encroached on
the jurisdiction of the mutasarrifs, controlled Iraq’s nomads and entered
‘the heart of the desert’ to ‘supply his Government’ with intelligence.33
26
FO 141/652, Oliphant to Allenby, 15 Nov. 1923.
27
FO 371/14621, ‘The Egyptian Press, Sept. 25th–Oct. 1st 1930’, 1 Oct. 1930.
28
29
30
FO 141/534/16, Wasfi, ‘Signs of Independence’.
31
FO 141/604/1, Habib to Ministry of War, 11 Nov. 1936. Following Assyrian unrest in
Iraq, similar accusations were made against the remaining SSOs: AIR 2/1196, A. Harding,
minute, 27 Sept. 1933.
32
AIR 2/1196, C.L. Cantney (?) minute, 31 July 1930.
33
MECA: JBG 5(207)/loose papers, Ali Mahmud Al Muhami, ‘The Ruler of the Desert’,
Al Istiqlal, 16 Nov. 1928.
His memory stalked the political landscape. Years after Glubb’s transfer
to Trans-Jordan, the Iraqi press continued to depict desert affairs ‘as still
being administered in the interests of British imperialistic aims’, by SSOs
and local agents who were ‘for all ends and purposes the substitute of
Captain Glubb in the southern desert’. This so ashamed Glubb’s Iraqi suc-
cessor, Al-Ahali claimed, as to drive him to suicide.34
Anti-colonial nationalism was slower to build in Trans-Jordan (where
Glubb nonetheless fretted over his personal visibility).35 Instead, it was a
Palestinian and Syrian political elite, occupying a third of official posts
by 1936, which attracted the bulk of popular resentment.36 But Peake
was still keenly aware that he occupied ‘the most coveted [post] in the
District’.37 Amidst the Emir’s attempts to settle dynastic scores through
the agency of Beni Atiya raiders in 1932, British control of the Desert
Patrol was openly criticized in the Legislative Council, an early forum
for the articulation of Trans-Jordanian identity. Later, other ‘malcontents’
complained of the amount of revenue spent ‘unproductively’ on desert
affairs.38 In many ways, the interwar attacks on conspicuous desert officers
in Egypt and Iraq, and the suspicion that their frontier duties compro-
mised their national loyalty, prefigured the manner of Glubb’s well-known
dismissal from Jordan in March 1956.39
For the Embassy in Cairo (as the Residency became upon completion
of the 1936 Treaty), as for British officials in Iraq, there was an awful truth
to these accusations that made them ‘mostly difficult to rebut’.40 Desert
Law did confer unparallelled powers of intervention and rule—that had
been the point. But deeper exploration of these press campaigns reveals
more subtle influences at play. In part, they suggest growing tensions
within desert administration’s ranks, and a heightened agitation for posts.
Mohammed Naguib, an officer of the Frontier Districts Administration
in the 1930s and figurehead of the 1952 Revolution, had been attracted
to an ‘autonomous force’ with the only mechanized cavalry in Egypt: ‘the
34
AIR 2/1196, local press extracts: ‘Foreign Intelligence Officers’, Al Istiqlal, 6 Sept.
1933; ‘The Rulers of the Desert’, Al Ahali, 20 May 1933; ‘Intelligence Officers’, Al Ahali, 8
May 1933. For Haqqi Beg’s suicide, which the British attributed to the desolation and the
drink, see AIR 23/60, Woolley to Air Staff Intelligence, 10 May 1932.
35
CO 831/11/5, Glubb to Peake, ‘Protests from Ibn Saoud’, 14 June 1931, encl. in
Chancellor to Ryan, 4 July 1931.
36
Robins, History of Jordan, pp. 33–34, 39–40.
37
T 161/1219, Peake to Cox, 11 May 1924, encl. in Samuel to Thomas, 30 May 1924.
See also: IWM: FGP 13 (letter book), fo. 26, Peake to the Chief British Resident (Philby),
7 June 1924.
38
CO 831/17/11, Glubb, ‘Memorandum on the Beni Atiya Situation’, 12 Oct. 1932;
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: June 1937.
39
FO 371/121491, Currie to Selwyn-Lloyd, 3 Jan. 1956.
40
FO 141/534/16, W. Smart, minute, (n.d.) Feb. 1937.
best of all our Armed Forces’.41 The longer British personnel sat on these
prestigious jobs, the greater the friction with their subordinates. Wasfi’s
article, submitted anonymously, did not hesitate to put his name forward
to replace the sitting Governor. The following month he wrote to the
Oriental Secretary, Walter Smart, to expressly demand Green’s job.42 It
was Lampson’s ‘ill luck’ (and the historian’s fortune) to have actually been
inspecting Wasfi’s jurisdiction when news arrived that his promotion had
been blocked to make way for a British candidate:
The poor man was obviously greatly upset, having first been told that he was
to be promoted and then suddenly informed that his promotion was for the
moment suspended. He said to Hamilton43 that he really would not mind
if eventually another Englishman was appointed to the Western Desert in
succession to Green Bey, but if as he was told the intention was to appoint an
Egyptian Army Officer . . . then he did think it was monstrous seeing that his
promotion was blocked . . . I told Hamilton to advise Wasfi Bey not to get
unduly worried and above all things to keep quiet.44
In the 1920s, when rumours had spread about the withdrawal of British
officers from the FDA, its Civil Secretary had been disquieted by the
unseemly ‘scramble for their posts among the higher Egyptian officials’.
Far from seeing the desert as a ‘punishment station’—as the British claimed
they did—Egyptian competition for placements was fierce.45
Desert Law, Bedouin Law, and other legal forms of isolating frontier
zones presented a target of opportunity for wider critiques of empire. For
nationalists, they belied claims to national unity and embarrassed their
political leadership. Affording special privileges to any community might
prove ‘the thin end of the separatist wedge’, and such provisions were
expressly identified with the prolongation of British power.46 In 1927, and
again in 1934, attempts were made to apply the regular legal code to the
FDA’s jurisdiction, ‘a change which would greatly weaken the position and
authority of the Governors’.47 Conditions exempting the Bedouin from
conscription (as in Egypt), or expressly recruiting them as police (as in
Iraq) also frustrated the development of integrated, national security and
41
Naguib, Egypt’s Destiny, pp. 31, 60ff.
42
FO 141/534/16, Wasfi to Smart, 4 Mar. 1937.
43
John Almeric de Courcy Hamilton (1896–1973), Residency staff, Cairo; formerly of
the Sudan Political Service.
44
MECA: Lampson collection, 3/2, Diary 1937, 22 June 1937.
45
FO 141/799/5, D.J. Wallace, ‘Report on the Frontiers Administration for the Period
1st January 1926 to 30th April 1927’, 29 July 1927.
46
Omissi, ‘Assyrians’, p. 315.
47
CAC: GLLD 14/18, Lloyd to Chamberlain, 28 Mar, 1927; FO 371/17977,
D. McCallum, ‘Memorandum on the Administration of the Province of Sinai’, 30 Apr.
1934, encl. in Lampson to Simon, 30 Apr. 1934.
armed forces. Some of these formulae were embraced by Bedouin groups

as a means of retaining their autonomy. But the resentment they inspired
in others is equally clear, and even led to objections in Trans-Jordan, where
mechanisms like the Bedouin Control Board are often seen as having been
a success. From 1936, mutasarrifs complained bitterly that the Tribal
Courts Law, delegating judicial powers to tribal shaykhs, cut into their
authority. To Glubb, that was its great advantage.48 ‘There is no doubt vir-
tue in the justice of the Desert’, Henry Cox accepted, ‘but arguments can
and have been found against so rough and ready a system’.49 Defending
its application was a political calculation, as much as a legal or ethical act.
Attacking conspicuous desert officials was also a way of rallying support
for broader programmes of political and social change. In Iraq, British
obstruction of conscription loomed large. Rumours circulated of collu-
sion between the SSOs on the country’s southern frontiers and Ikhwan
raiders from across the border, in ‘a deep-laid scheme’ to prove Iraq ‘inca-
pable of her own defence’.50 Meanwhile, accusations of official corrup-
tion in Egypt’s Western Desert were, the Embassy was assured, ‘flogging a
dead horse, but so long as the defunct animal is British, the process seems
to afford . . . a good deal of pleasure’.51 Frontiers, as scholars in a range
of disciplines have explored, can exert a powerful hold on the national
imagination, assuming a significance ‘to many people beyond their local-
ity’.52 In Egyptian nationalism, this was a relatively recent phenomenon.
During the ‘Taba incident’ of 1906 Mustafa Kamil’s Hizb al-Watani had
actually defended Ottoman claims to Sinai ahead of Egypt’s own.53 Even
Sa’d Zaghlul had once thought acceptable the presence of British forces
on ‘the Asiatic side’ of the Canal.54 But the mood shifted over the course
of the interwar years. In 1925, Ismail Sidkey felt he must insist that the
remote oasis of Jaghbub come under Egyptian sovereignty. If granted to
neighbouring Cyrenaica ‘public opinion would see therein a wound to
national prestige, of the greatest severity because it befalls at the begin-
ning of Independence’.55 Opposing foreign interference in frontier zones
played an important part in their incorporation in the national imagina-
tion. To Mustafa Nahhas the Sinai, quite as much as Suez, was Egyptian
48
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Mar. 1938.
49
CO 831/29/2, Cox to Wauchope, 12 Dec. 1934.
50
See, for example: AIR 23/32, Hindle James to Air Staff Intelligence, 26 Dec. 1927;
AIR 23/38, Foster to Air Staff Intelligence, 20 Mar. 1938; AIR 23/42, SSO Diwaniyah to
Air Staff Intelligence, 19 Aug. 1928.
51
FO 141/534/16, Wallace to Hamilton, 24 June 1937.
52
Hastings and Wilson, Border Approaches, p. 2. The connection between frontiers and
ideologies of ‘national rejuvenation’ is explored in: Hennessy, Frontier.
53
Goldschmidt, ‘Egyptian Nationalist Party’. 54
Eran, ‘Negotiating’.
55
FO 141/526, Sidkey to Ziwar, 1 Dec. 1925.
soil.56 For Naguib too, Sinai and the Western Desert were national spaces
where upright young officers challenged royal corruption, a ‘hard and
dangerous’ landscape offering ‘physical and spiritual well-being’.57 This
emphasis on battling ‘national corruption’ in the frontier zones—sedu-
lously detailing Governors’ tennis courts, electric refrigerators, ‘vast’ gar-
dens and Christmas holidays—foreshadows a signature theme of the Free
Officers movement.58
British officials had faced such attacks before. But by the mid-1930s,
circumstances were combining to set restrictive parameters around their
response, not least the end of the benign international environment in
which desert administration had taken root, and the eclipse of the fiscal
regime in which it made sense. In the mid-1920s, with Anglo-Turkish
agreement on the future of Mosul, British officials in Iraq told themselves
‘that the worst external danger . . . had passed’, freeing ‘politicians, people
and publicists . . . to turn with relief to . . . internal administration’.59
Egypt was ‘a charming place to be stationed’, the American minister
reported in 1932, with ‘not much going on . . . of tremendous conse-
quence to my Government’. There, the Wafd still posed ‘by far the big-
gest threat’ to British predominance.60 When the Italo-Abyssinian crisis
shattered this geopolitical interlude, it raised the strategic stakes beyond
the capacity of Britain’s desert officers. Faced with a hostile, mechanized
rival in the west, Egypt’s desert administration seemed underpowered. In
the weeks before the completion of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty, Lampson
learned of the freedom with which Italian agents infiltrated the Western
Desert, perhaps even the FDA itself.61 As some grasped quicker than
others, the fresh sense of urgency behind British policy risked displac-
ing a system of control predicated on containing nationalism and saving
money. Forms of indirect rule, as Ronald Hyam has observed elsewhere,
‘assumed a static situation’.62 In the Middle East from 1935, a new regime
of risk was at work.
56
Lloyd, Egypt Since Cromer, ii, p. 258. A similar trajectory—the slow nationalist
embrace of tribal ‘peripheries’—seems to have played out in Syria: Khoury, ‘Tribal Shaykh’,
pp. 188–189.
57
Naguib, Egypt’s Destiny, pp. 65, 89.
58
‘I do not wish to go into details’, Wasfi wrote of the British Governors’ living arrange-
ments, before doing precisely that: FO 141/534/16, Wasfi, ‘Signs of Independence’. For the
idea of imperialism and corruption as twin enemies, see Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement.
59
CO 731/115/1, Anon., ‘Report on the Administration of Iraq for the Year 1926’
(n.d.1927).
60
W. M. Jardine, cited in Hahn, United States, p. 15; Morewood, British Defence,
pp. 16–18.
61
FO 141/604/2, Weir to Lampson, 18 Apr. 1936.
62
Hyam, Declining Empire, pp. 12–15, 74–75, 84.
Its shockwaves were felt beyond Egypt’s frontiers. The demands of sup-
pressing the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt even questioned the logic of desert
administration in Trans-Jordan, where overt criticism of British influence
had not been as pronounced. Prior to the outbreak of the revolt, only
the Desert Patrol of the Arab Legion had been garrisoned inside mod-
ern, defensible forts. Now, further increases to the Legion’s strength would
focus on its position in the agricultural zone to the west of the Hedjaz
railway.63 When, in the summer of 1936, Glubb requested an increase in
Bedouin subsidies, the British Resident highlighted the change in empha-
sis. ‘Major Glubb’, he wrote, ‘in dividing the country into townsmen
and tribesmen, has forgotten the village and the leading men amongst
them who are a force to be reckoned with stronger, in my opinion, than
the Beduin’. Glubb’s request was denied.64 In December 1937, forty-five
members of the Desert Patrol were reassigned to Ramtha on the Syrian
frontier, stripping down some desert posts to just three men each.65 The
following September, the retreat of Palestine Government forces from the
area south of Hebron prompted further reorientation of the Arab Legion
towards the Jordan valley. By then, the informal co-operation of Sinai’s
Frontier Forces, the Palestine Police, and the Arab Legion was no longer
sufficient to protect the overland route to Egypt.66
As the Revolt wore on and the scale of the problem dawned on British
officials, Palestine displaced the importance formerly set by the Tribal
Question. Officers who were slow to appreciate this risked being branded
an irrelevance. In 1942, for example, John Glubb wrote a memorandum
dismissing the prospects of nationalism in the Middle East. Given the
improvements in regional communications, he reasoned, surely some
form of federation was better suited to the future? This was fine in theory,
Harold MacMichael wrote in response, but ‘the problem of Palestine does
not seem to me to be given by Colonel Glubb the weight which it will
certainly carry’. ‘Unless it is solved in advance’, the High Commissioner
reminded the Colonial Secretary, ‘the whole dream-fabric of “federa-
tion” is likely to collapse’.67 In other ways, too, the problem in Palestine
63
CO 831/54/14, Glubb, ‘History, Composition and Duties of the Arab Legion’, 19
Apr. 1939. Peake supported this decision. In 1931 he complained that growing political
unrest in Palestine demonstrated ‘a pressing need for new posts both on the Western and
North Boundary [of Trans-Jordan]’, rather than in its desert areas: MECA: JBG 7(208)/2,
Peake to Cox, 15 Apr. 1931. The 1948 war for Palestine completed this reorientation: Lunt,
‘Arab Legion’, p. 53.
64
CO 831/37/3, Cox to Wauchope, 6 July 1936; CO 831/41/11, Wauchope to
Ormsby-Gore, 9 Jan. 1937. Again, this met with Peake’s approval.
65
CO 831/41/11, Glubb, TJDR: Dec. 1937.
66
CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Sept. 1938; Morewood, British Defence, p. 164.
67
MECA: JBG 214/5, MacMichael to Stanley, 12 Dec. 1942.
increasingly displaced that of desert control. The Trenchard scheme of

air policing, so much a part of British desert control, now appeared out-
moded, unsuited to restoring order in Palestine’s urban areas. The RAF,
for its part, no longer needed to talk up its role in tribal control once
disclosures about the existence of the Luftwaffe offered a more pressing
rationale in Europe.68 Overland communications routes themselves would
be compromised unless a political solution in Palestine could be reached.
Even discussions with Ibn Saud increasingly turned on the Palestine issue,
rather than the Tribal Question. As the King confided to Harold Dickson
in 1937, popular calls to oppose the partition plan were as stressful to him
now as Ikhwan pressure to conduct tribal raids had been a decade before.69
Italian adventurism and unrest in Palestine also demanded a surge in
British military commitments in the Middle East. These dwarfed the scale
and significance of its arrangements in the desert. The number of British
troops and aircraft in Egypt doubled between 1935 and March 1939,
while in Palestine a further 20,000 men were introduced to police the
Arab Revolt.70 In contrast, Glubb had simply assumed on the outbreak
of the Second World War that the defence of the Middle East could be
left to locally-raised ‘colonial troops’, freeing the regular British army to
be trained in the technical, scientific and specialized arts necessary for ‘a
first class war’ in Europe. Such things, he wrote, were ‘not only useless
but positively in the way’ when campaigning under an Eastern sun.71 This
was unmindful of the changes around him. The FDA’s armed forces—like
Trans-Jordan’s Desert Patrol or Iraq’s Southern Desert Camel Corps—
had largely been intended to ‘handle small raiding parties and perform
intelligence and reconnaissance duties. Anything more than that’, as
Walter Smart knew, ‘would have to be handled by British forces’. While
the League of Nations debated the crisis in Abyssinia, a report confirmed
that the FDA’s ‘actual fighting efficiency against a well-armed and deter-
mined enemy even in small numbers’ was ‘not likely . . . to be very great’.72
Tribal ‘irruptions’ were no longer the main concern, and the gap in capa-
bilities between local police forces and mechanized armies would only
widen as the Second World War ended and the Cold War began.73 Even
Glubb’s Arab Legion would spend much of the Second World War play-
ing catch-up, expanding the size of its mechanized regiments and missing
out on a more prominent role on the battlefield. As such, Glubb later
68
As David Omissi observes: ‘Mediterranean’, p. 4.
69
Dickson, Kuwait, pp. 388–391. 70
Omissi, ‘Mediterranean’, p. 15.
71
CO 831/51/10, Glubb, TJDR: Oct. 1939.
72
FO 141/504/7, W. Smart minute, 10 Mar. 1928; FO 141/539/1, Weir to Lampson,
‘Value of the Frontier Administration Forces’, 4 June 1935.
73
T 161/1219, MacMichael to MacDonald, 26 Aug. 1939.
wrote that ‘the terrorism and bloodshed of Palestine, [and] the menaces of
Hitler and Mussolini’ had combined to end a whole stage of his career.74
Secondment to command bodies of native troops, Jarvis remembered, had
been highly-competitive in his youth, and the making of many an officer.
Now, ‘the methods and tactics of modern warfare’ were so ‘ephemeral’
that ‘the removal of an officer . . . .from the hub of things must constitute
a definite setback in his career’, leading to ‘an archaism of ideas, a kind of
military obsolescence’.75
These new constraints reopened old questions of balance, of where
Britain’s priorities really lay. Given officers’ preparedness to think in terms
of ‘the desert against the sown’, it was not long before arguments coa-
lesced along those lines. Peake, long concerned that Glubb had committed
too much time and too many resources on Trans-Jordan’s desert popula-
tions, sought to return attention to urban and village communities. He
approved of reorienting the state’s security forces to the settled zone west
of the railway, and grumbled that the government frittered away funds
on educating nomads while whole villages had gone without schools.76
Others were equally concerned that for all desert officers’ contacts with the
Bedouin, they were simply talking to the wrong people. ‘Politically’, John
Murray of the Foreign Office had observed in the 1920s, ‘the desert Arab
is to all intents and purposes a non-entity’. Only those who had settled
and acquired land were ‘of some political importance’.77 This argument
gathered momentum as affairs in Palestine, and not along the frontiers of
north Arabia, became the touchstone of Anglo-Saudi relations.78 Glubb
complained about this zero-sum approach to the desert and the sown,
likening it to a man who suffered from both toothache and bowel pain,
and who attributed the cure of one to the continuance of the other.79 But
later, as Peake’s successor, he accepted that ‘the universal concentration on
politics’ that increased from the mid-1930s had indeed drawn him away
from desert affairs.80 This was not quite the age of ‘peasants not pashas’, as
Ernest Bevin later put it, but nor was Peake alone in rethinking the focus
on ‘the desert and its scanty and politically unimportant inhabitants’.81
74
Glubb, Story, pp. 234, 347–350.
75
Jarvis, Arab Command, p. 12. Thus officers of his generation who sought new com-
mands in 1939 were more hindrance than assistance, mere ‘sand in the wheels’: JM: DN24,
Jarvis to Jock Murray, 11 Oct. 1939.
76
77
FO 371/12377, J. Murray minute, 24 Mar. 1927.
78
Letherdale, Britain and Saudi Arabia, pp. 259 ff.
79
MECA: JBG 1(203)/2, Glubb to Kitching, 5 June 1926.
80
81
FO 371/12377, J. Murray minute 24. Mar. 1927. For ‘peasants not pashas’:
Francis-Williams, Prime Minister Remembers, p. 176.
Desert administration risked being eclipsed, therefore, by forces extrin-

sic to itself. But Wasfi and his colleagues were scarcely pushing at an
open door. By the late 1930s, their own acts of obstruction, criticism and
non-cooperation had taken a very real toll on administrative efficiency.
This was increasingly clear in Egypt. In 1925, as we saw in Chapter 2,
responsibility for the FDA had passed to a sympathetic Egyptian Director-
General. For the next decade, Ahmed Shafik proved ‘ideal’ for the job,
veiling the extent of British influence while letting the British officials ‘do
what they liked’.82 But from the mid-1930s his successor, Mohammed
Tewfik, was far less biddable. Initial hopes of ‘working amicably’ with this
‘straightforward’ but ‘rather stupid’ officer proved a gross miscalculation.
Without warning, he demoted his British Assistant-Director, severing a
key tie to the Residency.83 At the same time, new orders expressly forbade
local Governors from ‘mov[ing] their own men about at their discretion’,
targeting the informal transgression of boundaries on which British desert
administration relied.84
With declining influence over transfers and appointments, British
desert officers reported growing obstruction. They even found Desert Law
turned against them, preventing the investigation or removal of subordi-
nate officials they mistrusted.85 At Headquarters, Ali Bey Musa returned
as second-in-command of the Frontier Forces, despite his dismissal in
1919 ‘for political intrigues and refusing to obey orders’.86 From Sinai,
Jarvis complained shrilly (and with no sense of irony) of ‘Egyptian inter-
ference’ in the conduct of his duties, and the replacement of trustworthy
subordinates with those who had ‘deserted to the Senussi during the war’.87
His successor thought the sub-Governor, Elwi Bey, a Wafd ‘rascal’ who
‘has been hoodwinking Jarvis for years’.88 Both Elwi Bey and Mohammed
Wasfi had once collaborated with British desert control—Lampson had
been hosted by the latter on his tour of the Southern Desert Province—
but were ‘no doubt hedging now with the Wafd to efface the stigma of
too long association with us’.89 In Iraq, Special Service Officers reported
82
FO 141/539/1 W. Smart, ‘Frontiers Administration’ minute, 13 Apr. 1935.
83
FO 141/539/1, C. W. Spinks, ‘El Lewa Mohammed Tewfik Pasha’ (n.d.); FO
141/799/5, ‘Note on the Frontiers Administration for 1936’, 12 Dec. 1936.
84
FO 141/604/1, M. Lampson, memorandum, 10 Aug. 1936. In 1938, Mohammed
Naguib likewise attempted to restrict the freedom of movement of British forces in the
Western Desert: Naguib, Egypt’s Destiny, p. 68.
85
FO 141/534/16, Wallace to Hamilton, 21 July 1937.
86
FO 141/534/16 Weir to Lampson, 24 Mar. 1937.
87
FO 141/604/1, Jarvis to Lampson, 17 June 1936; CAC: GLLD 12/17, Lloyd to
Chamberlain, 24 Mar. 1927.
88
FO 141/534/16, Hamersley to Lampson, 14 Feb. 1937.
89
FO 141/534/16, W. Smart minute, 13 Feb. 1937.
comparable problems when Khalil Bustan (‘a follower of Rashid Ali’)

and Abdul Jabbar (‘a complete effendi’) were appointed to the Southern
Desert.90 Following Britain’s public declaration of its intention to leave all
administration to the Iraqis after 1932, officers found it ‘more and more
difficult to get news of a really serious nature’.91
All this informed London’s response to attacks on Britain’s desert offic-
ers. For much of the interwar years, desert administration had run with a
dynamic of its own, straddling the jurisdictions and departmental rival-
ries of Britain’s Middle Eastern empire. But with no discrete professional
cadre, and scarce resources, it remained vulnerable to shifts in the politics
of individual territories. After June 1936 in Egypt, and from September
1929 in Iraq, it ran against Whitehall’s calculation that British priori-
ties—particularly the retention of regional military reserves—were better
served by courting goodwill through diplomatic treaties than by clinging
to administration. Viewed in this light, individual desert officers were but
‘subordinate details’ in a ‘larger and far more important scheme’:
Surely the experience of recent years in Egypt has shown clearly enough that
the efforts of individual Englishmen, however able and well-directed, do not
in themselves prevail in circumstances where they are necessarily in conflict
with political feeling . . . Could anyone’s powers and functions be more
clearly defined than those of the Governor of Sinai, and yet look how easy it
is to break his heart and reduce him to impotence.92
As the geopolitical climate worsened, so the influence of London,
and of the Foreign Office in particular, revived.93 Within its Eastern
Department, John Murray became ‘the high priest of the new ortho-
doxy’.94 Since the mid-1920s he had been arguing that British admin-
istrative undertakings such as the Frontiers Administration in Egypt
stood in the way of concluding treaties of mutual interest. As circum-
stances changed in the 1930s this idea found a wider audience, and
after the dismissal of their champion, George Lloyd, FDA officials had
growing reason to mistrust interventions from London. Uncertainty
over ‘how far HMG will go’ in defending the Frontier Administration
undermined the confidence of its advocates on the spot.95 Murray’s
90
AIR 23/60: G. De Gaury to Air Staff Intelligence, ‘Desert Administration’, 4 Nov.
1930; Woolley to Air Staff Intelligence, 9 Dec. 1930.
91
AIR 2/1196, K.C. Buss, ‘Intelligence in Iraq after 1932’, encl. in Brooke-Popham to
Thomson, 8 Sept. 1930.
92
FO 371/12377, Murray to Tyrrell, 26 Mar. 1927.
93
Glubb also complained that ‘ease of communications’ had steadily boosted London’s
hand, ‘depriving the man on the spot of authority’: Glubb, Britain and the Arabs,
pp. 451–452.
94
Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline?’, pp. 657–679.
95
FO 141/726/15, W. Smart minute, 7 Jan. 1931.
opposition also resulted in ‘successive [Treaty] negotiations in which

no mention of the Frontiers Administration was made, so that in 1936
it was simply impossible to mention . . . such a novelty’.96 Glubb, too,
was criticized for taking positions in frontier negotiations contrary
to those agreed at meetings in London, Jedda and Jerusalem, while
Peake’s habit ‘of writing freely on political questions to private friends
in England’—important to the circulation of ideas and practices
between disparate territories—was now judged ‘most objectionable’.97
Once part of a calculation for a less visible, more palatable presence,
the growth of desert administration since 1919 had turned it from an
asset into a liability.
In London, Cairo, Amman and Baghdad, staff weighed the risks of
protecting British desert personnel. ‘I am all for doing anything we can
to strengthen the FDA’, wrote Walter Smart, but ‘in all probability’ this
would mean ‘a first-class row’.98 This was the lesson of events in Iraq. The
1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty set no timetable for the withdrawal of Britain’s
Special Service Officers, giving some the hope that six men serving ‘in
frontier districts’ might continue in their current posts. (Failing that, the
training of Iraqi replacements could be strung out to take years.)99 But as
official Iraqi suspicion towards the SSOs mounted, officers were ordered
‘to modify the political side of their activities’ and to concentrate on col-
lecting purely military intelligence.100 Allowing officers to roam beyond
the RAF’s remaining bases became increasingly difficult to justify. New
SSOs were still advised to tour their districts, but ‘without disturbing the
equanimity of the resident [Iraqi Administrative Inspectors] or the local
population’.101 Henceforward, ‘the Iraqis’ weaknesses qua controlling the
desert tribesmen’ would just have to be accepted—no defence scheme
could work without the approval of their Government. ‘This sort of thing’,
the Foreign Office observed of a reported increase in desert raiding, ‘is the
96
FO 141/534/16, W. Smart minute, attached to F. Watson (Financial Adviser to the
Government of Egypt) to Lampson, 15 Apr. 1937.
97
CO 831/17/9, K.W. Blaxter minute, 18 Feb. 1932; CO 733/370/4, J. E. Shuckburgh
minute, 10 Mar. 1938.
98
FO 141/539/1, W. Smart, ‘Frontiers District (sic) Administration’, 8 Apr. 1935;
W. Smart, minute 10 Dec. 1935.
99
AIR 21196, MacGregor, ‘Future Intelligence Organisation in Iraq’, 21 July 1930. By
1936, the Military Mission had trained just five Iraqi Intelligence officers, two at headquar-
ters and three for the rest of the country: AIR 10/1426-7, Anon., ‘Military Report for Iraq,
1936’ (n.d.).
100
AIR 2/1196, Ludlow-Hewitt to Mackenzie, 2 Apr. 1931. The Anglo-Iraq Treaty of
1930, which came into effect in 1932, ceded British responsibility for ‘the defence of Iraq
from external raids’.
101
AIR 23/307, Jope-Slade to Finch, 8 July 1931; AIR 23/60, Jope-Slade to MacDonald,
23 Jan. 1931.
price of government by Iraqis for Iraqis, and we shall have to reconcile

ourselves to it’.102
In Egypt, local efforts to rally desert control met with similar problems.
‘Unless the F.O. are prepared to insist on [the Frontiers Administration]
being treated as a “reserved service” ’, Smart warned, ‘we may expect trou-
ble’.103 It increasingly became apparent that they were not. ‘I remain of the
opinion which I have held for years’, John Murray explained to Lampson’s
predecessor, ‘that British officers in the Frontiers Administration are a
convenience (a great and important convenience, admittedly), but not
a vital necessity’.104 Equally damaging was the judgement of the British
Inspector-General of the Egyptian Army, who thought his political capital
best saved for other fights. Attention should focus on regional defence
and professional intelligence, and the Frontiers excelled in neither.105 As
a fighting arm it was irregular, obsolete, ‘too slow and unwieldy . . . more
hindrance than assistance’.106 As an intelligence organization it was overly
dependent on its Bedouin agents, ‘defective’ and prone to alarmism.107
Its administrative functions were defended by Lampson and Smart alone:
It is not only British intelligence and British instruction of Egyptian desert
forces that are required in the Western Desert. We want to keep the Bedouin
under our wing and to prevent their being corrupted by the Italians . . .
Without administrative control of the Bedouin this can hardly be ensured.108
To secure Egyptian goodwill in the wake of the Treaty, however, this was
a chance London was willing to take. When Nahhas raised the question
of the FDA in June 1937, its ‘civilian element’—the British Governors of
Sinai, the Western Desert and its administrators at Headquarters—were
duly sacrificed in exchange for ‘more important desiderata’. Two Britons
were to help modernize the Frontier Forces as part of the new Military
Mission, and a liaison officer was assigned to the Western Desert purely
‘for intelligence duties’.109 Sensing which way the wind was blowing, the
102
AIR 2/1196, E. R. Ludlow-Hewitt, ‘Proposed Air Intelligence Organisation in Iraq’,
26 June 1931; FO 371/14481, Monteagle minute, 11 July 1930; FO 371/14481, O. A.
Scott minute, 10 July 1930.
103
FO 141/539/1, W. Smart, ‘Frontiers District (sic) Administration’, 8 Apr. 1935;
W. Smart minute, 10 Dec. 1935.
104
FO 371/14649, Murray to Loraine, 30 May 1930.
105
FO 141/604/1, C. Spinks, ‘Post of Assistant Director-General, Frontiers
Administration’, 19 June 1936.
106
FO 141/526, Spinks to Lloyd, ‘Defence of the Western Frontier of Egypt’, 11
Aug. 1925.
107
FO 141/539/1, C. Roe, ‘Criticism of the Frontiers Districts Administration’, (n.d.
Sept. 1935).
108
FO 141/534/16, W. Smart minute, 7 Apr. 1937; Lampson to Eden, 22 May 1937.
109
FO 141/534/16, Lampson to Eden, 19 June 1937; Weir to Secretary of State for War,
10 Apr. 1937.
Governor of the Sinai ceased ‘worrying about my position and usefulness’

and applied for a job in Palestine. He saw no future in Egypt now.110
* * *
This was not the end, of course: history is seldom so tidy. Many of the
dynamics and patterns of movement that had spanned the desert corri-
dor would go on subverting national borders even after another world
war. As ongoing anxieties about smuggling suggest, the environmental,
demographic and financial impediments to ever truly ‘closing’ these fron-
tiers remain. Even the recall of Britain’s desert officers would appear at
first glance to conceal basic continuities. Bedouin Law and Desert Law
bequeathed legal codes, coercive powers and an obscured and contested
sovereignty that remain controversial today. They gave institutional
expression to problematic assumptions about the timeless conflict of ‘the
desert and the sown’. In independent Iraq, the Southern Desert ‘theo-
retically’ had no political basis, its territory shared between the liwas of
Karbala, Diwaniya, and Muntafiq. But ‘in practice’ it remained, up to the
Second World War, ‘an entirely separate and distinct area administered by
Baghdad’, with law and order maintained by a discrete Desert Police.111 In
both Egypt and Iraq, exempting the Bedouin from conscription had been
part of British efforts to isolate frontier regions from national politics.
When successor regimes tried to overturn this, resentments and tensions
boiled over. In Egypt, the coercive powers of Sinai’s Governors still draw
protest from local Bedouin, who complain of government raids, summary
detentions and official harassment.112
For the British who stayed on, too, the recall of officers in one sec-
tion of the corridor did not immediately signal the collapse of the whole.
Wartime operations in Syria and Iraq built on its infrastructure—the
trans-desert track through the lava belt, cleared and maintained in the
interwar years, became ‘the principal line of communications between
the Western Desert and India’, an ‘arterial road along which whole divi-
sions of British and Indian troops were to roll by’.113 Even some influence
over administration remained. Two and a half years after leaving Iraqi ser-
vice, John Glubb (then attached to Trans-Jordan) learned that fifty-eight
Sirhan camels had been raided from across the Iraqi border. Anxious to
prevent a wider escalation, he contacted the Desert Police of the now
independent Iraq to request the camels’ return. At first, his counterpart
110
FO 371/23366, Hamersley to Lampson, 21 Aug. 1939.
111
AIR 10/1426, ‘Military Report for Iraq, 1936’.
112
Morrow and al-Omran, ‘Bedouin Demands’.
113
JBG 214/5, Anon., ‘The Arab Legion: Historical’ (n.d. 1944); Glubb, Story, p. 311.
appeared to be ‘taking the matter very calmly’, locating the loot, but show-
ing no intention of turning it over. Glubb took this personally: the officer
at Rutbah was ‘very well known to me, [having] served under me for sev-
eral years’. Nonetheless, after ‘pulling numerous strings’ and a delay of five
months, the camels were returned. The Sirhan had been reduced to ‘a par-
lous state’, but an outbreak of counter-raiding on the trans-desert route was
averted.114
Such arrangements, however, were increasingly rare. Glubb could be
more commonly heard complaining that frontier co-operation between
Trans-Jordan and Iraq was ‘virtually nil’. For much of the interwar
period, as we saw in Chapter 3, informal arrangements between dispa-
rate officers worked to mitigate the impact of new international bounda-
ries. Straddling overland communications routes, Bedouin goodwill was
seen as an imperial asset, and the Bedouin themselves were harnessed as
guides, agents, and tribal levies. British desert officers tolerated ‘the free
movement of pastoralists across the frontier’ in the interests of collecting
information and keeping order (to say nothing of the many Bedouin
groups which succeeded in turning boundaries to their advantage).115
In turn, local officers took a more equivocal view of boundaries, and
clashed with national governments in their reluctance to impose restric-
tive concepts of nationality on their tribal subjects. Now, in the trans-
formed geopolitical and local setting of the later 1930s and 1940s, those
concepts of nationality and the newly demarcated boundaries really
began to bite.
This in part explains why British desert officers could not view the indi-
genization of their administrations with equanimity. Desert administration
(in its British variant, at least) had not just been about establishing a meas-
ure of control in frontier regions—merely extending the reach of discrete
national centres. It had been about connecting discrete administrations in the
wider interests of empire. British officers not only feared that Egyptians or
Iraqis would handle the Bedouin with less tact. They rightly suspected they
would have little time for the trans-border arrangements on which British
influence in the corridor relied.
The difference took most visual expression on Egypt’s Cyrenaican bor-
der, where the barbed wire fence built by the Italians worked to ‘sever
artificially’ the two countries’ desert zones. Built from 1932 to disrupt the
flow of arms and supplies to Senussi rebels, and reinforced in a show of
force towards the British in Egypt, the fence handed the Italians ‘effective
control over all movement from Egypt into Libya’ (at twelve feet thick and
114
CO 831/23/13-15, Glubb, TJDR: Apr., July and Dec. 1933.
115
FO 141/525/1, Wallace to Chancery, 14 Mar. 1921; FO 141/539/1, Roe, ‘Criticism’.
five feet high, individuals might still clamber across, but their herds could
not follow).116 This was an exceptional measure, but more bureaucratic
forms of restricting movement were being felt on borders throughout the
region at this time. Before the mid-1930s, individuals regularly crossed
the frontier at Sollum without having their passports stamped, while fur-
ther east Bedouin moved between Trans-Jordan and Palestine without
passports at all.117 Thereafter, criticism of FDA procedures in light of the
invasion of Abyssinia led to a tightening up of practices. Efforts to combat
arms smuggling from 1936, and the institution of border passes during
the war, worked to make the boundaries of Palestine less porous.118 On
the southern borders of Iraq, meanwhile, Bedouin groups were caught
up in an acrimonious dispute between Kuwait’s merchant communities,
the shaykh of Kuwait, and Iraqi claims to Kuwaiti territory, with protec-
tive tariffs after 1932, and more aggressive border patrols from 1934 to
1935 working to disrupt Bedouin patterns of musabilah and trade.119 The
causes for these measures varied, but the impact on the logic of desert
administration was the same. Along a splintering desert corridor, ideolo-
gies of nationalism, the return of international rivalry and the efforts to
quell the Arab Revolt combined to effect a broader ‘bureaucratisation of
movement’.120
Desert officers had depended on the Bedouin for forward intelligence
on political conditions across this central junction of empire: from the
tensions within Ibn Saud’s domains and the possibilities of unrest in
Cyrenaica, Palestine, and the Hedjaz, to rumours concerning troop dis-
positions in French and Italian territory. When these networks broke
down, as they did amidst heightened Italian restrictions on movement
across the Libyan Desert, British officialdom suffered. ‘Arab agents’ of the
Frontier Districts Administration, ‘desperately afraid of being conscripted
by the Italians’ made ‘no attempt to cross the frontier’.121 In Iraq Flight
Lieutenant Finch, on arrival as the new SSO to Nasiriyah, was ‘forbid-
den’ from touring due to the ‘political complications’ that might ensue.
This ‘so obviously limited’ his ‘present capabilities’, he confessed in a
116
WO 287/27, Anon., ‘Military Report on the North-Western Desert of Egypt, 1937’
(n.d. 1937).
117
Falah, British Administration, pp. 52–53; Royle, Glubb Pasha, p. 200; FO 141/539/1,
Roe, ‘Criticism’. In contrast, Bedouin identity cards were introduced as early as 1926 on
the more settled parts of the Syria-Palestine frontier, although the extent of enforcement
remains unclear: Falah, British Administration, pp. 9–11.
118
FO 371/19099, [Anon.), ‘Passports for Beduin’, 31 Oct. 1935.
119
Harold Dickson watched the deterioration of border relations—and the rise of new
barriers to Bedouin movement—with growing alarm. See the series: British Library, India
Office Records, R/15/1/531-9 (Smuggling between Kuwait and Iraq, 1933–1946).
120
The term is Ghazi Falah’s: Falah, British Administration.
121
FO 141/539/1, Roe, ‘Criticism’.
remarkable, rambling despatch, that ‘there is in reality little or nothing for

me to report’.122
As nationalists, urban merchants and customs officials won concessions
in the political arena, they showed less time for wooing the Bedouin and
a greater resolve to tighten national borders. After all, it was more often
urban industries, rather than imperial officials, who pushed for customs
barriers, and independent states that imposed monopolies, developing
national trades at the expense of regional pastoralism.123 In 1935 Glubb
recorded Bedouin complaints against the newfound ‘stringency and high
dues of the Saudi customs’: until very recently ‘little or no attention’ had
been paid to passports or customs on Iraqi, Trans-Jordanian, and Saudi
frontiers.124 The contraction of Bedouin trade that followed may well have
been welcome to some (Ibn Saud had ‘some idea of making the Northern
Hedjaz economy independent of Trans-Jordan in case of war’) but it also
undercut British prestige. ‘In the bedouin world’, Glubb explained, the
British had been ‘the greatest peace makers and pacificators between the
three countries [Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq]’. New restrictions
on movement threatened this position and ‘lay us open to the charge of
keeping the Arabs apart’.125 Local British officers, it would seem, were
hardly proponents of ‘divide and rule’; the increasingly fragmented map
of the region was something they were reluctant to accept.
Special Service Officers singled out Abdul Jabbar, the qaimaqam at
Sulman in Iraq’s Southern Desert, for dealing particular damage to their
desert networks. He discharged many Bedouin police, replaced them with
recruits from the towns and villages, and drove others to contemplate
defecting to Ibn Saud.126 He forbade his men from helping to refuel British
aircraft (‘they are not coolies’), and even attempted to subvert an SSO’s
agent by offering him a higher salary.127 With the loss of British desert
personnel, and indeed with the ejection of European officials from similar
positions in neighbouring territories, some feared a future of increased
frontier tension.128 The Saudi Government may have taken exception to
Captain Glubb’s frontier work, Iraq’s High Commissioner was warned,
122
AIR 23/307, Finch to Jope-Slade, 7 Sept. 1931. Between September 1933 and
October 1935 the new ‘Intelligence Recording Officers’ filed just 21 reports, a striking drop
in the quality and quantity of Southern Desert intelligence: AIR 5/1270.
123
Peter, ‘Dismemberment’. 124
FO 905/18, Glubb, TJDR: Nov. 1935.
125
CO 831/37/3, Glubb, TJDR: Apr. and May 1936.
126
CO 730/158/21, F. Woolley, ‘The Iraq Desert Police’ (n.d.).
127
AIR 23/60, Woolley to Air Staff Intelligence, 12 Feb. 1931. AIR 23/60, Woolley to
Air Staff Intelligence, 9 Dec. 1930.
128
In January 1937 a Damascene replaced the French Governor of the Jebel Druze;
Glubb anticipated a consequent deterioration in border relations: CO 831/41/11, Glubb,
TJDR: Aug. 1937.
but they openly preferred his retention to the possible appointment of a

member of the Sherifian family.129 One Foreign Office official had been
impressed by Glubb’s plans for British administration of the steppe, but
thought the Iraq Government unlikely to fulfil ‘his rather enthusiastic
expectations’ when ‘left to its own devices’.130 Given the intersection of
Bedouin and British interests, we should hardly be surprised.
For the Bedouin, too, the eclipse of the arrangements sustaining
Britain’s desert corridor had important consequences. Many shaykhs had
profited from Britain’s search for collaborators, so that a number of large
herds remained commercially viable up to the outbreak of the Second
World War.131 Few remained so thereafter. This was not simply due to
the disruptions of the war itself: the restrictions on trade and bans on the
export of live camels, employment in military works and camps, reloca-
tion of communities, destruction of livestock and planting of landmines
that affect Bedouin movement to this day.132 Postwar governments were
also far more prepared to undertake conscious programmes of detribali-
zation and sedentarization than the client regimes of Britain’s interwar
empire. As historians of East Africa have noted, political independence
did not herald a more sympathetic approach to nomadic pastoralism—in
Syria the commitment ‘to sedentarise all nomads’ was actually written into
the new Constitution.133 In 1953 the Saudi state achieved a long-held
ambition to dispense with Bedouin law in its desert areas and to impose
Islamic sharia instead; at much the same time, nationalist groups in Jordan
were also calling for the abolition of the special status accorded to the
Bedouin by the law.134 In independent Iraq, sedentarization would prove
‘a constant theme’ of national politics, while growing moves to prosecute
Bedouin crimes under the regular criminal code caused ‘a profound sensa-
tion in Beduin circles’.135 Even King Ghazi—hardly a radical—proved ‘less
interested than . . . his father in bedouin affairs’, diverting the subsidies
once granted to the Nejd refugee tribes into other national projects (and
reducing some sections to the verge of starvation).136 In 1934 Mohammed
Fadhil Jamali, future Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Iraq, pub-
lished his study of the country’s Problem of Bedouin Education. Through
129
AIR 23/59, Ryan to Humphreys, 14 July 1930.
130
FO 371/13715, E3397/3/01, C.E. Stuart minute, 9 July 1929.
131
Toth, ‘Transformation’, pp. 131–134.
132
Toth, ‘Last Battles’, p. 71; Cole and Altorki, Bedouin, pp. 87–88.
133
This in Article 158 of the Constitution of 1950: Awad, ‘Settlement’, p. 45; Knowles
and Collet, ‘Nature as Myth’, p. 451.
134
Bailey, Bedouin Law, p. 12; Massad, Colonial Effects, pp. 63–66.
135
Owen, ‘Class and Class Politics’, pp. 165, 167; AIR 23/60, Woolley (SSO Sulman) to
Air Staff Intelligence, 18 Mar. 1932.
136
FO 905/18, Glubb, TJDR: Jan. 1935.
willful neglect of Bedouin education, or by limited provision of separate

nomad schools, Britain had undermined ‘the like mindedness which
brings about national cohesion and unity’. ‘Even in the establishment of
the present national government’, he sighed, ‘the tribes still believe that
the shadow of Great Britain is there . . . ’. Only ‘a change in his mode of
life’, achieved through educational reform and works programs, would
instill in the Bedouin a loyalty to the nation.137
If the risks and expense attending these schemes were more than many
British officers had been prepared to countenance, then so were the poten-
tial rewards: increased labour productivity, the development of national
resources, the building of a national community. ‘Local tribal solidarity’
was often ‘a handicap in the development of a national spirit’: sedentari-
zation had a political as well as an economic object.138 Other ruptures in
the region—the war for Palestine and its battles in the Negev, the creation
of Israel and the expansion of agricultural settlement schemes—placed
further limits on the operation of a pastoral economy.139 Postwar visions of
desert development may well have drawn on interwar debates, as we saw
in Chapter 4. But the sedentarization, detribalization, and encapsulation
schemes undertaken by successor states went beyond the resources—and
often against the interests—of Britain’s desert corridor. This serves as a
final reminder of the need to historicize relations in the steppe, to avoid
talk of a single ‘state administrative view’ of nomads. In the Middle East,
at least, imperial states and nation-states handled nomads in markedly
different ways.140
* * *
Recent histories of Britain’s interwar empire are right to stress its dyna-
mism and vitality. Viewed from London, the future looked bright. The
1936 Treaty with Egypt marked a ‘victory’ for British interests: like the
1935 Government of India Act and the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, it
promised true independence ‘only in the distant future’.141 The Foreign
Office had particular cause for optimism: a sound legal position and
renewed diplomatic goodwill, in their calculation, more than compen-
sated for outmoded administrative liabilities. As John Darwin has shown,
senior officials sincerely believed that limited steps towards devolution and
137
Jamali, New Iraq. 138
Awad, ‘Settlement’, pp. 32, 45, 54.
139
Awad, ‘Settlement’, pp. 29–30. For contrasting takes on Bedouin sedentarisation in
Israel, see Amiran and Ben-Ariyeh, ‘Sedentarisation’; Dinero, ‘Image is Everything’.
140
For an innovative attempt to make this case for the early modern period, see Kasaba,
Moveable Empire.
141
Morewood, ‘Appeasement’, p. 553.
self-government in the dominions, India and the Middle East would ‘out-
flank’ nationalist critics for a generation.142
And yet to emphasize all this ‘fancy footwork’ is to tell only part of the
story.143 It is tempting for historians of empire to concentrate on the agents
of change, those whose ideas and approaches won out in the end, and
whose voices resound clear and confident from the archive. But that gives
little sense of the feelings of frustration, resentment and loss that trac-
ing the full history of British desert administration, at any rate, demands.
Beyond Whitehall, amidst more muted voices, the transition from formal
control to informal influence was neither painless nor uncontested. If this
was a ‘victory’, it had its losers too.
Desert administration had always been more than a pragmatic response
to circumstance. It was a self-styled colonial profession with its own
vocabulary, models and points of reference; a distinctive interpretation of
Britain’s obligations not only to the Middle East, but to the arid parts of
the world. It was, in short, something for which clever diplomatic formu-
lae could never fully compensate. Lampson saw in Jarvis’ work an ‘illustra-
tion of the natural gift of our countrymen to gain the confidence of and
manage native races’. Jarvis himself had been ‘practically a father to his
people’.144 It basked in the reflected glory of Lord Lugard’s Dual Mandate
and Indirect Rule: morally charged, deeply paternalistic, and sincerely felt.
The tribes (so officers believed) ‘look[ed] on England as the guarantor of
peace and security’, for who else had adjudicated their disputes, taken
interest in their welfare, or done so much to develop the steppe?145 In this
sense, the logic of the ‘A’ mandates was applied unevenly within their terri-
torial bounds: the Bedouin (and desert areas) would depend on the British
connection for longer. George Lloyd, staunch advocate of Egypt’s Frontier
Districts Administration, decried the tendency to subordinate ‘the claims
of good administration’ to ‘the claims of political theory’. ‘Independence’,
he insisted, ‘settles not one single one of the problems which really con-
cern the welfare of the masses in Egypt, or in India, or in Palestine . . . In
all these countries the real problem has been administrative’.146 As John
Glubb need hardly have reminded the Royal Central Asian Society, the
142
Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline?’.
143
For some of the difficulties of this approach, see Tomlinson, ‘Contraction of England’,
pp. 58–61.
144
FO 371/17978, Lampson to Simon, 16 May 1934; FO 371/20847, J. S. Somers
Cocks minute, 6 Sept. 1937.
145
For examples of such an impassioned defence of British desert administration, see
FO 141/634, Bayly to Keown-Boyd, 11 Apr. 1925; FO 141/514/5, Jarvis to Parker, 10
Nov. 1920.
146
Lloyd, Egypt since Cromer, ii, pp. 4–5, 358.
ideal behind British ‘government in the East’ was ‘less a matter of fram-
ing Constitutions than of establishing personal contacts’. Feeling the
pressure from ‘red tape and centralization’, Glubb wrote an ode to a ‘lost
profession’.147
There was nothing terribly unique about the practice of Indirect Rule—
other European empires incorporated indigenous laws, customs and per-
sonnel into their systems of administration. What set the British apart, if
anything, was ‘the enthusiasm with which [they] talked about it all’.148 To
weaken British desert administration was to threaten the very genius of the
empire. We lose sight of these ideological stakes, and the extent of contem-
poraries’ emotional investment, by drawing too many allusions to today’s
concerns. British desert officers were not modern spooks-in-waiting; their
visions of desert development, as we saw in Chapter 4, showed just how
seriously they approached the business of administration. Its loss was sure
to be felt.
Some gave vent to anger and resentment, but Claude Jarvis, ‘afflicted
by a sense of humour’, expressed his sense of loss through satire.149 He
knew how ‘distasteful’ it was ‘when a man feels vindictive and shews it in
his book’ (and was warned against letting his ‘bitterness’ get the better of
him), so he turned to humour as a way of handling his own obsolescence,
and to explore the distinct form of administration to which he had given
his working life.150 Through tales of overzealous subalterns and fitful cen-
tralization, slashed budgets, attenuated authority, hopeless Romantics and
wily shaykhs, Jarvis sent up his own work for failing, in the end, to live
up to expectations.151 Behind the farce lay a serious point. Jarvis wrote,
he told his readers, ‘to remind Egypt that she has desert possessions and
Frontiersmen of her own race who guard and help administer them.
Sometimes I have the feeling she has forgotten the fact’.152 Glubb shared
this anxiety, frustrated that ‘the Iraq Government does not always realize
how efficient [desert administration] is, or how remarkable an achieve-
ment it has performed’.153
For the more stoic, or the less loquacious, similar feelings of loss gave
specific causes for alarm. By 1940 Whitehall could be charged with hav-
ing squandered desert experience at a time Britain could ill afford. Before
147
Glubb, ‘Transjordan and the War’, p. 29; CO 831/46/9, Glubb, TJDR: Jan. 1938.
148
Tidrick, Empire, p. 194.
149
JM: DC 42, Jarvis to Gorell, 18 Aug. 1936. For a reading of the ‘satire boom’ as a
commentary on British decline, see Ward, ‘No Nation could be Broker’.
150
JM: DN 24, Jarvis to Murray, 15 May 1938; Murray to Jarvis, 16 May 1938.
151
For one example among many, see Jarvis, Back Garden.
152
153
1914, a defence review had criticized the arrangement by which the Egyptian
Army monitored the frontiers in peacetime, but the British Army took over
in war, so that ‘the knowledge gained by the one force . . . cannot be absorbed
by the other’. British officers, the report recommended, should be seconded
to Egyptian units ‘to learn the language, study the habits and customs of the
people, and learn something of desert life’.154 In its heyday, British command
of the FDA had helped bridge this gap. Its eclipse in the later 1930s reset the
clock, and as deserts became battlegrounds once more, this translated into lost
opportunities. Without British personnel in control, the Egyptian Frontier
Forces were not trusted to engage the enemy. Senior British military officials
repeatedly held up its requests for modern weapons.155 Officials even thought
twice about approving its armed Ford cars (essential for anti-smuggling work)
for ‘if there were serious trouble . . . and the Egyptian Army and the Frontiers
Administration turned against us . . . it is possible that the mobility of these
cars in the desert might make a raid to blow up the canal possible’.156
Alone of the units of the Egyptian Army, the Frontier Forces did see
action in Libya in the 1940s, assisting the well-known Long Range Desert
Group on its first patrol into Italian territory. But like most Egyptian units
they were soon withdrawn from combat operations, confined to static
defence and to providing British troops with logistical support.157 In the
1930s, Lampson had hoped that the FDA’s desert experience and con-
tacts might ‘form the nucleus of an anti-Italian movement’, swinging into
operation should war break out. But in the event, the planned tribal risings
generated little interest in the modern, mechanized war that overran the
region’s deserts, and by the time they were beginning to take shape, many
of the personnel who might have been expected to lead them had gone.158
The feted, all-British Long Range Desert Group, under its commander and
founder Ralph Bagnold, worked to make good the deficit in desert knowl-
edge, labouring against ‘a great lack of foresight and preparation’.159 But the
154
FO 371/248, Albert, ‘Inspection of Troops and Defences in Egypt’, 30 Apr. 1907.
155
For example: FO 141/539/1, ‘Meeting between His Excellency [the High
Commissioner] and the CIGS’, 20 Mar. 1935; FO 371/19051, Spinks to Lampson, 20
Apr. 1935.
156
FO 141/718/2, Foreign Office minute (n.d. May 1934).
157
Kennedy-Shaw, Long Range Desert Group, pp. 17, 34–35; Rothwell, ‘Military Ally’.
158
FO 371/19053, Lampson to Vansittart, 2 Oct. 1935; WO 201/2555, ‘Scheme for
Organisation of Tribal Rising in the Event of War with Italy’, 24 Apr. 1940. Former SSO
Gerald De Gaury remembered being asked to ‘raise the tribes . . . on the old lines of the
Lawrence campaign’ during the relief of Habbaniya in 1941, but his efforts proved a disap-
pointment. Building connections and training tribesmen took time, ‘and we were all for
speed . . . So such plans lapsed. We bought cars and buses and enlisted drivers instead’: De
Gaury, Arabian Journey, pp. 136–137.
159
Kennedy-Shaw, Long Range Desert Group, pp. 25–26. Other opportunities to gain
desert experience, such the 1937 proposal to send a tank company to Egypt to train in
new forms of intelligence it promoted, and the solutions it improvised, only

added to the sense of lost desert expertise. Bagnold shared the conclusion of
the leading exponent of car patrols in the last war, that ‘the average native
knows little or nothing of the intermediate spaces’ of the desert.160 As one
report advised:
Good native guides accustomed to motor traveling are rare, and may not
always be procurable, and an unreliable guide is worse than none at all . . . [I]‌f
unused to cars [he] will become confused by the deviations that are so often
necessary to get good going. The pace also of a car, in comparison with that
of a camel, will lead him to misjudge his distances.161
Seldom employing guides on his interwar expeditions, Bagnold instead
favoured a technological solution to desert navigation, using sun com-
passes and speedometer readings to move by dead-reckoning, freeing
British units from indigenous guides.162
Glubb despaired of this wartime practice, thinking it a poor sub-
stitute for ‘actual knowledge of the country’. ‘The fatal inclination of
British officers to travel the desert on a compass bearing’ was, he felt,
insensitive to changes in the desert surface, the run of wadis, the lie
of sand-drifts, whole ranges of hills.163 Other Britons once connected
with the experiment in desert administration similarly bemoaned the
modern habit of travelling so quickly and as if in quarantine: ‘we do not
pause long enough to know our fellow men well’.164 Writing in 1949,
Russell Pasha felt that the speed and reliability of modern motor trans-
port meant ‘no one has time for talk with the occasional Arab’, so that
‘desert intelligence has become a matter of a few shouted remarks in
place of the leisured exchange of yarns round the fire . . . ’.165 What was
happening, nonetheless, was the advance of an abstracted, even esoteric
form of knowledge at the expense of the networks of human intelli-
gence (and more complex relationships with the Bedouin) on which
desert conditions, ran against the political desire to appease Italy: Morewood, British
Defence, p. 102.
160
IWM: C. H. Williams papers, Williams, Desert Memories.
161
WO 33/2831, C. H. Williams, ‘Report on the Military Geography of the
North-Western Desert of Egypt’, 1919. See also: WO 287/27, ‘Military Report on the
North-Western Desert of Egypt’, 1937.
162
CAC: BGND: C24, ‘Instructions for Use of Bagnold Sun-Compass’ (n.d.); B. Paget,
General Orders No. 193, 4 Feb. 1944. Bagnold’s sun-compass was invented in 1927, in use
by specialist desert units from 1940, and was the forerunner of the instrument used gener-
ally in desert navigation thereafter.
163
Glubb, Story, p. 272; MECA: JBG 214/5, Glubb, ‘The Desert as a Field of Manoeuvre
in History and Today’, 3 Aug. 1941.
164
De Gaury, Arabian Journey, pp. 6–7.
165
Russell, Egyptian Service, pp. 77–78.
desert administration had depended. Deserts became more intelligi-

ble to ordinary British soldiers and their officers, but their militarized
understandings bore little resemblance to realities on the ground. As
these richer sources of information went untapped, so ideas about the
landscape itself changed once more. Through long exposure, Britain’s
desert officers had come to appreciate the many ways in which ‘the
desert is quite unlike the sea’—a variegated, inhabited place, with fer-
tile valleys, sheer cliffs, and areas of winter grazing that funneled and
focused mobility. But to those now striking out across its expanse, ‘dead
reckoning as on a ship at sea’, this was a war of rapid movement across
an empty, unpeopled space; ‘travel’, Bagnold described it, ‘in a dead
world’.166
* * *
‘History’, Claude Jarvis was reminded by his publisher, ‘repeats itself
more in the Nile Valley than in any other country’.167 At the end of the
Second World War, his generation of one-time desert officers resurfaced
to volunteer familiar suggestions on re-balancing an obtrusive regional
presence. Might the prospect of renewed urban unrest be met with
another shift to the periphery? Could deserts again be made to serve as
reservoirs of imperial power, or as pawns to be traded for political con-
cessions? From Jordan, Glubb sketched out ‘a chain of Gibraltars’ in the
deserts of Cyrenaica, Sinai, and the Persian Gulf, where imperial forces
and local troops could operate ‘far from politicians and centres of popu-
lation’.168 Schemes for the retention of a British Negev—a British link
in the sundering of the corridor that now loomed—appeared before the
Cabinet in 1943, 1946 and 1948.169 Most persistent of all was Wilfred
Jennings-Bramley, formerly of the Frontiers Administration, who pressed
for the annexation of Sinai as ‘another Gibraltar’ at every opportunity
between 1946 and 1951.170
These schemes deserve their day in the sun. They prove, if nothing else,
that the lingering idea of British capacity to operate in the desert—British
‘desert-mindedness’—died hard. But the replies to Bramley’s ‘hobby-horse’,
always the same, also give a sense of how much had changed. Lawyers
debated if Sinai could be declared res nullius, and the notion that it was ‘not
Egypt proper’ did the rounds. Some anticipated that a British base there
166
Bagnold, Libyan Sands. 167
JM: DN24, Murray to Jarvis, 13 July 1946.
168
FO 371/91223, Glubb, memorandum, 23 May 1951.
169
Cohen and Kolinsky, Demise, pp. 79–92, 200–201, 220–246; Louis, British Empire,
p. 578.
170
Bramley’s original correspondence on the issue is with the Royal Geographical Society
(London): LMS B.40, Jennings-Bramley papers.
would be ‘more palatable to the Egyptians than in the Canal Zone’.171 But
annexation, scarcely ‘practical politics’, was entirely out of step with the
postwar pursuit of ‘partnership’ with the peoples of the Middle East.172
The Chiefs of Staff would not countenance leaving the Canal base—least
of all for ‘undesirable’ Sinai—and had no sympathy with Glubb’s vision
of falling back on ‘tribal levies’ in the age of the strategic bomber.173 With
no fellahin to uplift, where oil did not flow, and with little imminent pros-
pect of contributing to Britain’s post-war economic recovery, the desert
frontiers and nomadic societies of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq had little
place in Government visions of a revived Middle Eastern empire. Lord
Salisbury, with inimitable style, once dismissed French North Africa as
deserts and wastes, ‘somewhat light soil, I believe’. To Clement Attlee,
preoccupied with the dollar shortage and Russian expansion, the former
desert corridor was equally inconsequential, merely part of ‘a wide glacis of
desert and Arabs’.174 A predilection had become a punchline.
171
FCO 93/328, J. Bannerman, ‘Status of the Sinai Peninsula’, 17 Jan. 1973; FO
371/73558, R. Bailey, minute, 31 Mar. 1949. The legal argument, which bordered on the
arcane, is summarized in: Warburg, ‘Sinai Peninsula Borders’.
172
‘Any hint [of this] would produce from the Egyptians a reaction of such violence as
to exclude the possibility of any political advantage’: FO 371/63080, J. Bowker, telegram
no. 1949, 1 Oct. 1947.
173
FO 371/73558 COS(49)146, Chiefs of Staff Committee, ‘Military Requirements
in the Sinai Peninsula’, 27 Apr. 1949; Francis-Williams, Prime Minister Remembers, p. 178.
174
Dalton, High Tide, p. 105.
Conclusion
Deserts, Nomads, and Empire in the Interwar World
I laid stress on the difficulty in effectively closing a semi-desert

frontier, and he seemed to appreciate the difficulty.1
‘Faced with nomadism’, a historian of North Africa once observed, ‘the

European imagination runs riot’. Between the wars, Britain’s ‘Tribal
Question’ proved that that fascination had lost none of its force.2 Across
a great arid arc of the world, what we might call a Tribal Frontier of the
British Empire, the nature of nomads and their future course, the possi-
bilities of transforming both them and their environments, and the prob-
lems of regulating desert and steppe frontiers captivated the officials of
the largest of the European empires. The places, peoples, and problems
discussed in this book may strike some historians as marginal; insofar as
they were found at the spatial limits of better-known terrains, they were.
But incidental, of minor consequence, of little wider import—marginal in
the other sense of the word—they most certainly were not.
For one thing, a powerful worldview drove Britain’s Tribal Question,
one which divided the world’s peoples (and the Empire’s subjects) accord-
ing to their modes of life: nomads against settlers, the desert against the
sown. Its reach, tenacity, and pertinence have been occluded by the habit
of examining imperial ideologies predominantly in terms of ethnicity and
race. Instead, we should see the modes of life for the vital analytical cat-
egories they were. Managing the clash between nomads and their ‘rivals’
drove interwar imperial arguments over practices and resources, just as
much as the concern to divide and rule ethnicities, or to contain national
1
FO 684/2, W. A. Smart, Damascus Consular reports, 1 Aug. 1925.
2
Gautier, Conquête, cited in Febvre, Geographical Introduction.
aspirations. To draw attention to the nomadic or sedentary basis of a given

society was no mere discursive or rhetorical habit: for the ranks of sol-
diers, officials, surveyors, and airmen on the arid frontiers of the interwar
Empire, these categories fed directly into policy proscriptions and daily
administration. The modes of life took time to become such compelling
categories. They were not a product of straightforward invention, nor did
they straightjacket all officials into behaving alike. But they mattered, and
this book offers them as an addition to the conceptual frameworks that
have hitherto dominated the writing of imperial history.
Conceiving the world in terms of a grand Tribal Question encouraged
local officials separated by jurisdictional boundaries and thousands of miles
to perceive common problems, and to apply common solutions. Institutions
like the Royal Central Asian Society and its members’ own career trajecto-
ries encouraged this further, as the ‘desert-minded’ compared and translated
policies from the Sahara to the North-West Frontier of India and beyond.
Attention shifted across this vast canvas in response to specific moments
of unrest, revival, and international friction. It tracked the growth of new
overland communications routes, the launch of ambitious programs of set-
tlement and sedentarization, the discovery of resources and the advance of
desert agriculture; it forces us, as historians, out of our own narrow confines,
too. For those asking the Tribal Question, ideas about deserts and nomads
formed the basis for sharing approaches across disparate parts of the world.
Sir Aurel Stein, for instance, praised Peake’s work in Trans-Jordan because
he believed similar techniques had succeeded in ‘similar conditions’ in
India, two thousand miles away.3 ‘Hill tribes’ were thought to be ‘of much
the same kind’ wherever they were found, and so were the implications for
the conduct of foreign policy.4 Common conditions were said to mark all
‘ “hilly” district frontiers’: poor communications, administrative inacces-
sibility, and inhabitants who revelled in ‘raiding the fat and smiling plains
(as on the North-West Frontier of India) or . . . stealing a neighbour’s flock
and herds (a great game enjoyed by all Somali tribes)’.5 In this sense, tribal
affairs came to be seen as conforming to a logic beyond the control of par-
ticular governments or the writ of individual states. Claude Jarvis thought
Egypt’s Frontiers Administration ‘one of those temporary institutions that
survive long after empires like Rome and Spain are relegated to the limbo
of dust and ashes’, a kind of eternal obligation to the security of mankind.6
There were deep flaws in this worldview, of course; wide variations
between places and peoples, ‘nomads’ and ‘tribes’, that dividing the empire’s
3
4
Leach, ‘Transport Developments’, pp. 174–175.
5
Chamier, ‘Air Control’, pp. 403–404. 6
Conclusion 275
subjects by their modes of life could never accommodate. Moreover, the

networks that carried these ideas could be lumpy, uneven or broken: it may
reflect the discreteness of the Sudan Political Service (and of its Sudan Notes
and Records) that its sustained engagement with ‘tribal policy’ seldom con-
nected with Society debates. But it remains the case that many official ideas
and practices in motion across the desert corridor—whether definitions of
nomadism, techniques of tribal control, or visions of desert development—
were also circulating on an imperial scale. Where mechanisms like the RCAS
allowed, or where requests for desert ‘experts’ went out, geographical dis-
tance and bureaucratic rivalries could be overcome. Beyond the national and
regional level lay a forgotten colonial profession—‘desert administration’—
and another lens through which Britons tried to make sense of their world.
While this book has focused on three Middle Eastern territories, there-
fore, it has addressed a broader phenomenon. It has argued that the project
of desert administration was of central significance to the interwar British
Empire. In many ways, it was the distant frontiers of the British world system
that became its key focal points of struggle between the wars. It was here
where new bargains had to be struck between local and metropolitan officials,
urban-based nationalists and vibrant nomadic groups, in an unsettled and
parsimonious postwar climate. It was here where discrete imperial systems
came into contact, and where foreign relations and ‘spheres of influence’ were
worked out. It was here that the effort required to penetrate and control dif-
ficult environments prompted innovations in technology and administra-
tion, and conspicuous concentrations of power and authority, while setting
a premium on flexibility. It was here, as we have seen, that an emergent class
of official invested great time and energy into developing administrations,
improving communications, mapping migrations, recruiting tribal police,
tracking smugglers, educating nomads and envisioning their future (arguing,
all the while, about how best to proceed). The frontiers of the great arid zone
provided both the flashpoints and the touchstone of wider imperial authority.
Restoring agency to long-neglected ‘margins’ may be a laudable schol-
arly pursuit, but it brings insights to other histories, too. All the major ele-
ments of colonial administration, collaboration and resistance were played
out in this arid zone: through the Tribal Frontier of the British Empire, we
see that empire in microcosm. Important aspects of individual national
histories (the struggle between imperialism and nationalism in Egypt,
Trans-Jordan and Iraq, for example) are also enriched by taking account of
its dynamics. Most of all, perhaps, thinking critically about these contact
regions prompts us to re-examine where the centres of power and pulses
of change really lay.
Between the wars, British influence tightened in the deserts of
Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq even as it relaxed elsewhere. This striking
pattern—this shift to the periphery—was partly made to develop and sus-

tain the new overland routes of empire. But it was also a response to the
financial constraints, military demobilization and anti-colonial pressures
of the postwar ‘crisis of empire’. Political concessions could be granted in
Cairo, Amman, and Baghdad as long as Britain retained a firm grasp on
each territory’s foreign policy, and that meant, local officers argued, taking
hold of their sensitive frontier zones. Frontier incidents had foreign policy
implications: ‘the international dog’, as Sir Evelyn Howell neatly put it,
‘is very liable to be wagged by the tribal tail’.7 In the Middle East, desert
administration remained a vital prop of British influence for as long as it
satisfied these requirements cheaply and unobtrusively.
There may well be other problems in imperial history—other attempts
to shift to the periphery in the face of criticism and unrest—that await
re-examination in this way: the forward movement in the Aden Protectorate
in the late 1930s (and again in south-west Arabia in the 1950s); the flirta-
tion with desert bases in Cyrenaica in the 1940s. As the study of other bor-
derlands has shown, we can learn much about centres of power by looking
at their peripheries.8 The heightened engagement with desert affairs reveals
the dynamism and adaptability of the interwar empire.
Exploring the history of the desert corridor underscores something else,
too: the centrality of mobility in the life cycles of empire. ‘All Britain wants
in the Middle East’, John Glubb once told the Society, ‘is the power to
be able to cross it’. This was something less than the full picture, but he
hit on a wider point.9 All empires are ultimately predicated on favouring
some forms of movement while restricting others. We can lose sight of this
when we treat imperial rule as simply a matter of administering discrete
territorial spaces. In Britain’s desert corridor, two different forms of mobil-
ity came into contact, blunting the impact of the international boundaries
being drawn between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. The
first—Britain’s new overland ‘routes to the East’, and its concern to super-
vise the zones through which they passed—imposed a supra-nationalism
from above. The second took the form of indigenous patterns of mobility
and exchange, notably the migration, raiding and trade of Bedouin com-
munities, and applied regionalist pressures from below. These two types
of network—imperial communications and tribal mobility—are seldom
explored in tandem. Their intersection, however, made the desert corridor
a distinct historical space.
Viewing these networks within the same frame unsettles established nar-
ratives and geographies of empire, and suggests new and exciting stories.
7
Howell, ‘Some Problems’, p. 185. 8
van Schendel, ‘Geographies’, p. 662.
9
Glubb, ‘Britain and the Middle East’, pp. 216–225.
Conclusion 277
It also compels the historian to adopt a truly transnational perspective.

Much of the writing on Britain’s ‘moment’ in the Middle East takes
separate territories or states as its point of departure, and urban-based
nationalists and officials as its protagonists. When desert areas are dis-
cussed, they are often treated in isolation from one another, as distinct
aspects of discrete national historiographies. The approach I have taken
here yields a different interpretation. It reveals a wider, comparable and
connected history beyond the ‘tribal policies’ of Egypt, or Trans-Jordan,
or Iraq. As Bedouin rivalries, grazing, and trade straddled new interna-
tional boundaries, so discrete colonial officialdoms were drawn together
in their wake, building networks of surveillance, policing and law that
ran athwart national boundaries. And as those relationships between
Bedouin communities and imperial rule became ever more complex,
a patchwork of bureaucratic and administrative arrangements was
thrown together along a desert corridor of the British Empire. This
desert corridor emerges as a zone in its own right: a lost arena of activ-
ity with distinctive actors, rhythms and dynamics; a new frontier—the
final frontier—of Britain’s world empire. Shifting our attention to these
contact regions not only serves to recover their forgotten pasts. It also
allows us to see the histories of the surrounding nations, and of a wider
empire, in a new light.
* * *
Claude Jarvis, Frederick Peake, and John Glubb would have been
the first to admit that the problems they faced were larger and more
extended than those of British imperial rule. Their careers can be our
passport to a wider, global story.
For much of recorded history, the connection between desert envi-
ronments, nomadic societies and the life of empires would have needed
little introduction. From the Scythians of Antiquity to the Golden
Horde, nomads from across the Eurasian arid zone had a profound
impact on the peoples of the settled regions of China, South Asia, and
the Middle East. As mounted warriors, nomads had for millennia been
a force to be reckoned with, if not an existential threat. Even when not
building empires themselves, the need to respond to and engage with
nomads shaped processes of state-formation in neighbouring polities.
And yet when we approach more recent historical times this analytical
framework abruptly fades from sight. While scholars of the ancient and
mediaeval world have found the Eurasian arid zone to be a useful unit
of analysis, historians of the modern period seldom acknowledge its
existence.
Some cease to trace its dynamics around the year 1500, when the
collapse of the empire built by Chinggis Khan ‘meant the end of
the steppe as a factor in world politics’.10 Others take the story forward
into the mid-eighteenth century, when an expanding Qing Empire finally
bested the Zunghars, ending the Mongol threat ‘once and for all’.11 Either
way, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries are widely seen as a decisive
turning-point, as agrarian states around the Eurasian arid zone centralized,
militarized, intensified their land use and pushed their borders towards its
heart. ‘In nearly every region of the world’, the historian J. F. Richards wrote,
the sedentary cultivation of pioneer settlers ‘invaded remote lands lightly
occupied by shifting cultivators, hunter-gatherers, and pastoralists’.12 ‘La
revanche des sédentaires’, when it came, was apparently complete.13
By 1900 it had become commonplace to observe the closing of the
world. As the last ‘empty’ frontiers were settled and new international
boundaries drawn up, an era of territorial expansion seemed to be at an
end.14 In many of the world’s arid zones, however, transforming those
abstract boundary lines into the realities of effective control remained a
task for the generation that followed. Between the two world wars a num-
ber of governments—from the state-building projects of Saudi Arabia and
Iran to the empires of Italy, France, Great Britain, and Japan—embraced
new techniques and technologies in an attempt to monopolize authority
over desert and steppe environments. Straddling international boundaries
and communications routes, the control of nomadic populations become
a pressing problem once more. This book has been a call to take this phe-
nomenon seriously. To a far greater degree than is commonly acknowl-
edged, the questions we have asked of earlier historical periods—about
the difficulties empires faced in operating in arid environments, or the
consequences of engaging with nomadic groups for the apparatus of gov-
ernment—can and should be asked of the twentieth century, too.
In interwar Iran, for example, a ‘tribal problem’ lay at the heart of Reza
Shah’s profound drive to remake the state. It was after 1921 that the state
reached out to penetrate rural society deeply for the first time, sedentariz-
ing tribes, courting khans and targeting the power of the Bakhtiyari with
unprecedented resolution and force.15 These aspirations were echoed
10
Kwanten, Imperial Nomads. 11
Perdue, China Marches West.
12
Richards, Unending Frontier.
13
The phrase is Gerard Chaliand’s: Empires Nomades.
14
Frederick Jackson Turner remains the best-known exponent of this view (he feared for
American development in an age without ‘free land’), but similar ideas—the loose ‘doctrine
of closed space’—were much more widespread. See: Malin, ‘Space and History’.
15
Cronin, Tribal Politics. The Qajar dynasty had not been blind to these questions, but
Pahlavi efforts were something new, and were seen as such by contemporaries. For the nine-
teenth century, see Khazeni, Tribes and Empire.
Conclusion 279
across the interwar Middle East. Ibn Saud in Arabia, King Amanullah
in Afghanistan, and Kemal Ataturk in Turkey all sought to project power
into their arid hinterlands and curb the autonomy of nomadic groups. In
North Africa, the French Empire had a longer history of attempting to
pacify the peoples of the Sahara, but the interwar years still had a tenor
of their own. Dreams of the transsaharien had come and gone before, but
now, thanks to aircraft and the automobile, they became a reality, with
new implications for French military control and tribal policy.16 In Libya
the Italian Empire, as we have seen, launched new and ambitious schemes
of military occupation and agricultural settlement in the 1920s and 1930s,
to contain the country’s nomadic populations and remake its desert fron-
tiers.17 Tsarist Russia had supported peasant emigration into Central Asia
since the 1880s, but wholesale revolt from 1916 would prompt a renewed
effort to suppress tribal power and extend imperial authority.18 And on the
Manchurian plains, at the far end of the Eurasian arid zone, Chinese set-
tlers advanced the reach of agriculture in unprecedented numbers, taking
over Mongol pastures and opening them to cultivation. Even the maritime
empire of Japan got involved, hitching notions of agricultural settlement
and the peopling of the Manchurian ‘wilderness’ to its imperial ideology
as never before, while new state agencies and institutions were formed to
recruit and organize a ‘Millions to Manchuria’ programme.19
The circumstances varied, but in each case the challenges of man-
aging nomads or transforming arid and steppe environments shifted
into a new gear, catalyzing legal, institutional and structural changes to
the imperial territories and national states in question. Often, the sheer
extent of the difficulties to be overcome gave rise to a scale of state inter-
vention and to apparatuses of government distinct from those at work
in more settled, ‘orderly’ jurisdictions. On the ground, a new class of
official emerged throughout the Arid Zone, one who invested great time
and energy into building desert administrations, controlling nomads,
and contemplating the economic possibilities of these vulnerable dry-
land environments.
Why did this happen? A definitive answer wants a book of its own. But
Britain’s Tribal Question belongs within this wider story, and permits us to
at least hint at a possible explanation.
While most of the world’s deserts had been formally partitioned by the
1920s, these areas remained difficult to govern, with their low popula-
tion densities, poor productivity, vast distances and mobile inhabitants.
16
Brower, Desert Named Peace; Thomas, ‘Modern Trans-Saharan Routes’.
17
Ahmida, Modern Libya; Segrè, Fourth Shore. 18
See Brower, Turkestan.
19
Lattimore, Manchuria; Young, Japan’s Total Empire.
Control existed more on paper than in practice. The conditions which

have made settled agriculture so favourable to the exercise of enduring
control over substantial populations—its material surpluses, trade, and
fixed, stable communities—were not merely challenged in the great arid
zone; they were still only slowly being addressed in the early twentieth
century. Overcoming them impacted upon processes of state-develop-
ment, while the incompleteness of these efforts meant that many arid
areas remained contested spaces—and cockpits of international rivalry—
well into the twentieth century. The desert peripheries into which these
interwar states were expanding might be termed ‘adolescent borderlands’:
dynamic, unsettled spaces in which economic, social and political rela-
tions were beginning to be affected by international boundaries, but in
which older networks still persisted.20 Interwar technologies like aircraft,
the motorcar and wireless telegraphy allowed states to expand into hinter-
lands where their authority had long been attenuated, but not yet to act
with impunity towards the peoples who called them home. For decades,
they would remain inscrutable terrains into which forces independent of
and antagonistic to the state could retreat, re-form, and re-emerge.
It may have been this particularly fluid position—not an open frontier
but not yet part of a closed system of states—that lent desert affairs such
prominence between the wars. Nomads themselves had much to do with
this, for while there was no new steppe empire in the offing, the actions of
nomadic groups—as the Ikhwan Revolt shows—could still worry clusters
of governments. The Bedouin were also not the only nomads to emerge
from the First World War better armed, and the British not the only impe-
rial authorities haunted by the idea (as much as the reality) of desert hordes
overrunning the sown, puncturing the edifice of their ‘enlightened’ rule.
Technologies and techniques also spread rapidly between states—recall
Ibn Saud’s use of Marconi wireless sets and Ford armed cars, but also how
his methods of modifying tribal warfare were admired and emulated by
British officials in turn—so that systems of desert control often resembled
one another.
Nor was it simply a question of a new capacity to project power: there
were new imperatives at work, too. At an ideological level, the national
modernism of the Saudi, Pahlavi, and Soviet state projects renewed gov-
ernments’ resolve to suppress tribal autonomy and to remake rural hinter-
lands. Dramatic evidence of widespread soil erosion and theories of global
desiccation had prompted a fresh wave of concern in the latter 1930s,
20
This ‘life cycle’ metaphor for studying borderlands is proposed in Baud and van
Schendel, ‘Borderlands’. As the authors themselves admit, it has problematic evolutionary
and deterministic implications, but nonetheless provides a starting point for comparison.
Conclusion 281
and a rush of new proscriptions for the better management of dryland

environments. The tough economic climate of the interwar years forced
some states to adapt how they approached nomads and frontier regions; in
other cases, states were impelled to attempt to turn their desert hinterlands
to profit. Modernization theory would provide further fuel to ambitious
schemes to ‘make the desert bloom’—they would reach their apotheosis,
in both hubris and in scale, in postwar irrigation and engineering pro-
jects. The era of decolonization, meanwhile, imparted its own urgency to
a range of state efforts to engage more closely with their arid hinterlands,
driven by the desire to maximize agricultural yields, exploit new mineral
resources, and to bind nomadic groups (through programs of sedentariza-
tion and detribalization) to the fate of newly national communities.
The dynamics of Britain’s desert corridor, and the posing of its Tribal
Question, belong within this broader, arid zone story. At the very least, it
reminds us of the limits of imperialism as an explanatory tool. Britain was
only one of many powers that experienced a heightened engagement with
deserts and nomads between the wars, part of a wider shift in perceptions
of deserts as barriers or wastelands (‘natural frontiers’) to deserts as zones
of administration and intercourse (‘scientific frontiers’). With ideas and
practices being developed in dialogue between nations and empires as well
as within them (our epigraph here comes from a conversation between
British and French consular officials), the rise of ‘experts’ in desert admin-
istration may have been a generally observable phenomenon.
Working within a comparative framework of the modern history of
the world’s deserts also helps with our final task: sifting out what was dis-
tinctive about the British experience. In many of the world’s desert and
semi-desert environments, including elsewhere in the British World, the
presence of assertive settler groups did much to determine government
attitudes towards nomads and the land. But in the deserts of the Middle
East, Britain’s Tribal Question was largely a non-settler affair. The absence
of a settler voice proved a crucial variable, freeing colonial officials to
approach nomadic societies from a variety of perspectives, and to disagree
widely over their nature and future.
The use of railways to penetrate desert environments was another com-
mon feature of the modern history of the arid zone that played relatively
little part here, but other technologies such as the aircraft and the motor-
car, and their very real limitations, did work to deepen the engagement
between British officials and the Bedouin. The relationship between
new imperial communications routes and nomadic patterns of move-
ment formed a central theme of Britain’s desert corridor, and reminds us
of the importance of mobility in Britain’s imperial enterprise. We have
tended to write about Britain’s Middle Eastern possessions in terms of the
administration of a kaleidoscope of distinct mandates, colonies, and bases.

What really mattered to many officials, instead, was an ability to move
through them. In running the corridor, Britain’s desert officers were more
often concerned with safeguarding the routes of empire than with turning
nomads into citizens. The nation-states that succeeded them were no less
interested in their arid ‘margins’, but their designs on these areas, and their
starting orientation, could be very different indeed.
The latitude afforded to local desert officers was a third distinguish-
ing feature, and owed much to the geopolitical window in which desert
administration took root. But it also reflected the political necessity of
establishing a modus vivendi in the desert at a time when the fiscal and mil-
itary resources available for active coercion were shrinking. Such latitude
encouraged the development of informal connections and associational
links between officers, a plurality of responses to nomads, and a more
equivocal view of international boundaries than many of their superiors
would instinctively have tolerated.
A fourth feature was the striking premium set upon nomadic mobil-
ity as a source of information. This suited an empire seeking to run the
corridor on a shoestring, but was also the result of a marked apprecia-
tion that engaging with nomads offered a means of monitoring and influ-
encing foreign affairs, particularly when other levers of exerting control
were increasingly under pressure. Many of the governments committing
time and resources to their arid hinterlands at this time were interested
in encapsulating nomads within a national community; for the British,
the Bedouin were as interesting for their external connections as for their
internal orientation.
Finally, Britain’s experiences in running the corridor would help fuel
the peculiar notion that the British understood and handled nomads bet-
ter than anyone else. This drew on a range of assumptions, prejudices and
calculations: the apparent track record of the great Victorian travellers and
the sense of expertise conferred by the RCAS; the reassuring analogies
drawn between controlling deserts and the sea; the necessity of discredit-
ing rival sources of influence in the desert, whether those of neighbouring
imperial powers or national elites from the towns and cities. It followed
from this that local British officials came to view the consequences of their
withdrawal with dread, and that a lingering desire to influence desert
affairs—and a supposed British aptitude for doing so—would outlast the
project of desert administration itself.
Britain’s Tribal Question warns us against any simple story of enduring
hostility between nomadic peoples and an undifferentiated ‘state’. But it
also points to a wider phenomenon that awaits further exploration. We
may never be justified in talking breezily of a grand conflict between ‘the
Conclusion 283
desert and the sown’, as many contemporaries did. But we might also
question the suitability of the national units and chronologies prevalent
today to writing the modern histories of their arid ‘margins’.
At the end of his career in the Middle East, John Glubb opened an
account of his service in the Southern Desert of Iraq anticipating
criticism.‘To many people’, he began, ‘the study of minor frontier hostili-
ties against wild tribes, thirty or forty years ago, may seem today a profit-
less occupation.’21 But not—I hope—to us. Another fifty years on, that
view from the frontier still has much to offer.
21
Glubb, War in the Desert, p. 9.
APPENDIX
Dramatis Personae
Jarvis, Claude Scudamore, CMG 1936; author, army officer and Governor
of Sinai; b. 20 July 1879; s. of John Bradford Jarvis, clerk, and Mary Harvey.
Circumnavigates the globe as Midshipman aboard the barque Port Jackson,
1896–1898. Volunteer Imperial Yeomanry, South African War, 1899–1901. The
Dorsetshire Regiment, Kinsale, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Guernsey and Londonderry,
1902–1914; tramping and caravanning in England and Ireland, 1902–1914.
m. 1903, Mabel Jane Hodson, d. of Charles Hodson, US Embassy. War service
with the Dorset Yeomanry, Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, 1914–1918. Joins
Egyptian Frontier Districts Administration with rank of Major, 1918; made
sub-District Commandant, Mariut, 1918; District Commander, Kharga, 1920;
Fig A1. Claude Scudamore Jarvis

Source: Private collection.
286 Appendix
sub-Governor, Sinai, 1922; Governor, Sinai, 1923. Guide on Zerzura expedi-
tion, 1923. Architect of the Wadi Gedeirat reclamation scheme and Mitla Pass
project. Retires from Frontier Districts Administration, 1936. Friend and corre-
spondent to John Murray VI, publisher (1909–1993). Awarded RCAS Lawrence
Memorial Medal, 1938. Editor, JRCAS, 1937; weekly columnist, Country
Life, 1939–1953; occasional correspondent, The Times, The Field, The Cornhill
Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine, Antiquity, Palestine Exploration Quarterly,
JRCAS. Publications include: Yesterday and To-day in Sinai, 1931; Three Deserts,
1936; Oriental Spotlight, 1937; Desert and Delta, 1938; The Back Garden of Allah,
1939; Scattered Shots, 1942; Arab Command: the biography of Lieutenant-Colonel
F. G. Peake Pasha, 1942; Half a Life, 1943; Gardener’s Medley, 1951. Interests:
gardening, fishing, shooting, painting, archaeology, keeping dogs. d. Ringwood,
Hampshire, 8 Dec. 1953.
Peake, Frederick Gerard, CBE 1926, CMG 1939; army officer and Commander
of the Arab Legion; b. 12 June 1886; s. of Lt-Col. Walter Ancell Peake and Grace
Elizabeth Ann Fenwicke. Educ: Stubbington House School; Royal Military
Academy, Sandhurst. Commissioned to Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, 1903;
transferred to Ambala, Punjab, 1906. Seconded to Egyptian Army, 1914; Fourth
Fig A2. Frederick Gerard Peake

Source: Alan Saunders collection, Album 7, No. 3, MECA: Oxford.
Appendix 287
Battalion of Infantry at Abbassia, Sennar and Dongola. War service in Darfur
expedition, 1916; Salonica with the Royal Flying Corps, 1916; invalided, 1917;
commands Egyptian Camel Corps, Hedjaz, Palestine and Syria, 1918. Made base
commandant, Aqaba, 1919; Officer Commanding Camel Corps, Negev, 1919–
1920; Political Officer, Trans-Jordan, 1920; Inspector-General of Gendarmerie,
Trans-Jordan, 1921; Officer Commanding Arab Legion, 1924. m. 1937, Elspeth
Maclean, d. of Norman Ritchie, St Boswell’s, Roxburghshire. Retires from
Arab Legion, 1939; awarded Lawrence Memorial Medal, 1940. Civil Defence,
Northern Region (UK), 1939–1945; retires to farm at Hawkslee, St. Boswells,
Roxburgshire. Publications include: History of Trans-Jordan and its Tribes, 1935;
Change at St Boswells: The Story of a Border Village, 1961; History of Burrough on
the Hill and Pedigree of the Peake Family, n.d. Interests: aircraft and archaeology,
breeding peacocks, farming. d. Kelso, Roxburgshire, 20 Mar. 1970.
Glubb, John Bagot, OBE 1925, CMG 1946, KB 1956; author, army officer
and Commander of the Arab Legion; b. 16 Apr. 1897; s. of Maj. Frederic Manly
Glubb, RE and Frances Letitia Bagot. Educ: Cheltenham College; Royal Military
Academy, Woolwich. Commissioned to Royal Engineers, 1915; war service in
France, 1915–1918; invalided with Military Cross, 1917. Volunteers for service in
Fig A3. John Bagot Glubb

Source: J. B. Glubb collection (new acquisition), MECA, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
288 Appendix
Iraq as Lieutenant, RE, 1920; seconded to Air Ministry as Special Service Officer,
Iraq; resigns commission to become Administrative Inspector, Iraq Government,
1926. Transferred to Trans-Jordan as Arab Legion Intelligence Officer, 1930;
made Officer Commanding Desert Area, 1932; promoted to command of the
Arab Legion, 1939; dismissed from command of the Legion and from Jordan,
1956. Military operations: Iraq Southern Desert, 1928–1930; Palestine Frontier,
1936–1939; Iraq and Syria, 1941; West Bank, 1948–1949. Awarded Lawrence
Memorial Medal, 1936. m. 1938 Muriel Rosemary, d. of James Graham Forbes,
physician. Publications include: The Story of the Arab Legion, 1948; A Soldier with
the Arabs, 1957; Britain and the Arabs, 1959; War in the Desert, 1960; The Empire
of the Arabs, 1963; The Way of Love, 1974; Into Battle: A Soldier’s Diary of the Great
War, 1977; Arabian Adventures, 1978; The Changing Scenes of Life, 1983. Interests:
reading and writing history. d. 17 Mar. 1986 in Mayfield, Sussex.
Bibliography
M A N U S C R I P T A N D A RC H I VA L M AT E R I A L S
The National Archives, Kew
AIR 2 Air Ministry and Ministry of Defence: Registered Files, 1887–1985
AIR 5 Air Ministry: Air Historical Branch: Papers (Series II), 1914–1959
AIR 9 Air Ministry: Directorate of Operations and Intelligence and
Directorate of Plans: Registered Files, 1914–1947
AIR 10 Ministry of Defence and predecessors: Air Publications and Reports,
1913–1979
AIR 23 Air Ministry and Ministry of Defence: Royal Air Force Overseas
Commands, Reports and Correspondence, 1916–1978
AIR 24 Air Ministry and Ministry of Defence: Operations Record Books,
Commands, 1920–1980
CO 725 Colonial Office: Aden: Original Correspondence, 1921–1951
CO 730 Colonial Office: Iraq Original Correspondence, 1921–1932
CO 732 Colonial Office: Middle East Original Correspondence, 1921–1949
CO 733 Colonial Office: Palestine Original Correspondence, 1921–1949
CO 813 Colonial Office: Iraq Government Gazettes, 1921–1955
CO 822 Colonial Office: East Africa: Original Correspondence, 1927–1964
CO 831 Colonial Office: Transjordan Original Correspondence, 1928–1946
CO 859 Colonial Office: Social Services Department and successors: Registered
Files (12,000, SS and other Series), 1939–1966
FO 141 Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Embassy and
Consulates, Egypt: General Correspondence, 1815–1973
FO 195 Foreign Office: Embassy and Consulates, Turkey (formerly Ottoman
Empire): General Correspondence, 1808–1962
FO 248 Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Embassy
and Consulates, Iran (formerly Persia): General Correspondence,
1807–1970
FO 371 Foreign Office: Political Departments: General Correspondence from
1906–1966
FO 624 Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Embassy,
High Commission and Consulate, Iraq: General Correspondence,
1929–1964
FO 684 Foreign Office: Consulate, Damascus, Syria: General Correspondence
and Registers of Births and Marriages, 1922–1944
FO 905 Foreign Office: Embassy and Legation, Saudi Arabia: General
Correspondence, 1934–1950
T 161 Treasury: Supply Department: Registered Files (S Series), 1905–
1975
290 Bibliography
WO 33 War Office: Reports, Memoranda and Papers (O and A Series),
1853–1969
WO 106 War Office: Directorate of Military Operations and Military
Intelligence, and predecessors: Correspondence and Papers,
1837–1962
WO 181 War Office: Directorate of Military Survey and predecessors: Papers,
1887–1995
WO 201 War Office: Middle East Forces; Military Headquarters Papers,
Second World War, 1936–1946
WO 287 War Office: Confidential Printed Papers (B Papers), 1904–1949
India Office Records and Private Papers, The British Library, London
IOR/L/PS/10 Departmental Papers: Political and Secret Separate Files,
1902–1931
IOR/L/PS/11 Departmental Papers: Political and Secret Annual Files,
1912–1930
IOR/L/PS/12 Departmental Papers: Political (External) Files and Collections,
1903–1950
IOR//L/PS/20 Political and Secret Department Library, 1757–1952
IOR/R/15/1 Political Residency, Bushire, 1763–1948
The Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents, Lambeth

1447 Captain C.H. Williams papers
4410 Glubb, John Bagot [IWM interview]
6751 Colonel R. F. G. Jayne papers
6786 Major-General C. H. Miller papers
6959 Lieutenant-Colonel F. G. Peake papers
Middle Eastern Centre Archive, Private Papers Collection, St. Antony’s College,
Oxford
N.I. Baird
H. E. Bowman
C. D. Brunton
H. R. P. Dickson
C. J. Edmonds
J. B. Glubb
W. H. Ingrams
M. Lampson
Nairn Transport Company
H. S. B. Philby
T. W. Russell
A. L. F. Smith
F. R. Somerset
H. W. Young
Bibliography 291
Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge
GLLD George Lloyd papers
BGND Ralph Bagnold papers
The Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, London

BROOKE-POPHAM, ACM Sir (Henry) Robert (Moore) (1878–1953)
LEES, Lt Aubrey Trevor Oswald (1899–1969)
The Royal Society for Asian Affairs

The Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal Committee papers
Minute Books (1903–1940)
The Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon

AIR 69 Air Ministry: Royal Air Force Staff College, Andover: Reports and Papers,
1917–1969
Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes

Fonds Beyrouth, série: Cabinet Politique 986–994
The Royal Geographical Society, Kensington

LMS B 40 W. E. Jennings Bramly correspondence
The John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

DC42 ‘Oriental Spotlight’
DP3 ‘Innocent Pursuits’
DM4 ‘Happy Yesterdays’
CU49 ‘Scattered Shots’
DN24 ‘Desert and Delta’
D47 ‘Half a Life’
DO18 ‘The Back Garden of Allah’
The University of Sussex Library, Special Collections

Rudyard Kipling papers
P R I N T E D S O U RC E S : P R I M A RY S O U RC E S
Acland, P. D., ‘Communications by Air in the East’, JRCAS, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1921),
pp. 99–114.
Anderson, J. G., ‘The Highway of Europe and Asia’, JRCAS, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1929),
pp. 191–195.
Anon., ‘The Annual Dinner’, JRCAS, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1921), pp. 4–12.
Anon., Review of Pioneers of Progress: Empire Builders—Sir Robert G. Sandeman by
A. L. P. Tucker, JRCAS, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1922), pp. 112–115.
Anon., ‘Arabia in Perspective’, JRCAS, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1925), pp. 171–177.
Anon., ‘Colonel Lawrence’s Manuscript’, JRCAS, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1926), pp.
165–168.
292 Bibliography
Anon., ‘Some Notes on the Overland Motor Route to India’, JRCAS, Vol. 14, No.
2 (1927), pp. 181–188.
Anon., ‘The Nejd Boundary’, JRCAS, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1927), pp. 207–208.
Anon., ‘Annual Dinner’, JRCAS, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1928), p. 447.
Anon., ‘The Iraq-Nejd Frontier’, JRCAS, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1930), pp. 77–92.
Anon., ‘The Role of Special Service Officers in the Air Intelligence Organization’,
The Royal Air Force Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan. 1931), pp. 51–58.
Anon., Review of Passages from Arabia Deserta by Charles Doughty by E. Garnett,
JRCAS, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1931), p. 590.
Anon., Review of The Syrian Desert by C. Grant, JRCAS, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1937),
pp. 503–504.
Anon., Review of T. E. Lawrence by his Friends by A. W. Lawrence, JRCAS, Vol.
25, No. 1 (1938), p. 110.
Anon., ‘The Frontier Problem: A Suggested Solution’, JRCAS, Vol. 32, No. 1
(1945), pp. 80–84.
Anon., ‘Golden Jubilee Dinner’, JRCAS, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1952), p. 40.
Arbos, P., ‘The Geography of Pastoral Life’, Geographical Review, Vol. 13, No. 4
(Oct. 1923), pp. 559–575.
al-Aref, A., Bedouin Love, Law and Legend: Dealing Exclusively with the Badu of
Beersheba (New York, 1974 [1944]).
al-’Askari, J., ‘Five Years’ Progress in Iraq’, JRCAS, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1927), pp. 62–72.
Astor, W. W., ‘The Middle East and the War’, JRCAS, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1943), pp.
133–141.
Awad, M., ‘The Assimilation of Nomads in Egypt’, Geographical Review, Vol. 44,
No. 2 (Apr. 1954), pp. 240–252.
Awad, M., ‘Settlement of Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribal Groups in the
Middle East’, International Labour Review, Vol. 79 (1959), pp. 25–56.
Bagnold, R. A., ‘Motor-Cars in the Orient—the Middle East on Wheels’, The
Times, 9 Aug. 1929, p. 11.
Bagnold, R. A., Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World (London, 1935).
Barron, F. W., ‘The New Responsibilities of the British Empire Created by the
Assumption of Mandates in the Middle East, and their Strategic Significance
with Special Reference to the Defence of India’, Journal of the Royal United
Services Institute, Vol. 67, No. 466 (May 1922), pp. 255–273.
Barton, W., ‘The Problems of Law and Order under a Responsible
Government in North-West Frontier Province’, JRCAS, Vol. 19, No. 1
(1932), pp. 5–21.
Bell, C., ‘The North-Eastern Frontier of India’, JRCAS, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1930),
pp. 221–225.
Bell, G., The Desert and the Sown (London, 1985 [1907]).
Bell, G., The Arab of Mesopotamia (Basra, 1917).
Bentwich, N., ‘Mandates: With Special Reference to the “A” Mandates of the
Near and Middle East’, JRCAS, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1931), pp. 207–221.
Bentwich, N., ‘Palestine’s Progress’, JRCAS, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1935), pp. 77–92.
Boucheman, A. de, ‘La sédentarisation des nomades du desert de Syrie’, L’Asie
Française, Vol. 320 (1934), pp. 140–143.
Bibliography 293
Bowman, H., ‘Rural Education in the Near and Middle East’, JRCAS, Vol. 26,
No. 3 (1939), pp. 402–414.
Brancker, S., ‘Air Routes in Asia’, JRCAS, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1925), pp. 251–272.
Bray, N. N. E., Paladin of Arabia: The Biography of Brevet Lieut.-Colonel G. E.
Leachman (London, 1936).
Brooke-Popham, H. R. M., ‘Some Notes on Aeroplanes, with Special Reference
to the Air Route from Cairo to Baghdad’, JRCAS, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1922), pp.
127–146.
Bruce, C. E., ‘Tribal Problems of Today’, JRCAS, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1930), pp.
226–231.
Bruce, C. E., ‘The Sandeman Policy as Applied to Tribal Problems of Today’,
JRCAS, Vol. 19, No.1 (1932), pp. 45–67.
Bruce, C. E., Review of The Problem of the North-West Frontier by C. Colin Davies,
JRCAS, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1932), pp. 687–689.
Bruce, C. E., Waziristan, 1936–1937: The Problems of the North-West Frontiers of
India and their Solutions (London, 1938).
Bryce, J., Studies in History and Jurisprudence (2 vols, New York, 1901).
Burchall, H., ‘The Air Route to India’, JRCAS, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1927), pp. 3–18.
Byrt, A. H., ‘The Indian North-West Frontier under Modern Political Conditions’,
JRCAS, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1941), pp. 270–294.
Chamier, J. A., ‘Air Control of Frontiers’, JRCAS, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1934), pp.
403–419.
Chirol, V., ‘Storm Waves in the Mohamedan World’, JRCAS, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1922),
pp. 193–223.
Cole, D. H., Imperial Military Geography: General Characteristics of the Empire in
Relation to Defence (London, 1924).
Cox, P. Z., Review of Arabia Felix: Across the Empty Quarter by Bertram Thomas,
JRCAS, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1932), pp. 321–325.
Cunningham, G., ‘Reforms in the North-West Frontier Province of India’, JRCAS,
Vol. 24, No. 1 (1937), pp. 90–101.
Curzon, G. N., Frontiers (Oxford, 1907).
Dalton, H., High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945–60 (London, 1962).
De Gaury, G., Review of the ‘Anizah Tribe (Beirut, 2005 [1932]).
De Gaury, G., Arabian Journey and Other Desert Travels (London, 1950).
Dickson, H. R. P., The Arab of the Desert (London, 1983 [1949]).
Dickson, H. R. P., Kuwait and Her Neighbours (London, 1956).
Dobbs, H., ‘Unifying British Control in the Middle East’, JRCAS, Vol. 18, No. 3
(1931), pp. 482–483.
Douglas-Scott-Montagu, J. W. E., ‘The Influence of Communications on Military
and other Policy on the North-West Frontier of India’, JRCAS, Vol. 11, No. 3
(1924), pp. 244–262.
Douglas-Scott-Montagu, J. W. E., ‘The North West Frontier of India’, JRCAS,
Vol. 11, No. 2 (1924), pp. 136–146.
Dumreicher, A. von, Trackers and Smugglers in the Deserts of Egypt (New York, 1931).
Elath, E., Israel and Elath: The Political Struggle for the Inclusion of Elath in the
Jewish State (London, 1966).
294 Bibliography
Emerson, R. W., ‘History’, in his Essays, First Series (1841).
Epstein, E., ‘The Bedouin of Transjordan: Their Social and Economic Problems’,
JRCAS, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1938), pp. 228–236.
Epstein, E., ‘Correspondence: The Economic Situation of the Trans-Jordan
Tribes’, JRCAS, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1939), pp. 177–185.
Epstein, E., ‘Al Jezireh’, JRCAS, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1940), pp. 68–82.
Etherton, P. T., ‘Central Asia: Its Rise as a Political and Economic Factor’, JRCAS,
Vol. 10, No. 2 (1923), pp. 87–103.
Fawcett, C. B., Frontiers: A Study in Political Geography (Oxford, 1918).
Febvre, L., A Geographical Introduction to History (London, 1932).
Fitzgerald Lee, J., Imperial Military Geography (London, 1922).
Forbes, R., ‘The Senussi as a Factor in North African Development’, JRCAS, Vol.
8, No. 4 (1921), pp. 167–187.
Forde, C. D., ‘The Habitat and Economy of the Northern Arabian Badawin’,
Geography, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1933), pp. 205–219.
Forde, C. D., Habitat, Economy and Society: A Geographical Introduction to
Ethnology (London, 1934).
Francis-Williams, E., A Prime Minister Remembers: The War and Post-war Memoirs
of the Rt. Hon. Earl Attlee (London, 1961).
Gautier, E., La Conquête du Sahara (Paris, 1919 [1910]).
Glubb, J. B., ‘Air and Ground Forces in Punitive Expeditions’, Journal of the Royal
United Services Institute, Vol. 71, No. 484 (Nov. 1926), pp. 777–784.
Glubb, J. B., Review of Arabia of the Wahhabis by H. Philby, JRCAS, Vol. 16, No.
2 (1929), pp. 259–262.
Glubb, J. B., ‘The Bedouins of Northern Iraq’, JRCAS, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1935), pp.
13–31.
Glubb, J. B., ‘Arab Chivalry’, JRCAS, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1937), pp. 5–26.
Glubb, J. B., ‘Relations Between Arab Civilization and Foreign Culture in the Past
and To-Day’, JRCAS, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1937), pp. 411–428.
Glubb, J. B., Review of The Arabs by Bertram Thomas, JRCAS, Vol. 24, No. 3
(1937), pp. 504–506.
Glubb, J. B., ‘The Economic Situation of the Trans-Jordan Tribes’, JRCAS, Vol.
25, No. 3 (1938), pp. 448–459.
Glubb, J. B., Handbook of the Nomad, Semi-Nomad, Semi-Sedentary and Sedentary
Tribes of Syria (HQ 9th Army, 1942).
Glubb, J. B., ‘The Sulubba and Other Ignoble Tribes of Southwestern Asia’, in H.
Field and J. B. Glubb, The Yezidis, Sulubba and Other Tribes of Iraq and Adjacent
Regions (Menasha, WI, 1943), pp. 14–16.
Glubb, J. B., ‘Transjordan and the War’, JRCAS, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1945), pp. 24–33.
Glubb, J. B., The Story of the Arab Legion (London, 1948).
Glubb, J. B., ‘Britain and the Middle East’, JRCAS, Vol. 44, No. 3 (1957), pp.
216–225.
Glubb, J. B., A Soldier With the Arabs (London, 1957).
Glubb, J. B., Britain and the Arabs, 1908–1958 (London, 1959).
Glubb, J. B., War in the Desert: An RAF Frontier Campaign (London, 1960).
Bibliography 295
Glubb, J. B., The Mixture of Races in the Eastern Arab Countries (Oxford, 1967).
Glubb, J. B., The Way of Love: Lessons from a Long Life (London, 1974).
Glubb, J. B., The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (Edinburgh, 1978).
Glubb, J. B., Arabian Adventures: Ten Years of Joyful Service (London, 1983).
Gottmann, J., ‘The Pioneer Fringe in Palestine: Settlement Possibilities South and
East of the Holy Land’, Geographical Review, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct. 1937), pp.
550–565.
Grant, C. P., The Syrian Desert: Caravans, Travel and Exploration (London, 1937).
H. M. S. O., Report by His Britannic Majesty’s Government to the Council of the
League of Nations on the Administration of ‘Iraq, October 1920 to March 1922
(London, 1922).
H. M. S. O., Special Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of
Great Britain to the Council of the League of Nations on the Progress of Iraq during
the Period 1920–31 (London, 1931).
Hamilton, A. M., ‘The Haifa-Baghdad Road’, JRCAS, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1940), pp.
232–233.
Hamilton, R. A. B., ‘The Social Organization of the Tribes of the Aden
Protectorate: Part I’, JRCAS, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1943), pp. 142–157.
Hamilton, R. A. B., ‘The Social Organization of the Tribes of the Aden
Protectorate: Part II’, JRCAS, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1943), pp. 267–274.
Harford, F. D., ‘An Old Route to India’, JRCAS, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1919), pp. 99–118.
Haward, E., ‘India’s Defence as an Imperial Problem’, JRCAS, Vol. 13, No. 2
(1926), pp. 111–129.
Hill, R., The Baghdad Air Mail (London, 1929).
Hillelson, S., Review of Sons of Ishmael: A Study of the Egyptian Bedouin by G. W.
Murray, Man, Vol. 36 (1936), pp. 139–140.
Holt, A. L., ‘Some Journeys in the Syrian Desert’, JRCAS, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1923),
pp. 175–191.
Holt, A. L., ‘The Future of the North Arabian Desert’, The Geographical Journal,
Vol. 62, No. 4 (Oct. 1923), pp. 259–268.
Horsfield, A., ‘Journey to Kilwa, Transjordan’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 102,
No. 2 (Aug. 1943), pp. 71–77.
Hoskins, H. L., British Routes to India (New York, 1928).
Howell, E., ‘Some Problems of the Indian Frontier’, JRCAS, Vol. 21, No. 2
(1934), pp. 181–198.
Huntingdon, E., The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the
Geographic Basis of History (New York, 1907).
Hutchison, A. M. C., ‘The Hadhrami Bedouin Legion’, JRCAS, Vol. 37, No. 1
(1950), pp. 62–65.
Ingrams, W. H., Review of Three Deserts by C. S. Jarvis, JRCAS, Vol. 23, No. 4
(1936), pp. 695–697.
Jackson, R. G. J., ‘Some Aspects of the War and its Aftermath in the Middle East’,
JRCAS, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1945), pp. 258–268.
Jacob, A. le G., ‘Waziristan’, JRCAS, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1927), pp. 238–257.
Jamali, M. F., The New Iraq: Its Problem of Bedouin Education (New York, 1934).
296 Bibliography
James, L., ‘The Kenya Masai: A Nomadic People Under Modern Administration’,
Africa: Journal of the International African Affairs Institute, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan.
1939), pp. 49–73.
Jarvis, C. S., Yesterday and To-Day in Sinai (London, 1931).
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Sinai: With Special Reference to the Forty Years’ Wandering of
Israel’, JRCAS, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1933), pp. 91–109.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Sinai’, JRCAS, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1935), pp. 32–51.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Three Deserts’, JRCAS, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1935), pp. 535–555.
Jarvis, C. S., Three Deserts (London, 1936).
Jarvis, C. S., ‘The Desert Beduin and His Future’, JRCAS, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1936),
pp. 585–593.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘The Drug Smugglers of Egypt’, The Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 156
(1937), pp. 588–605.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘The Goat Standard’, JRCAS, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1937), pp. 318–326.
Jarvis, C. S., Review of Sea Adventures by Henry de Monfried, JRCAS, Vol. 24,
No. 2 (1937), pp. 366–367.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘An Empty Quarter: The Negev Area of Southern Palestine’, JRCAS,
Vol. 24, No. 4 (1937), pp. 663–669.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘The Desert Yesterday and To-Day’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly,
Vol. 69 (1937), pp. 116–124.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Tasks on the Frontiers: Raiders and Smugglers’, The Times, 26 Jan.
1937, p. xiv.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Southern Palestine and its Possibilities for Settlement’, JRCAS, Vol.
25, No. 2 (1938), pp. 204–218.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘The Forty Years’ Wanderings of the Israelites’, Palestine Exploration
Quarterly, Vol. 70 (1938), pp. 25–40.
Jarvis, C. S., Desert and Delta (London, 1938).
Jarvis, C. S., The Back Garden of Allah (London, 1939).
Jarvis, C. S., ‘South of the Holy Land: A Desert with a Future: Roman Irrigation’,
The Times, 9 Feb. 1939, p. 9.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Roads in Egypt, a Strategical Necessity: The Camel’s Empire
Challenged’, The Times, 26 June 1939, pp. 15–16.
Jarvis, C. S., ‘To Petra from the West’, Antiquity, Vol. 14, No. 54 (1940), pp.
138–147.
Jarvis, C. S., Arab Command: The Biography of Lieutenant-Colonel F. G. Peake
Pasha (London, 1942).
Jarvis, C. S., Half a Life (London, 1943).
Jarvis, C. S., ‘Correspondence’, JRCAS, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1945), pp. 335–336.
Jarvis, C. S., Review of Arabia Phoenix by Gerald de Gaury, JRCAS, Vol. 34, No.
1 (1947), p. 102.
Jarvis, C. S., Review of Nomad by Robin Maugham, JRCAS, Vol. 35, No. 1
(1948), pp. 79–80.
Jarvis, C. S., Gardener’s Medley (London, 1951).
Jennings-Bramley, W. E., ‘The Bedouin of the Sinaitic Peninsula’, Palestine
Exploration Fund Quarterly Statements, misc [1905–1914].
Bibliography 297
Keeling, E. H., ‘The Proposed Haifa-Baghdad Railway’, JRCAS, Vol. 21, No. 3
pp. 373–393.
Kennedy-Shaw, W. B., Long Range Desert Group: The Story of its Work in Libya,
1940–1943 (London, 1945).
Kennett, A., Bedouin Justice: Law and Customs among the Egyptian Bedouin
(London, 1968 [1925]).
Kirkbride, A. S., ‘Changes in Tribal Life in Trans-Jordan’, Man, Vol. 45 (Mar.–
Apr. 1945), pp. 40–41.
Kirkbride, A. S., A Crackle of Thorns: Experiences in the Middle East (London,
1956).
Lattimore, O., Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (New York, 1932).
Lattimore, O., ‘On the Wickedness of Being Nomads’, T’ien Hsia Monthly, Vol.
1 (Aug. 1935), pp. 47–62.
Lattimore, O., ‘The Eclipse of Inner Mongolian Nationalism’, JRCAS, Vol. 33,
No. 3 (1936), pp. 427–439.
Lattimore, O., Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (Oxford,
1962).
Lawrence, T. E. and Woolley, C. L., The Wilderness of Zin (2003 [1915]).
Leach, F. B., ‘Transport Developments in Burma: Road and Air’, JRCAS, Vol. 28,
No. 2 (1941), pp. 167–181.
Lethbridge, A., ‘The Burma Military Police on the North-East Frontier’, JRCAS,
Vol. 19, No. 3 (1932), pp. 434–444.
Lindgren, E. L., ‘The Reindeer Tungus of Manchuria’, JRCAS, Vol. 22, No. 2
(1935), pp. 221–231.
Lloyd, G., Egypt Since Cromer (2 vols, London, 1933–1934).
Lloyd-Williams, J. J., ‘Re-Marking the Air Route from Ramadi to Landing
Ground R’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 62, No. 5 (Nov. 1923), pp. 350–359.
Lunt, J. D., ‘The Arab Legion’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, Vol.
99, No. 593 (Feb. 1954).
Lunt, J. D., The Arab Legion: 1923–1957 (London, 1999).
Lyautey, P., ‘Aerial Geography’, JRCAS, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1935), pp. 189–203.
McCallum, D., ‘The French in Syria, 1919–1924’, JRCAS, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1925),
pp. 3–25.
McCallum, D., ‘The Discovery and Development of the New Land Route to the
East’, JRCAS, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1925), pp. 43–67.
Mackenzie, M., ‘Transjordan’, JRCAS, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1946), pp. 260–270.
Mackinder, H. J., ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, The Geographical Journal,
Vol. 23, No. 4 (Apr. 1904).
Mackinder, H. J., Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of
Reconstruction (London, 1919).
Macmunn, G. and Falls, C., Military Operations; Egypt & Palestine: From the
Outbreak of War with Germany to June 1917 (London, 1928).
Main, E., ‘Water Supplies of Iraq’, JRCAS, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1933), pp. 266–269.
Main, E., ‘Iraq: A Note’, JRCAS, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1933), pp. 427–436.
Main, E., ‘Iraq and the Assyrians’, JRCAS, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1933), pp. 664–666.
298 Bibliography
Malin, J. C., ‘Space and History: Reflections on the Closed-Space Doctrines
of Turner and Mackinder and the Challenge of Those Ideas by the Air Age’,
Agricultural History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr. 1944), pp. 65–74, and No. 3 (July
1944), pp. 107–126.
Murray, G. W., ‘The Land of Sinai’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 119, No. 2
(June 1953), pp. 140–153.
Murray, G. W., ‘Obituary’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 126, No. 2 (June 1960),
pp. 258–259.
Naguib, M., Egypt’s Destiny (New York, 1955).
Newman, E. W. P., ‘Palestine, Syria and Trans-Jordan: Their Political and
Strategical Significance’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, Vol. 72,
No. 488 (Nov. 1927).
Noel, E., ‘Wanted: A Frontier Policy’, JRCAS, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1944), pp. 74–79.
Ormsby-Gore, W., ‘The Organisation of British Responsibilities in the Middle
East’, JRCAS, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1920), pp. 83–105.
Parker, A. C., The Diaries of Parker Pasha (London, 1983).
Patterson, L. D. M., ‘From Rawalpindi to London By Car’, JRCAS, Vol. 23, No.
2 (1936), pp. 271–279.
Peake, F. G., ‘A Brief Outline of the Wahabi Movement’, JRCAS, Vol. 17, No. 4
(1930), pp. 401–416.
Peake, F. G., ‘Trans-Jordan’, JRCAS, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1939), pp. 375–396.
Peake, F. G., History of Trans-Jordan and its Tribes (Coral Gables, FL, 1958 [1935]).
Peake, F. G., Change at St Boswells: The Story of a Border Village (London, 1961).
Philby, H. S. B., ‘Transjordan’, JRCAS, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1924), pp. 296–312.
Philby, H. S. B., ‘The Triumph of the Wahhabis’, JRCAS, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1926),
pp. 293–319.
Philby, H. S. B., ‘A Survey of Wahhabi Arabia’, JRCAS, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1929), pp.
468–481.
Philby, H. S. B., Review of History of the Arabs by P. K. Hitti, JRCAS, Vol. 25, No.
1 (1938), p. 105.
Philipps Price, M., Review of Mongol Journeys by Owen Lattimore, JRCAS, Vol.
28, No. 4 (1941), p. 462.
Ram, H., Sandeman in Baluchistan (Calcutta, 1916).
Reifenberg, A., The Struggle Between the Desert and the Sown: Rise and Fall of
Agriculture in the Levant (Jerusalem, 1955).
Russell, T. W., Egyptian Service, 1902–1946 (London, 1949).
Rutter, E., ‘The Holy Cities of Arabia’, JRCAS, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1929), pp. 196–205.
Rutter, E., ‘Damascus to Hail’, JRCAS, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1931), pp. 61–73.
Salt, A. E. W., Military Geography of the British Commonwealth (Aldershot, 1925).
Salt, A. E. W., Imperial Air Routes (London, 1930).
Sassoon, P., The Third Route (London, 1929).
Sayers, F., ‘Nomad Tribes of South India: From a Policeman’s Point of View’,
JRCAS, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1943), pp. 158–164.
Shabnam, A., ‘Sandeman and Baluchistan’, The Near East and India, 21 Feb.,
1935, pp. 215–217.
Shanklin, W. M., ‘The Anthropology of the Ruwala Bedouins’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, Vol. 65 (1935).
Bibliography 299
Sheppard, E. W., ‘Some Military Aspects of the Mesopotamian Problem’, JRCAS,
Vol. 8, No. 1 (1921), pp. 14–28.
Sinclair, J. M., ‘Correspondence’, JRCAS, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1948), p. 295.
Skrine, C. P., ‘From Baluchistan to the Mediterranean by Car’, JRCAS, Vol. 19,
No. 1 (1932), pp. 68–86.
Smith, A., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (2 vols,
London, 1776 [1981]).
Spears, E., ‘The Middle East and our Policy There’, JRCAS, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1945),
pp. 156–165.
Stark, F., ‘Two Merchant Nations: Britain and Arabia’, The Listener (11 Dec. 1947).
Sykes, P. M., ‘The Founding and Progress of the Royal Central Asian Society’,
JRCAS, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1934), pp. 5–8.
Thesiger, W., ‘The Badu of Southern Arabia’, JRCAS, Vol. 37, No. 1 (1950), pp.
53–61.
Thomas, B. E., ‘Modern Trans-Saharan Routes’, Geographical Review, Vol. 42, No.
2 (Apr. 1952), pp. 267–282.
Thompson, C. B., ‘My Impressions of a Tour in Iraq’, JRCAS, Vol. 12, No. 3
(1925), pp. 207–225.
Thomson, J., Street Life in London (London, 1877).
Thornton, T. H., Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman: His Life and Work on our Indian
Frontier (London, 1895).
Toukan, B., ‘The Future Settlement of the Arab Countries’, JRCAS, Vol. 30, No.
2 (1943), pp. 198–205.
Toukan, B., ‘Transjordan: Past, Present and Future’, JRCAS, Vol. 31, No. 3
(1944), pp. 253–264.
Tucker, A. L. P., Sir Robert G. Sandeman: K. C. S. I., Peaceful Conqueror of
Baluchistan (London, 1921).
Turner, F. J., The Frontier in American History (New York, 1921).
Vickery, C. E., Review of The Heart of Arabia by H. Philby, JRCAS, Vol. 10, No.
1 (1923), pp. 78–80.
Waugh, E., Remote People (London, 1931).
Wells, H. G., A Short History of the World (London, 1922 [2006]).
Wheeler, W. E., ‘The Control of Land Routes: Russian railways in Central Asia’,
JRCAS, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1934), pp. 585–608.
Wilson, A. T., ‘Mesopotamia, 1914–1921’, JRCAS, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1921), pp.
144–155.
Wilson, A. T., ‘The Bakhtiaris’, JRCAS, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1926), pp. 205–225.
Wilson, A. T., Review of Revolt in the Desert by T. E. Lawrence, and With Lawrence
in Arabia by L. Thomas, JRCAS, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1927), pp. 282–285.
Woods, H. C., ‘The Near East and the War’, JRCAS, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1915), pp.
71–88.
Yate, A. C., ‘Britain’s Buffer States in the East’, JRCAS, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1918), pp.
3–23.
Yate, A. C., ‘The Nineteenth Anniversary Meeting of the Central Asian Society’,
JRCAS, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1920), pp. 107–112.
Yate, A. C., ‘Report for 1920–21’, JRCAS, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1921), pp. 188–191.
Young, H., The Independent Arab (London, 1933).
300 Bibliography
P R I N T E D S O U RC E S : S E C O N D A RY S O U RC E S
Abu-Jaber, K. S. and Gharaibeh, F. A., ‘Bedouin Settlement: Organizational,
Legal and Administrative Structure in Jordan’, in J. G. Galaty, D. Aronson, P.
C. Salzman, and A. Chouinard (eds.) The Future of Pastoral Peoples: Proceedings
of a Conference Held in Nairobi, Kenya, 4–8 August 1980 (Ottawa, 1981), pp.
294–301.
Abu-Lughod, L., Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society
(Berkeley, 1986).
Adas, M., Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of
Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989).
Adelman, J. and Aron, S., ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-
States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History’, The American
Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 3 (June 1999), pp. 814–841.
Adelson, R., Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur (London, 1975).
Aharoni, R., The Pasha’s Bedouin: Tribes and State in the Egypt of Mehemet Ali,
1805–1848 (Abingdon, 2007).
Ahmad, A. S., ‘Nomadism as Ideological Expression: The Case of the Gomal
Nomads’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan. 1983), pp.
123–138.
Ahmida, A. A., The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and
Resistance, 1830–1932 (Albany, 1994).
Alon, Y., The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State (London,
2007).
Alon, Y., ‘Silent Voices within the Elites: The Social Biography of a Modern
Shaykh’, in A. Singer, C. K. Neumann, and S. A. Somel (eds.), Untold Histories
of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries (Abingdon,
2011), pp. 91–105.
Amiran, D. H. K. ‘Nomadic and Beduin Population in the Census Returns of
Mandatory Palestine’, Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1963), pp.
247–252.
Amiran, D. H. K. and Ben-Arieh, Y., ‘Sedentarisation of Beduin in Israel’, Israel
Exploration Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1963), pp. 161–181.
Anderson, D., ‘Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography and Drought: The Colonial
State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s’, African Affairs,
Vol. 83, No. 332, pp. 321–343.
Anderson, D. and Killingray, D. (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority
and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester, 1991).
Armitage, D. and Braddick, M. J. (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800
(Basingstoke, 2009 [2002]).
Asiwaju, A. I. and Adeniyi, P. O. (eds.), Borderlands in Africa: A Multidisciplinary
and Comparative Focus on Nigeria and West Africa (Lagos, 1989).
Baer, G., ‘The Settlement of the Beduins’, in G. Baer (ed.), Studies in the Social
History of Modern Egypt (Chicago, 1969), pp. 3–16.
Bailey, C., Bedouin Poetry: From Sinai and the Negev (London, 2002).
Bibliography 301
Bailey, C., Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev: Justice without Government
(New Haven, CT, 2009).
Bailyn, B. and Morgan, P. D. (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins
of the First British Empire (London, 1991).
Balfour-Paul, G., ‘Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East’, in W. R. Louis
(ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire (5 vols, Oxford, 1998–1999), iv,
p. 490.
Bamyeh, M. A., ‘Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic
Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden,
2006), pp. 33–48.
Banner, S., Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers and Indigenous People from Australia
to Alaska (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
Barfield, T., ‘Tribe and State Relations: The Inner Asian Perspective’, in P. Khoury
and J. Kostiner (eds.), Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (London,
1991), pp. 153–182.
Barkan, E., The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain
and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1992).
Barth, F., ‘A General Perspective on Nomad-Sedentary Relations in the Middle
East’, in C. Nelson (ed.), The Desert and the Sown: Nomads in the Wider Society
(1973), pp. 11–21.
Batatu, H., The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: a Study
of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba’thists, and
Free Officers (Princeton, 1978).
Baud, M. and Schendel, W. van, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’,
Journal of World History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1997), pp. 211–242.
Bayly, C., ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India’, Modern
Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1993), pp. 3–43.
Bayly, C., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication
in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996).
Bayly, S., ‘French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina’,
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2000), pp. 581–622.
Beattie, H., Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan (Surrey, 2002).
Ben-David, J. and Kressel, G. M., ‘The Bedouin Market: The Axis around which
Beersheba Developed in the British Mandatory Period’, Nomadic Peoples, No.
39 (1996), pp. 3–28.
Benton, L., A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires,
1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010).
Blecher, R., ‘Desert Medicine, Ethnography and the Colonial Encounter in
Mandatory Syria’, in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The British and French
Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp. 249–268.
Blouet, B. W., Halford Mackinder: A Biography (Texas, 1987).
Blyth, R. J., The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–
1947 (London, 2003).
Bocco, R., ‘The Settlement of Pastoral Nomads in the Arab Middle
East: International Organizations and Trends in Development Policies,
302 Bibliography
1950–1990’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North
Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 302–330.
Bocco, R. and Tell, T., ‘Pax Britannica in the Steppe: British Policy and the
Transjordan Bedouin’, in E. Rogan and T. Tell (eds.), Village, Steppe and
State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan (London, 1994), pp. 108–127.
Bond, B., The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History
(Cambridge, 2002).
Bose, S., A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
(Cambridge, MA, 2006).
Bou-Nacklie, N. E., ‘Les Troupes Spéciales: Religious and Ethnic Recruitment,
1916–1946’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 25 (1993), pp.
645–660.
Bourke, J., An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-Century
Warfare (London, 1999).
Bradley, M. (ed.), Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford, 2010).
Brantlinger, P., Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races,
1800–1930 (New York, 2003).
Bridge, C. and Fedorowich, K. (eds.), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and
Identity (London, 2003).
Brody, H., The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World
(New York, 2001).
Brower, B. J., A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian
Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York, 2009).
Brower, D., Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (Abingdon, 2003).
Brown, J. M., ‘ “Life Histories” and the History of Modern South Asia’, The
American Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 3 (June 2009), pp. 587–595.
Brown, N., ‘Brigands and State Building: The Invention of Banditry in Modern
Egypt’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr. 1990),
pp. 258–281.
Buchan, B., ‘Subjecting the Natives: Aborigines, Property and Possession under
Early Colonial Rule’, Social Analysis, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Nov. 2001).
Burke III, E., ‘A Comparative View of French Native Policy in Morocco
and Syria, 1912–1925’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1973), pp.
179–186.
Büssow, J., ‘Negotiating the Future of a Bedouin Polity in Mandatory
Syria: Political Dynamics of the Sbaʿa-ʿAbada during the 1930s’, Nomadic
Peoples, Vol. 15 (2011), pp. 70–95.
Butlin, R. A., ‘Historical Geographies of the British Empire, c. 1887–1925’,
in M. Bell and R. A. Butlin (eds.), Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940
(Manchester, 1995), pp. 151–188.
Butt, G., The Lion in the Sand: The British in the Middle East (London, 1995).
Butt, G., History in the Arab Skies: Aviation’s Impact on the Middle East (Nicosia,
2011).
Cannadine, D., In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain
(London, 2002).
Bibliography 303
Canny, N., ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: from Ireland to America’, The
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct. 1973), pp. 575–598.
Canny, N., ‘Moving Forward from the “New British History” ’, in C. Schmurmann
and H. Lehmann (eds.), Atlantic Understandings: Essays on European and
American History in Honour of Hermann Wellenreuther (Hamburg, 2006).
Cell, J. W., ‘Colonial Rule’, in W. R. Louis (ed.), The Oxford History of the British
Empire, (5 vols, Oxford, 1998–1999), iv, pp. 233–234.
Chaliand G., Les Empires Nomades: de la Mongolie au Danube (Paris, 2005).
Chamberlain, M. E., ‘Lord Cromer’s “Ancient and Modern Imperialism”:
A Proconsular View of Empire’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1972),
pp. 61–85.
Chappell, J., ‘Climatic Change Reconsidered: Another Look at The Pulse of Asia’,
Geographical Review, Vol. 60, No. 3 (July 1970), pp. 347–373.
Charmley, J., Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London, 1987).
Chatelard, G., ‘Desert Tourism as a Substitute for Pastoralism? Tuareg in Algeria
and Bedouin in Transjordan’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle
East and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 710–736.
Chatty, D., From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World (New York,
1986).
Chatty, D., ‘Introduction’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East
and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 1–29.
Chatwin, B., ‘The Mechanics of Nomad Invasions’, History Today (May 1972).
Citino, N. J., ‘The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the
Frontier-Borderlands Approach in American Foreign Relations’, Diplomatic
History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2001), pp. 677–693.
Clark, P., British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational
World (Oxford, 2000).
Clavin, P., Securing the World Economy. The Reinvention of the League of Nations,
1920–1946 (Oxford, 2013).
Cohen, M. and Kolinsky, M. (eds.), Demise of the British Empire in the Middle
East: Britain’s Responses to Nationalist Movements, 1943–55 (London, 1998).
Colchester, M., ‘Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas: Rights, Principles and
Practice’, Nomadic Peoples, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2003), pp. 33–51.
Cole, D. P., ‘Where Have the Bedouin Gone?’, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 76,
No. 2 (2003).
Cole, D. P. and Altorki, S., Bedouin, Settlers and Holiday-Makers: Egypt’s Changing
Northwest Coast (Cairo, 1998).
Colley, L., The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London,
2007).
Comaroff, J. L., ‘Colonialism, Culture and the Law: a Foreword’, Law and Social
Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr. 2001), pp. 305–314.
Cooper, F. and Stoler, L. (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois
World (Berkeley, 1997).
Cronin, S., Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–1941
(Abingdon, 2007).
304 Bibliography
Cronin, S. (ed.), Subalterns and Social Protest: History From Below in the Middle
East and North Africa (London, 2008).
Curthoys, A., ‘Indigenous Subjects’, in D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds.), Australia’s
Empire (Oxford, 2008).
Daniels, S. and Nash, C., ‘Lifepaths: Geography and Biography’, Journal of
Historical Geography, Vol. 30 (2004), pp. 449–458.
Darwin, J., ‘Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between
the Wars’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1980), pp. 657–679.
Darwin, J., Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of
War, 1918–1922 (London, 1981).
Darwin, J., ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial
Expansion’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 447 (June 1997), pp.
614–642.
Darwin, J., The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–
1970 (Cambridge, 2009).
Davies, R. R., The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles,
1093–1343 (Oxford, 2002).
Dawisha, A., Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth-Century: From Triumph to Despair
(Princeton, 2005).
Dewey, C., ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’,
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1972), pp. 291–328.
Deringil, S., The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in
the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London, 1998).
Deringil, S., ‘ “They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late
Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Apr. 2003), pp. 311–342.
Dinero, S. C., ‘Image is Everything: The Development of the Negev Bedouin as a
Tourist Attraction’, Nomadic Peoples, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2002), pp. 69–94.
Dodge, T., Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied
(London, 2003).
Donnan, H. and Wilson, T. M., Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State
(Oxford, 1999).
Drayton, R., ‘Maritime Networks and the Making of Knowledge’, in D.
Cannadine (ed.), Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World,
c.1760–c.1840 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 72–82.
Dyson-Hudson, N., ‘The Study of Nomads’, in N. Dyson-Hudson and W. Irons
(eds.), Perspectives on Nomadism (Leiden, 1972), pp. 2–29.
Dyson-Hudson, R. and Dyson-Hudson, N., ‘Nomadic Pastoralism’, Annual
Review of Anthropology, Vol. 9 (1980), pp. 15–61.
Eran, O., ‘Negotiating the Anglo-Egyptian Relationship between the World
Wars’, in K. M. Wilson (ed.), Imperialism and Nationalism in the Middle
East: The Anglo-Egyptian Experience, 1882–1982 (New York, 1983), pp. 56–75.
Erlich, H., ‘British Internal Security and Egyptian Youth’, in M. J. Cohen and
M. Kolinsky (eds.), Britain and the Middle East in the 1930s: Security Problems,
1935–39 (London, 1992), pp. 98–112.
Bibliography 305
Fabietti, U., ‘Control and Alienation of Territory among the Bedouin of Saudi
Arabia’, Nomadic Peoples, No. 20 (Mar. 1986), pp. 33–39.
Fabietti, U., ‘Facing Change in Arabia: the Bedouin Community and the Notion
of Development’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and
North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 573–598.
Falah, G., The Role of the British Administration in the Sedentarization of the
Bedouin Tribes in Northern Palestine, 1918–48 (Durham, 1983).
Faragher, J. M., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of the Frontier
in American History’, and Other Essays (New Haven, CN, 1998).
Farooqui, A., Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants, and the
Politics of Opium, 1790–1843 (Lanham, MD, 2005).
Farouk-Sluglett, M. and Sluglett, P., ‘The Transformation of Land Tenure and Rural
Social Structure in Central and Southern Iraq, c. 1870–1958’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Nov. 1983), pp. 491–505.
Fischbach, M., ‘The British Land Program, State-Societal Cooperation, and
Popular Imagination in Transjordan’, in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.),
The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004),
pp. 477–495.
Fletcher, R. S. G., ‘The Amarat, their Shaykh and the Colonial State: Patronage
and Politics in a Partitioned Middle East’, Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient (forthcoming: 2015).
Franzén, J., ‘Development vs. Reform: Attempts at Modernization during the
Twilight of British Influence in Iraq, 1946–58’, The Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2009), pp. 77–98.
Fratkin, E., ‘Pastoralism: Governance and Development Issues’, Annual Review of
Anthropology, Vol. 26 (1997), pp. 235–261.
Gallagher, J., ‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922’, Modern Asian
Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1981), pp. 355–368.
Gallagher, J., The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures
and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1982).
Gardner, A. and Marx, E., ‘Employment and Unemployment among Bedouin’,
Nomadic Peoples, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2000), pp. 21–27.
Glaisyer, N., ‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth Century British
Empire’, Historical Journal, Vol. 47 (2004), pp. 451–476.
Glassner, M. I., ‘The Bedouin of Southern Sinai under Israeli Administration’,
Geographical Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Jan. 1974), pp. 31–60.
Goldschmidt, A., ‘The Egyptian Nationalist Party: 1892–1919’, in P. M. Holt
(ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt (London, 1968), pp.
308–333.
Gommans, J., ‘The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. AD 1100–1800’, Journal of
World History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 1–23.
Gommans, J., ‘Burma at the Frontier of South, East and Southeast
Asia: A Geographic Perspective’, in J. Gommans and J. Leider (eds.), The
Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial
Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1000–1800 (Leiden, 2002), pp. 1–7.
306 Bibliography
Gordon, J., Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution
(Oxford, 1992).
Goudie, A. S., ‘George Nathanial Curzon:Superior Geographer’, The Geographical
Journal, Vol. 145, No. 2 (July 1980), pp. 203–209.
Goudie, A. S. and Wilkinson, J. C., The Warm Desert Environment (Cambridge,
1977).
Grove, R. H., ‘Imperialism and the Discourse of Desiccation: The
Institutionalisation of Global Environment Concerns and the Role of the
Royal Geographical Society, 1860-1880’, in M. Bell and R. A. Butlin (eds.),
Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 36–52.
Habeck, J. O., ‘Sedentarisation of Nomads in the Evenki Autonomous District
(Siberia)’, paper presented at the 35th International Congress of Asian and
North African Studies, Budapest, Hungary, 7–12 July 1997 <http://www.spri.
cam.ac.uk/~jeoh2/2icanas.htm>.
Hahn, P. L., The United States, Great Britain and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and
Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (London, 1991).
Hanna, A., ‘The Attitudes of the French Mandatory Authorities towards Land
Ownership in Syria’, in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The British and
French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp. 457–475.
Hastings, D. and Wilson, T. (eds.), Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives
on Frontiers (London, 1994).
Hauser, K., Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern
Life (London, 2008).
Havinden, M. and Meredith, D., Colonialism and Development: Britain and its
Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London, 1993).
Hennessy, C. A. M., The Frontier in Latin American History (London, 1978).
Hiatt, J. M., ‘State Formation and the Encapsulation of Nomads: Local Change
and Continuity among Recently Sedentarised Bedouin in Jordan’, Nomadic
Peoples, No. 15 (Apr. 1984), pp. 1–11.
Higham, R., Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, 1918 to 1939: The Story of Britain’s
Overseas Airlines (London, 1960).
Hobart, M. (ed.), An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of
Ignorance (London, 1993).
Hobbs, J. J., ‘Guidelines for the Involvement of Nomadic Pastoralists in Conservation
and Development Efforts’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle
East and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 785–799.
Holland, R. F., Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800
(London, 2012).
Holton, R., ‘The Inclusion of the Non-European World in International Society,
1870s–1920s: Evidence from Global Networks’, Global Networks, Vol. 5, No.
3 (2005), pp. 239–259.
Hopkins, A. G., ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’,
Past and Present, No. 164 (1999), pp. 198–243.
Horden, P. and Purcell, N., The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History
(Oxford, 2000).
Bibliography 307
Horden, P. and Purcell, N., ‘The Mediterranean and “the New Thalassology” ’, The
American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (June 2006), pp. 722–740.
Howard, M., ‘The British Way in Warfare: A Reappraisal’, in M. Howard, The
Causes of Wars (London, 1984), pp. 189–207.
Hyam, R., ‘Bureaucracy and “Trusteeship” in the Colonial Empire’, in W. R. Louis
(ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire (5 vols, Oxford, 1998–1999), iv,
pp. 255–279.
Hyam, R., Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1965
(Cambridge, 2006).
Jasanoff, M., Liberty’s Exiles: the Loss of America and the Remaking of the British
Empire (London, 2011).
Jeffery, K., The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918-22 (Manchester, 1984).
Kasaba, R., A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants and Refugees (Seattle,
2009).
Keats-Rohan, K. S. B., Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook
(Oxford, 2007).
Kent, M., Moguls and Mandarins: Oil, Imperialism and the Middle East in British
Foreign Policy (London, 1993).
Kedourie, E., England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire,
1914–1921 (London, 1956).
Khalidi, R., ‘Concluding Remarks’, in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The
British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp.
695–704.
Khalidi, R., Anderson, L., Muslih, M., and Simon, R. S., (eds.), The Origins of
Arab Nationalism (New York, 1991).
Khazanov, A. M., Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge, 1984).
Khazanov, A. M. and Wink, A. (eds.), Nomads in the Sedentary World (Richmond,
Surrey, 2001).
Khazeni, A., Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle,
2009).
Khoury, P., ‘The Tribal Shaykh, French Tribal Policy and the Nationalist Movement
in Syria Between the Two World Wars’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2
(1982), pp.180–193.
Khoury, P. and Kostiner, J., ‘Introduction: Tribes and the Complexities of State
Formation in the Middle East’, in P. Khoury and J. Kostiner, (eds.), Tribes and
State Formation in the Middle East (London, 1991).
Killingray, D. and Omissi, D. (eds.), Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the
Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964 (Manchester, 1999).
Kingston, P., Britain and the Politics of Modernization in the Middle East, 1945–
1958 (Cambridge, 1996).
Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., A Biographical Dictionary of the British Colonial Service,
1939–1966 (London, 1991).
Klute, G., ‘Nomads and the State’, Nomadic Peoples, No. 38 (1996), pp. 3–10.
Knowles, J. N. and Collett, D. P., ‘Nature as Myth, Symbol and Action: Notes
Towards a Historical Understanding of Development and Conservation in
308 Bibliography
Kenyan Maasailand’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol.
59, No. 4 (1989), pp. 433–460.
Kostiner, J., The Making of Saudi Arabia, 1916-1936: From Chieftancy to
Monarchical State (New York, 1993).
Kozma, L., ‘Cannabis Prohibition in Egypt, 1880–1939: From Local Ban to
League of Nations Diplomacy’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2011),
pp. 443–460.
Kwanten, L., Imperial Nomads (Leicester, 1979).
Lambert, D. and Lester, A., ‘Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in D. Lambert
and A. Lester (eds.) Colonial Lives across the British Empire (Cambridge, 2006),
pp. 1–31.
Lawrence, C. and Mayer, Anna-K. (eds.), Regenerating England: Science, Medicine
and Culture in Inter-War Britain (Amsterdam, 2000).
Leach, H., Strolling About on the Roof of the World: The First Hundred Years of the
Royal Society for Asian Affairs (formerly Royal Central Asian Society) (New York,
2002).
Leder, S. and Streck, B. (eds.), Shifts and Drifts in Nomad-Sedentary Relations
(Wiesbaden, 2005).
Lenhart, L. and Casimir, M. J., ‘Environment, Property Resources and the
State: An Introduction’, Nomadic Peoples, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2001), pp. 6–20.
Lester, A., ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’,
History Compass, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2005), pp. 124–141.
Letherdale, C., Britain and Saudi Arabia, 1925–1939: The Imperial Oasis (London,
1986).
Lias, G., Glubb’s Legion (London, 1956).
Limerick, P. N., ‘Going West and Ending up Global’, The Western Historical
Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 5–23.
Lorcin, P. M. E., ‘Imperialism, Colonial Identity and Race in Algeria, 1830–
1870: The Role of the French Medical Corps’, Isis, Vol. 90, No. 4 (1999), pp.
653–679.
Lorcin, P. M. E., ‘Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin
Past’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2002), pp. 295–329.
Louis, W. R., The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–51 (Oxford, 1984).
Lukitz, L., ‘Axioms Reconsidered: The Rethinking of British Strategic Policy in
Iraq during the 1930s’, in M. J. Cohen and M. Kolinsky (eds.), Britain and
the Middle East in the 1930s: Security Problems, 1935–39 (London, 1992), pp.
113–127.
Lunt, J. D., ‘The Arab Legion’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, Vol.
99, No. 593 (Feb. 1954), pp. 47–53.
Lunt, J. D., Imperial Sunset: Frontier Soldiering in the Twentieth-Century (London,
1981).
Lunt, J. D., The Arab Legion: 1923–1957 (London, 1999).
MacKenzie, J. M., ‘Lakes, Rivers and Oceans: Technology, Ethnicity and the
Shipping of Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in D. Killingray, M.
Lincoln, and N. Rigby (eds.), Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime
Trade in the Nineteenth-Century (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 111–127.
Bibliography 309
McKitterick, R. and Quinault, R. (eds.), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge,
1997).
McLoughlin, L., In a Sea of Knowledge: British Arabists in the Twentieth-Century
(London, 2002).
Magee, G. B. and Thompson, A. S., Empire and Globalisation: Networks of
People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge,
2010).
Martínez, O. J., Border People: Life and Society in the US-Mexico Borderlands
(Tucson, 1994).
Mandler, P., ‘Against “Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits to Rural
Nostalgia, 1850–1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series,
Vol. 7 (1997), pp. 155–175.
Marx, E., ‘The Political Economy of Middle Eastern and North African Pastoral
Nomads’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North
Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 78–97.
Massad, J. A., Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York,
2001).
Mazower, M., Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London, 2012).
Meek, R. L., Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976).
Mellor, D. (ed.), A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935–
55 (London, 1987).
Melman, B., Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and
Nymphs (London, 1988).
Mendilow, J., The Romantic Tradition in British Political Thought (London, 1986).
Méouchy, N. (ed.), France, Syrie et Liban, 1918-1946: les ambiguïtés et les dynam-
iques de la relation mandataire (Damascus, 2002).
Méouchy, N. and Sluglett, P., ‘General Introduction’, in N. Méouchy and P.
Sluglett (eds.), The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective
(Leiden, 2004), pp. 1–20.
Métral, J., ‘Robert Montagne et les études Ethnographiques Francaises dans la
Syrie sous Mandat’, in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The British and French
Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp. 217–234.
Mills, J. H. ‘Colonial Africa and the International Politics of Cannabis: Egypt,
South Africa and the Origins of Global Control’, in J. H. Mills and P. Barton,
Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c.1500–
c.1930 (New York, 2007), pp. 165–184.
Mills, J. H. and Barton, P. (eds.), Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism
and Intoxication, c.1500–c. 1930 (New York, 2007).
Mitchell, T., Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).
Mizrahi, J., Genèse de l’Etat Mandataire: Service des Renseignements et bandes armées
en Syrie et au Liban dans les années 1920 (Paris, 2003).
Mohammed Salih, M. A., ‘Perspectives on Pastoralists and the African States’,
Nomadic Peoples, No. 25–27 (1990), pp. 3–6.
Monroe, E., Philby of Arabia (Reading, 1998 [1978]).
Moreman, T. R., ‘Watch and Ward: The Army in India and the North-West
Frontier, 1920–1939’, in D. Killingray and D. Omissi (eds.), Guardians of
310 Bibliography
Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964 (Manchester,
1999), pp. 137–156.
Morewood, S., ‘Appeasement from Strength: The Making of the 1936
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Alliance’, Diplomacy and Statecraft,
Vol. 7, No. 3 (1996), pp. 530–562.
Morewood, S., The British Defence of Egypt, 1935–1940: Conflict and Crisis in the
Eastern Mediterranean (Abingdon, 2005).
Morrow, A. and al-Omran, K. M., ‘Fearing Border Protests, Cairo Meets Bedouin
Demands’, <http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38480>, 10 July 2007.
Morsy, L., ‘The Military Clauses of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and
Alliance, 1936’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1
(Mar. 1984), pp. 67–97.
Mousa, S., ‘Jordan: Towards the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1841–1918’, in
A. Hadidi (ed.), Studies in the History of Archaeology of Jordan (Amman, 1982),
pp. 385–391.
Munro, J. M., The Nairn Way: Desert Bus to Baghdad (Delmar, NY, 1980).
Murray, J. R., ‘Asia from the Doorstep of 50 Albemarle Street’, Asian Affairs, Vol.
35, No. 2 (July 2004), pp. 183–199.
Nasaw, D., ‘Historians and Biography’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 114,
No. 3 (June 2009), pp. 573–578.
Ndagala, D. K., ‘Pastoralists and the State in Tanzania’, Nomadic Peoples, No.
25–27 (1990), pp. 51–64.
Nelson, C. (ed.), The Desert and the Sown: Nomads in the Wider Society (Berkeley,
1973).
Noyes, J. K., ‘Nomadic Landscapes and the Colonial Frontier: The Problem
of Nomadism in German South West Africa’, in L. Russell (ed.), Colonial
Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester,
2001), pp. 198–215.
Nugent, P. and Asiwaju, A. I. (eds.), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and
Opportunities (Edinburgh, 1996).
Offer, A., The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989).
Omissi, D. E., ‘Britain, The Assyrians and the Iraq Levies, 1919–1932’, Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1989), pp. 301–322.
Omissi, D. E., Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939
(Manchester, 1990).
Omissi, D. E., ‘The Mediterranean and the Middle East in British Global
Strategy: 1935–39’, in M. J. Cohen and M. Kolinsky (eds.), Britain and the
Middle East in the 1930s: Security Problems, 1935-39 (London, 1992), pp.
3–20.
Onley, J., The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British
in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford, 2007).
Owen, R., ‘The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience on British Policy in
Egypt, 1883–1907’, St. Antony’s Papers, Vol. 17 (1965), pp. 109–139.
Owen, R., ‘Class and Class Politics in Iraq Before 1958’, in R. A. Fernea and W.
R. Louis (eds.), The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 (London, 1991).
Bibliography 311
Parker, E. S., ‘John Thomson, 1837–1921: RGS Instructor in Photography’, The
Geographical Journal, Vol. 144, No. 3 (Nov. 1978), pp. 463–471.
Patai, R., The Arab Mind (New York, rev. ed. 2002).
Pedersen, S. ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument’, Geschichte
und Gesellschaft, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct–Dec. 2006), pp. 560–582.
Perdue, P., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard,
2005).
Perkins, K. J., ‘Colonial Administration in the Twilight of Imperialism: Great
Britain and the Egyptian Frontier Districts Administration, 1917–39’, Middle
Eastern Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Oct. 1982), pp. 411–425.
Perry, C. R., ‘In Search of H. V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in
the First Age of British Democracy’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 10,
No. 4 (1999), pp. 431–456.
Peter, F., ‘Dismemberment of Empire and Reconstitution of Regional Space: The
Emergence of ‘National’ Industries in Damascus between 1918 and 1946’,
in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The British and French Mandates in
Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp. 415–446.
Porter, D., Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing
(Princeton, 1991).
Porter, P., Military Orientalism (New York, 2009).
Pouillon, F. and Rivet, D. (eds.), La sociologie musulmane de Robert Montagne
(Paris, 1997).
Pratt, L. R., East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis, 1936–1939
(Cambridge, 1975).
al-Qasimi, M., The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London, 1988).
Ranger, T., ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case for Colonial Africa’, in
T. Ranger and O. Vaughan (eds.), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century
Africa: Essays in Honour of A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (London, 1993), pp. 5–50.
Reid, D. M., ‘Cromer and the Classics: Imperialism, Nationalism and the
Graeco-Roman Past in Modern Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1
(1996), pp. 1–29.
Reimer, M. J., Colonial Bridgehead: government and society in Alexandria,
1807-1882 (Boulder, 1997).
Richards, J. F., The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early
Modern World (Berkeley, 2003).
Robins, P., A History of Jordan (Cambridge, 2003).
Robinson, R. and Gallagher, J., Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of
Imperialism (London, 1961).
Rogan, E., ‘Asiret Mektebi: Abdulhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892–1907)’,
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb. 1996), pp.
83–107.
Rogan, E., Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–
1921 (Cambridge, 1999).
Rosenberg, E. S., ‘Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World’, in E. S. Rosenberg
(ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2012), pp. 813–996.
312 Bibliography
Rosenthal, F. (trans.), The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (Princeton,
2004).
Rothwell, S. K., ‘Military Ally or Liability? The Egyptian Army, 1936–1942’,
Army Quarterly and Defence Journal, Vol. 128, No. 2 (Apr. 1998), pp. 180–187.
Rowe, W. T., ‘Owen Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History’, Journal of Asian
Studies, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Aug. 2007), pp. 759–786.
Royle, T., Glubb Pasha: The Life and Times of Sir John Bagot Glubb, Commander of
the Arab Legion (London, 1992).
Rudd, J. A., ‘The Origins of the Transjordan Frontier Force’, Middle Eastern
Studies, Vol. 26 (1990), pp. 161–184.
Salzman, P. C., ‘Is “Nomadism” a Useful Concept?’, Nomadic Peoples No. 6 (June
1980), pp. 1–17.
Salzman, P. C., ‘Studying Nomads: An Autobiographical Reflection’, Nomadic
Peoples, No. 36–37 (1995), pp. 157–166.
Satia, P., Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s
Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford, 2008).
Schendel, W. van, ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping
Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol.
20 (2002), pp. 647–668.
Scott, J. C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998).
Scott, J. C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia (New Haven, CT, 2009).
Segrè, C. G., Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago, 1974).
Shaw, B. D., ‘Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk: The Ancient Mediterranean Ideology
of the Pastoral Nomad’, Ancient Society, Vols 13–14 (1982–1983), pp. 5–31.
Shaw, B. D., ‘A Peculiar Island: Maghrib and Mediterranean’, Mediterranean
Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Dec. 2003), pp. 93–125.
Shryock, A., Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and
Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley, 1997).
Sluglett, P., ‘Formal and Informal Empire in the Middle East’, in W. R. Louis
(ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire (5 vols, Oxford, 1998–1999), v,
pp. 416–436.
Sluglett, P., ‘The Mandates: Some Reflections on the Nature of the British Presence
in Iraq (1914–1932) and the French Presence in Syria (1918–1946)’, in N.
Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The British and French Mandates in Comparative
Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp. 103–127.
Sluglett, P., Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, 1914–1932 (New York,
2007).
Smith, L. V., ‘Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-Five Years
Later’, History and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 2 (May 2001), pp. 241–260.
Spear, T., ‘Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial
Africa’, Journal of African History, Vol. 44 (2003), pp. 3–27.
Spencer, I., ‘Pastoralism and Colonial Policy in Kenya, 1895–1929’, in R. Rotberg
(ed.), Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa (Lexington,
MA, 1983), pp. 113–140.
Bibliography 313
Steele, I. K., The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication
and Community (Oxford, 1986).
Stewart, F. H., ‘Tribal Law in the Arab World: A Review of the Literature’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 19. No. 4 (1987), pp. 473–490.
Stewart, F. H., ‘Customary Law Among the Bedouin of the Middle East and
North Africa’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and
North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 239–279.
Stiles, D. N., ‘Desertification and Pastoral Development in Northern Kenya’,
Nomadic Peoples, No. 13 (July 1983), pp. 1–14.
Subrahmanyam, S., ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration
of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1997), pp.
735–762.
Subramanian, L., ‘Of Pirates and Potentates: Maritime Jurisdiction and the
Construction of Piracy in the Indian Ocean’, in D. Ghosh and S. Mueche
(eds.), UTS Review: The Indian Ocean, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2000), pp. 14–23.
Sweet, L., ‘Camel Raiding of North Arabian Bedouin: A Mechanism of Ecological
Adaption’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 67 (1965), pp. 1132–1150.
Tagliacozzo, E., Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast
Asian Frontier, 1865–1925 (New Haven, CT, 2005).
Tamari, S., Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman
Past (Berkeley, 2011).
Tapper, R., ‘Anthropologists, Historians, and Tribespeople on Tribe and State
Formation in the Middle East’, in P. Khoury and J. Kostiner (eds.), Tribes and
State Formation in the Middle East (London, 1991), pp. 48–73.
Tell, T., ‘Guns, Gold and Grain: War and Food Supply in the Making of
Transjordan’, in S. Heydemann (ed.), War, Institutions and Social Change in the
Middle East (Berkeley, CA, 2000), pp. 33–58.
Thomas, M., ‘Bedouin Tribes and the Imperial Intelligence Services in Syria, Iraq
and Transjordan in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 38, No. 4
(Oct. 2003), pp. 539–561.
Thomas, M., Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after
1914 (Berkeley, 2008).
Thomas, N. J., ‘Exploring the Boundaries of Biography: The Family and
Friendship Networks of Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India, 1898–1905’, Journal
of Historical Geography, Vol.. 30 (2004), pp. 496–519.
Tidrick, K., ‘The Masai and Their Masters: A Psychological Study of District
Administration’, African Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Apr. 1980), pp. 15–31.
Tidrick, K., Empire and the English Character (London, 1992).
Tidrick, K., Heart-Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia (London,
1990).
Tomlinson, B. R., ‘The Contraction of England: National Decline and the Loss
of Empire’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 11, No. 1,
pp. 58–72.
Toth, A. B., ‘Conflict and a Pastoral Economy: The Costs of Akhwan Attacks on
Tribes in Iraq, 1922–1929’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 11,
No. 2 (Sept. 2002), pp. 201–227.
314 Bibliography
Toth, A. B., ‘Last Battles of the Bedouin and the Rise of Modern States in Northern
Arabia, 1850–1950’, in D. Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East
and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden, 2006), pp. 50–75.
Trégan, F., ‘Approche des Savoirs de l’Institut Francais de Damas: a la recherche
d’un temps mandataire’, in N. Méouchy and P. Sluglett (eds.), The British and
French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), pp. 235–247.
Trentmann, F., ‘Civilization and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism
and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western
Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Oct. 1994), pp.
583–625.
Tripp, C., A History of Iraq (Cambridge, 2002).
Ure, J., In Search of Nomads: An English Obsession from Hester Stanhope to Bruce
Chatwin (London, 2003).
Visser, R., Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq
(Münster, 2005).
Vitebsky, P., Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (London,
2005).
Warburg, G. R., ‘The Sinai Peninsula Borders, 1906–47’, Journal of Contemporary
History, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Oct. 1979), pp. 677–692.
Ward, S., ‘ “No Nation could be Broker”: The Satire Boom and the Demise of
Britain’s World Role’, in S. Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire
(Manchester, 2001), pp. 91–110.
Wasserstein, B., ‘ “Clipping the Claws of the Colonisers”: Arab Officials in the
Government of Palestine, 1917–1948’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2
(May 1977), pp. 171–194.
Waterhouse, R., ‘Settling the Land’, in D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds.), Australia’s
Empire (Oxford, 2008).
White, R., The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991).
Wigen, K., ‘Oceans of History’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 3
(June 2006), pp. 717–721.
Wilkinson, J. C., Arabia’s Frontiers: The Story of Britain’s Boundary Drawing in the
Desert (London, 1981).
Wolf, E. R., ‘Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 35,
No. 1 (Feb. 1994), pp. 1–12.
Young, L., Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism
(Berkeley, 1999).
UNPUBLISHED THESES
Hamarneh, M. B., ‘Social and Economic Transformation of Trans-Jordan, 1921–
1946’ (Georgetown University PhD thesis, 1985).
Rogan, E., ‘Incorporating the Periphery: The Ottoman Extension of Direct Rule
over Southeastern Syria (Transjordan), 1867–1914’ (Harvard University PhD
thesis, 1991).
Bibliography 315
Toth, A., ‘The Transformation of a Pastoral Economy: Bedouin and States in
Northern Arabia, 1850–1950’ (Oxford University D. Phil. thesis, 2000).
Winegard, T. C., ‘All the King’s Men: Indigenous Peoples of the Dominions and
the First World War’ (Oxford University D. Phil. thesis, 2010).
Worrall, R. J., ‘Britain and Libya: A Study of Military Bases and State Creation,
1945–1956’ (Oxford University D. Phil. thesis, 2010).
Index
Abdullah ibn Hussein (1882–1951), Emir Arab Revolt, First World Warâ•‡ 49,Â€204–5
of Trans-Jordanâ•‡ 113, 114, 115, 117, archaeology:Â€and Desert
118, 120–1, 122, 124, 191, 246,Â€250 Administrationâ•‡ 157, 186–7,
Abu Ghar (Shamiyah desert, Iraq)â•‡ 159 188–9, 191, 193–4, 199, 200, 201,
Abu Taya, Auda (d.1924), Howeitat 210–11,Â€211–12
shaykhâ•‡159 See also desert development; Peake;
‘Adwan rebellion (1923)â•‡ 34, 114–15,Â€191 Jarvis;Â€Glubb
aerial bombardmentâ•‡ see air control el-Aref, Aref (1892–1973), politician
Ahaywatâ•‡172 and District Officer, Beershebaâ•‡ 151
Ahmed, Sayyid, Grand Senussi n118; see also Beersheba
(1873–1933)â•‡86 auxiliaries (indigenous)â•‡ see recruitment;
agriculture:Â€and development,â•‡ 37–8, policing; Arab Legion; Southern
39 n128, 80 n72, 184, 190–3, Desert Camel Corps; Frontier
208,Â€279–80 Districts Administration
See also desert development; Glubb; Awazimâ•‡145
Jarvis; mode of life;Â€Peake Awlad Aliâ•‡ 144,Â€146
aircraft:Â€and desert flightâ•‡ 67 n1, 73–4,Â€186 Azazmaâ•‡172
See also communications; desert Azraq (Trans-Jordan)â•‡ 67, 80, 113, 124,
corridor; Royal AirÂ€Force 159, 217, 222,Â€223
Air Ministryâ•‡ 102, 120, 121, 122,
225,Â€246 Bagnold, Ralph Alger (1896–1990),
air controlâ•‡ 98, 101–2, 103, 108, 117, explorer, British Army officer
150, 231,Â€255 and scientistâ•‡ 80, 133, 179 n274,
air routesâ•‡ see communications 269–70,Â€271
Ajmanâ•‡ 84,Â€145 Bair (Trans-Jordan)â•‡ 124, 159,Â€223
Allenby, Edmund, Field Marshal and High Bakhtiariâ•‡ 34, 278; see alsoÂ€Iran
Commissioner for Egypt and the Basraâ•‡96–7
Sudan (1861–1936)â•‡ 23 n30, 89, 91, Ball, John (1872–1941), Egypt Desert
173 n233,Â€248 Surveyâ•‡81
Amaratâ•‡ 98, 103; see also Ibn Hadhdhal Bedouin:Â€British attitudes towardsâ•‡ 183
Amira (Egypt)â•‡ 82, 92,Â€249 andâ•‡ dira 126, 135,Â€174
Ammanâ•‡ 72, 74, 97 n197, 129, 159, 193 razing grounds and patternsâ•‡ 91, 143–5,
n65,Â€194 153–4, 156, 158, 167, 173, 174,
Anazaâ•‡ 2, 98, 99 n209, 101, 104, 179,Â€263
108, 145, 222; see also Amarat; as information sourceâ•‡ 120, 155,
Dahamshah;Â€Ruwala 158–63, 167–8, 175, 220–1, 249,
Anglo-Egyptian treaty (1936)â•‡ 243, 244, 262, 263–4, 270–1,Â€282
245, 253, 260,Â€266 and the interwar periodâ•‡ 11, 13, 99,
anti-colonialismâ•‡ see nationalism 126, 134–7, 140–1,Â€197–8
Aqabaâ•‡ 36, 85, 90, 115, 142, 151–2,Â€158 and nationality questionâ•‡ 173–6
Arab Bureauâ•‡ 45,Â€48,Â€95 population estimatesâ•‡ 21–2
Arab Legion, Trans-Jordanâ•‡ 12, 111, 114, and sedentarizationâ•‡ 77, 134–5, 136,
118, 119, 153, 167, 191, 192, 204, 163, 187, 198–9, 202, 207–8, 213,
230–1, 254,Â€255–6 233, 236, 264,Â€265–6
Desert Patrolâ•‡ 77, 116, 123, 159, 160, See also Bedouin raiding; nomadism;
171, 204 n123, 220 n224, 222, 223, recruitment; smuggling
226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 250, Bedouin Control Ordinance
254,Â€255 (Palestine)â•‡151
318 Index
Bedouin raiding 35, 99–101, 102, 103–4, communications 35–6, 59–60, 70–1,
105–8, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117, 79–80, 156, 280
119, 121–2, 140–1, 146, 160–1, air routes 30, 36, 67–8, 78
161–2, 165–6, 168–9, 171, 178–9, and desert administration 28, 36, 61,
221, 224 71, 74–5, 80–1, 93, 103–4, 109, 127,
Beersheba 21, 67, 144, 151, 152, 153, 153, 166, 243, 280, 281–2
169, 172 road-building 36, 50, 75–7, 80, 157,
Bell, Gertrude (1868–1926), traveller and 158, 210, 261
administrator, Iraq 48, 53, 161, 196 wireless 28, 72, 149, 160, 169, 171,
Beni Atiya 120, 124, 174, 250 224–5, 280
Beni Huchaim 98 See also desert air route; desert corridor;
Beni Sakhr 68, 113, 114, 115, 116, Haifa-Baghdad railway; Nairn Motor
118, 119, 150 n105, 174, 198, Company; oil
213–14, 229 conscription 92, 105, 163, 251, 252, 261
Bentwich, Norman (1883–1971), Contrôle Bédouin, Syria 127, 169, 171,
Attorney-General, Palestine 31 175 n244
Billi 120, 150 Cornwallis, Sir Kinahan (1883–1959),
biography: and imperial history 10–11 Arab Bureau and Advisor to Ministry
borderlands: and scholarship 9, 135, 150, of Interior, Iraq 24, 46, 108–9
181, 276 Cox, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry,
boundaries: and the interwar Middle British Resident, Amman 21,
East 134–5, 136–7, 144, 146, 150, 115–16, 117, 122, 187 n29, 191, 252
156–7, 170–1, 172, 173, 175, 176, Cox, Sir Percy (1864–1937), High
180–1, 214, 262 Commissioner for Iraq 24, 34
Brooke-Popham, Air Vice-Marshal n91, 173
Robert (1878–1953), Air Officer Cromer, Lord (1841–1917),
Commanding Iraq 67 n1, 74, 178 Consul-General of Egypt 50, 85,
Brunton, Captain Chisholm (b.1887), 186 n19, 192
Trans-Jordan Reserve Force 114, 118 Curzon, Lord (1859–1925), Viceroy of
Burma Frontier Service 34 India and Foreign Secretary 20–1,
Burton, Major, surveyor 72, 74, 81 23, 34, 60, 79, 91 n150, 93
Busaiyah: attack on (1927) 102, 105, 119 n164, 181
customary law see Desert Law
Cairo conference (1921) 98
cartography: and Desert Dahamshah 103, 106, 107, 146
Administration 62, 69, 80–1, 85, Damascus-Baghdad caravan route 74, 157
145, 149, 150, 159 Deedes, Sir Wyndham (1883–1956), Chief
See also communications; surveying Secretary, Palestine 123
Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau De Gaury, Gerald (1897–1984), Special
(Egypt) see Russell; Sinai; smuggling Service Officer, Political Officer
Chancellor, Sir John Robert (1870–1952), and diplomat 146, 257–8, 269
High Commissioner for n158, 270
Palestine 118–19, 120, 121–2 Deir ez-Zor (Syria-Iraq frontier) 157
Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer de Lancey Forth, Lieutenant Colonel
(1874–1965), as Secretary of State N. B., Frontier Districts
for War and Air and Colonial Administration 82
Secretary 71–2 Desert Administration 2, 3, 7, 15, 37,
Cobham, Alan (1894–1973), aviator 74 40, 43, 62, 122–3, 124–30, 163,
Colonial Office 102, 108, 115, 121, 153, 168–72, 175, 181, 184, 219, 233,
166, 246 242, 243, 245, 247–8, 258, 262,
Colonial Service 39–40 267–8, 274–6
colonial troops see recruitment; policing; in Egypt 84–96
Arab Legion; Southern Desert as interwar phenomenon 278–81
Camel Corps; Frontier Districts in Iraq 98–111
Administration military character 29–30
Index 319
in Trans-Jordan, 111–24 British occupation of 4
See also Frontier Districts Administration; British Residency 31, 52, 88–90, 92,
Arab Legion; Special Service Officers 96, 250
desert air route 67–8, 71–5, 78, 104; see Egyptian Army 89, 92, 94, 251,
also communications; Royal Air Force 260, 268–9
desert corridor 15–16, 67–8, 69–82, four ‘reserved points’ (1922) 90, 91, 94,
84, 104, 129–30, 133, 144–5, 154, 95, 243
156–7, 168, 171–2, 176–7, 180–2, See also Desert Administration;
184, 200–1, 243, 261, 266, 276–7; nationalism; First World War;
see also Syrian Desert Frontier Districts Administration;
desert development 36, 184–90, 208–9, Sinai; Western Desert
232–7; see also Jarvis; Peake; Glubb El Arish 67, 76 n48, 165, 195, 201, 249
desert forts 99–100, 109, 113, 115, 123, Ellington, Air Vice-Marshal Edward
154, 158–60, 171, 254 Leonard (1877–1967), Air Officer
desert furrow see desert air route Commanding Iraq 106–7
Desert Law 94, 163–7, 174, 175, 181, Eurasian arid zone 58–9, 60–2, 65,
208, 250, 251–2, 261, 265 277–9, 280
desert officers 11, 29, 45–6, 65, 80, 125,
128, 155, 164–6, 184, 208, 268, 282 Faisal ibn Hussein (1885–1933), king of
and isolation 29–30 Iraq 83, 100, 104–10, 224
and understandings of the al-Faiz, Mithqal (d.1967), shaykh of the
desert 125–6, 219, 232, 247, Beni Sakhr 114
269–71, 281 Febvre, Lucien (1878–1956),
See also Desert Administration; Royal historian 20, 26, 53, 57, 61 n278, 62
Central Asian Society n280, 126, 215, 234
desert warfare 36–7, 177–8, 203, 216, 225, federation schemes 176–7, 254
226–7; see also recruitment; policing Field Museum Expedition to the Near
deserts: as compared with oceans 133, East 31, 32 n79
157, 177–80, 181, 271 Fillet, Captain, Tribal Officer to Jebel
desiccation 40, 62, 193–6, 210–11, Druze, Syria 169, 171
212–13, 280–1 First World War 4, 20, 24, 68–9, 157,
Dhafir 99 n209, 107, 141, 145, 220, 221 215, 216
n229, 222 effect on Bedouin groups 4–6, 33, 74,
Dickson, Harold Richard Patrick 97–8, 205, 280
(1881–1951), army officer, Political effect on desert communications 20,
Officer, Iraq and Political Agent, 70, 125, 270
Kuwait 30, 54, 83 n96, 173, See also Arab Revolt; Senussi Rebellion;
175, 234 Sinai and Palestine campaign;
Dobbs, Sir Henry Robert Conway Mesopotamia campaign
(1871–1934), High Commissioner Forde, Cyril Daryll (1902–1973),
for Iraq 24, 69, 104–5, 106–8, 178–9 anthropologist 62 n280, 144, 218
Doughty, Charles Montagu (1843–1926), Foreign Office 4, 28 n49, 46–7, 81, 92,
traveller and writer 47–8 96, 102, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111,
Dowson, Sir Ernest MacLeod 113, 119, 242–3, 247, 258–9, 266–7
(1876–1950), director of land surveys French mandatory territory: cooperation
in Egypt and Palestine 172, 175 with British Desert
drought 35, 145, 185, 198, 200, 213 Administration 169, 170–1,
Dust Bowl 195–6, 212–13; see also 264 n128
desiccation tribal policy 6 n12, 31, 43, 214, 227
al-Duweish, Faisal (d.1931), shaykh of See also Contrôle Bédouin
the Mutair and leader of Ikhwan Frontier Districts Administration
Revolt 153; see also Ikhwan Revolt (Egypt) 12, 13, 30, 42, 43, 47,
76, 80, 81, 82, 87–96, 139, 140,
Egypt: pre-colonial administration of 147, 148, 153, 170 n220, 172–3,
desert territories 84–5, 161 200, 245–6, 248, 250–1, 253, 257,
British Army in 80, 268–9 258–9, 267, 269
320 Index
Frontier Districts Administration (cont.) Howeitat 68, 113, 116, 118, 144, 150,
159, 199, 214, 220 n227, 224,
Light Car Patrols and Camel Corps 88, 229
90, 92, 94, 122–3, 141–2, 147–8, Howes, Flying Officer Ernest, Special
149, 151, 152, 153, 158, 250–1, 254, Service Officer 101, 141, 214, 222
255, 257 Hull, Edith Maude (1880–1947),
See also Desert Administration; writer 49, 53
Jarvis; Sinai; smuggling; Wallace; Hunter, Colonel G.C., Western Desert
Western Desert Frontier Force and Frontier Districts
Administration 88, 92
Glubb, Sir John Bagot (1897–1986) 12, Huntingdon, Ellsworth (1876–1947),
46, 81, 110, 128, 140, 159–60, 165, geographer 63
167–8, 168–9, 173, 189, 190, 229, 247 Hussein ibn Ali (1853–1931), emir of
attitude towards sedentarizaton 35 Mecca 115
and Bedouin recruitment 97, 101–2,
108, 220, 224–9, 230, 254, 255 Ibn Bassam, Mohammed, Ruwala
on Desert Administration 43, 99, shaykh 157–8
103, 109, 111, 170, 171–2, 176, Ibn Hadhdhal, Fahd (d.1927), shaykh
247–8, 268 of the Amarat 99, 100–1, 113,
and desert development 184, 186, 188, 146, 163
209–12, 214, 217–18, 222–5 Ibn Hadhdhal, Mahrut, shaykh of the
and trans-desert communications 69, Amarat 101, 103, 104, 105
70, 176, 254 Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406), administrator
views on Bedouin life 21, 32, 51, and philosopher 53–4, 136, 193
52, 174, 178, 203, 209, 213–14, Ibn Rifada rebellion (1932) 151, 170
215–17, 219–22 Ibn Saud, Abd al-Aziz (1876–1953), ruler
as writer 28, 189, 268 of Nejd and King of Saudi Arabia 34,
Green, A.W., Governor of Western 35, 68, 77, 83–4, 90–1, 100–1, 104,
Desert Province, Frontier Districts 105, 157, 173, 207–8, 255, 279
Administration 82, 162, 249, 251 identity cards 176, 263
Ikhwan 74, 83, 100, 102, 103, 113, 117,
H4 (desert station, Trans-Jordan) 136–7 141, 200, 224, 227
Hadda Agreement 71, 116, 144 n68; see Ikhwan Revolt (1927–30) 35, 83–4, 105,
also boundaries 108, 113, 153, 162, 170, 185, 192,
Haifa-Baghdad railway scheme 30, 36, 248, 252, 255; see also Ikhwan; Ibn
77–8, 79, 81, 104, 157, 247 Saud; Desert Administration
Ha’il (Nejd) 83, 100, 109 Imperial Airways see communications;
Hailey, Lord (1872–1969), colonial desert air route
administrator 23 n30, 209 India: Government of 4, 102, 105,
Harb 84, 145 107–8, 138
hashish 137–8, 139–40; see also smuggling North-West Frontier policing and
Hatton, Major Leonard, Officer policy 34–5, 36, 41, 44–5, 50, 63,
Commanding Camel Corps and 64, 104
Light Car Patrols, Frontier Districts Ingrams, Harold (1897–1973), Political
Administration 80, 82 Officer, Aden 24, 64, 223
Hedjaz 84, 91, 115, 151, 159, 174, 264 Iran: tribal policy 34, 141, 278
Hedjaz railway 61–2, 67, 71, 114, 190, Iraq: Army 225–6
204, 243, 254 Assyrian community 35, 105, 207,
Hill, Wing Commander Sir Roderic 249 n31
Maxwell (1894–1954) 67–8; see also Shi’ite rebellion (1920) 98, 110
desert air route Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes
Hogarth, David George Regulations 165
(1862–1927), Arab Bureau and See also Desert Administration;
archaeologist 31, 207–8 Shamiyah; Special Service Officers
Holt, Major A.L. (1896–1971), army Iraq Petroleum Company 159, 171; see
officer and surveyor 70, 72, 77, 157 also oil
Index 321
Islam: British views of 63–4 Lattimore, Owen (1900–1989),
Italy: invasion of Abyssinia 71, 244, 245, anthropologist, scholar and
253, 255, 263 traveller 21, 31, 35, 212–13, 214,
tribal policy in Libya 91, 146, 162, 218, 235
163, 262–3, 279 Lampson, Sir Miles Wedderburn
(1880–1964), High Commissioner
al-Jafr (Trans-Jordan) 159 for Egypt and the Sudan 24, 82, 94,
Jamali, Mohammed Fadhil (1903–1997), 96, 244, 251, 253, 267
Iraqi politician 223 n247, 265–6 land reform 3, 112, 199
Jarvis, Claude Scudamore (1879–1953) 1, Lausanne, Treaty of (1923) 68
11–12, 46, 47, 82, 88, 93, 94, 187 Lawrence, Thomas Edward
n26, 189, 247, 256 (1888–1935) 48–9, 85 n103, 113,
on Desert Administration 43, 202, 274 187, 190, 204–5
and desert development 185, 186, 188, Lawrence of Arabia Memorial
195–6, 198, 201–3, 211 Medal (Royal Central Asian
time as Governor of Sinai 76, 82–2, Society) 45–7, 183–4
139, 141, 142–3, 146, 147–9, Leachman, Colonel Gerard Evelyn
150–3, 195, 196, 201–3, 249, (1880–1920), army officer and
257 traveller 98
views on the Bedouin 48, 52, 64, 192, League of Nations 3, 34, 173, 223
195–6, 197, 198, 205 Permanent Mandates Commission 207
as writer 12 n34, 28, 49 n199, 189, Convention on Opium 138–9
190, 271 Liddell Hart, Basil (1895–1970),
Jauf (Nejd) 36, 68, 159, 169, 171, 224 army officer, journalist and
Jebel Druze 169, 264 n128; see also historian 179
Syrian Revolt Lloyd, George Ambrose (1879–1941),
Jebel Tubeiq 67, 170 High Commissioner for Egypt and
Jennings-Bramley, Wilfred (1871–1960), the Sudan 23 n30, 91, 94, 95–6,
army officer and administrator, 129, 267
Sudan, Sinai and Western Desert 82, Locke, John (1632–1704) 38
85, 218, 271 Long Range Desert Group 80–1, 179
Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society n274, 269
14, 25–8, 44, 48, 60 Longrigg, Stephen Hemsley (1893–1979),
jundis see Arab Legion: Desert Patrol administrator in Iraq and Iraq
Petroleum Company executive 24
Kaf 68, 115, 159, 169
Karbala 106, 224 Ma’an (Trans-Jordan) 67, 91, 115, 199,
Kennedy-Shaw, Major William Boyd 200, 213, 214
(1901–1979), Sudan Agricultural Maasai 56, 57, 65–6, 188 n31, 213, 218
Service and Long Range Desert MacDonnell raid arbitration
Group 82 (1930–31) 122, 169, 221
Kennett, Austin, Frontier Districts Mackinder, Halford (1861–1947),
Administration 167, 234 geographer and politician 59–61
Kharga oasis (Egypt) 1, 81–2, 246 MacMichael, Sir Harold Alfred
Khasabha, Ahmed, Minister of War (1882–1969), High Commissioner
(Egypt) 95–6 for Palestine 228 n283, 254
khuwwa 75, 141, 161, 171, 221 mandates 11, 31, 135 n11; see also
Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936): and Iraq; League of Nations; Palestine;
Claude Jarvis 31–2, 47 Trans-Jordan
Kirkbride, Sir Alec Seath (1897–1978), al-Mansur, Yusuf Beg 105
assistant secretary, Palestine Mesopotamia campaign (First World
and assistant British Resident, War) 23, 97–8, 205; see also First
Trans-Jordan 24, 54, 196, 205 World War; Arab Revolt
Kuwait 96, 101, 107, 145, 156 n137, Milner Mission to Egypt
157, 162, 167, 173, 227, 234, 263 (1919–21) 88–9, 91, 92
322 Index
‘mode of life’ 7, 16, 56–8, 184, 188, nomadism 8, 55–6, 62, 161, 180,
189–90, 191, 196–8, 203, 205, 218–19, 234
208, 214, 215, 216, 225, 233, 235, British attitudes towards 16, 37–9,
273–4; see also agriculture; desert 48, 51–8, 60, 172–6, 177–8, 184,
development; nomadism; stage theory 185, 188, 189–90, 196–7, 205–6,
Mongol nomads 33–4, 35, 51, 212–13, 212–15, 218, 223, 235
218, 278, 279 contemporary romanticism towards 22,
Montagne, Robert (1893–1954), 232 n302
sociologist, Director of Institut See also Bedouin; ‘mode of life’; desert
Français de Damas 31 development
Montagu, John Walter Edward
Douglas-Scott- (1866–1929), O’Dwyer, Sir Michael Francis
promoter of motoring 36; see also (1864–1940), Lieutenant Governor
road-building of the Punjab 23
Moore, Flight Lieutenant Guy, Special oil 4, 77, 80 n72, 104, 185, 193, 237,
Service Officer, Iraq 81, 82, 272; see also Iraq Petroleum Company
102–3, 221 Ottoman Empire: presence in desert
Mudawara (Trans-Jordan) 124, 159, 223 provinces 54–5, 96–7, 112, 125,
Murray, Sir Archibald James (1860–1945), 180, 193, 199, 223, 236
commander of the Egyptian Overland Reinforcement Route (Syrian
Expeditionary Force 86, 87; see also Desert) 81
Sinai and Palestine campaign
Murray, John (Foreign Office) 92, 128, Palestine: Jewish settlement in 39, 173,
242 n6, 256, 258–9, 260 202–3, 211, 245
Murray, John (publishers) 28 Palestine Revolt (1936–39) 191–2, 220
musabilah 98, 101, 144–5, 175, 263 n227, 244–5, 254–5, 263
Mutair 54, 84, 99 n209, 102, 145 Palgrave, William Gifford (1826–1888),
traveller, writer and diplomat 47, 62
Naguib, Mohammed (1901–1984), Palmer, Edward Henry (1840–1882),
Egyptian Army officer, Frontier scholar, surveyor and spy in
Districts Administration and Sinai 196 n75, 219
President of Egypt 250–1, 253, Paris Peace Conference (1919) 172–3
257 n84 Parker, Colonel Alfred Chevalier
Nahhas, Mustafa (1879–1965), (1874–1935), Governor of Sinai 85
Prime Minister of Egypt 152–3, Peake, Federick Gerard (1886–1970) 12, 46,
252–3, 260 81, 112, 114, 115, 117–18, 119–20,
Nairn Transport Company 72 n24, 75–6, 122–3, 151–3, 157, 158, 162, 164,
157–8; see also communications; 167, 186–7, 189, 193–4, 229, 247, 250
desert corridor and agriculture 183–4, 190–2, 199,
‘Nairn way’ see Nairn Transport Company 200–1, 208, 230
Najaf (Iraq) 106, 224 and military recruitment 203–7, 225,
Nasiriyah (Iraq) 74, 100, 110, 145, 263 226, 229–32, 254 n63
nationalism 3, 16, 114, 126–7, 128–9, views on the Bedouin 53, 55, 118, 123,
242–3, 244–5, 249–52, 271, 174, 190–2, 193, 194, 196, 197,
275–6 204–7, 231, 256
Egyptian 89, 91, 93, 137–9, 148, 152, and writing 27–8, 189
156, 244, 249, 251, 252–3, 257, 260 Philby, Harry St.John Bridger
Iraqi 106, 111, 244, 249–50, 252, (1885–1960), administrator,
257–8, 259–60 Mesopotamia, British representative,
and sedentarization 135, 175, 236, Trans-Jordan, Arabist and
237, 264, 265–6 traveller 35, 46, 77, 112, 123, 207
navigation: in the desert 80, 158, 270–1 piracy: in British colonial
Negev 67, 151–2, 153, 172, 185, 202, discourse 178–9, 179–80
211, 266, 271 Playfair, Air Marshal Sir Patrick
Nejdi tribes 71, 105, 106, 227–8 (1889–1974) 158
Index 323
policing: colonial 10 n28, 36, 97, 101–2, San Remo conference (1920) 98
155, 192, 203, 227 sand tyres 80, 149
See also recruitment Sandeman, Sir Robert Groves
(1835–1892), political officer
race: and nomadism 53, 56–8, 64, and Chief Commissioner of
189–90, 191, 206, 226, 228–9, 273 Baluchistan 29, 37, 49–50,
See also ‘mode of life’; stage theory 52, 221–2
Raids see Bedouin raiding Second World War 143, 177, 179,
recruitment: of Bedouin 105–8, 109–10, 184, 185, 228, 255–6, 261, 265,
110–11, 126–7, 148, 149–50, 269–70, 271
204–7, 224–32 Senussi 34, 86–7, 91, 206, 262
See also policing: colonial Senussi Rebellion (1915–17) 86–7, 88,
Reserve Force (Trans-Jordan) 114 90, 257; see also First World War;
Royal Air Force (RAF) 62, 101, 102, 108, Western Desert Frontier Force
231, 255; see also air control; desert Service de Renseignements (Syria) 171
air route; Special Service Officers Shafik, Ahmed, Frontier Districts
Royal Central Asian Society 13–14, 15, Administration 89, 257
16, 30, 32–3, 40–2, 46, 48, 49, 50–1, Sha’lan, Nuri (1847–1942), shaykh of the
59–60, 65, 70, 77, 78, 182, 189, 195, Ruwala 77, 145 n72, 170, 205; see
205, 233, 275 also Ruwala
dialogue with scholarship and Shamiyah (Southern Desert, Iraq) 96,
academia 31–2 97–8, 102–3, 104–5, 108–9,
library 24 110–11, 167–8, 209–10, 214, 219,
membership 24–6, 28–32, 42–3 224, 261, 263, 264
origins 23–4 Shammar 2, 99, 100–1, 103, 105,
and ‘The Tribal Question’ 22, 33–7, 44, 107, 145, 156 n138, 227; see also
50–1, 58, 59, 63–4, 184, 196, 221, al-Yawir, Ajil
234–5, 237, 274 Shanklin, William, anthropologist 31–2
See also Journal of the Royal Central Sheik, The (1919) see Hull, Edith
Asian Society; Lawrence of Arabia Sinai 63, 67, 76, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 90,
Memorial Medal 91–2, 93, 94, 122–3, 136, 137, 139,
Royal Geographical Society 23, 27, 31, 141, 142–3, 146–9, 158, 165, 170
40, 57, 59, 66 n307, 77, 271 n170 n 220, 172–3, 201–3, 219, 241–2,
‘Rules for Raiders’ scheme (Iraq, 249, 252–3, 271–2; see also El Arish;
1925–6) 99–101 Frontier Districts Administration;
Rumm (Trans-Jordan) 124, 159, 199, 200 Jarvis; smuggling
Russell, Thomas Wentworth (1879–1954), Sinai and Palestine campaign (First World
Commandant, Cairo City Police War) 86, 87, 112, 143, 153, 204–5;
and Director, Central Narcotics see also Arab Revolt; First World War;
Intelligence Bureau 59, 139, 142, Murray, Sir Archibald James
145 n74, 166 n192, 270; see also Singh, Udham (1899–1940), Indian
smuggling nationalist 23
Rutbah (Iraq) 68, 72, 78, 101, 136, Siwa (Egypt) 158
157, 169 Smart, Walter, Oriental Secretary, British
Ramadi (Iraq) 72, 169 Residency, Cairo 93, 151, 251, 255,
Ruwala 71, 77, 99 n209, 119, 145 n72, 259, 260
166, 227; see also Anaza; Sha’lan smuggling 147, 148, 157, 263
of hashish 137, 139–44, 146–7, 151,
al-Sa’id, Nuri (1888–1958), Iraqi army 155, 156, 173
officer and Prime Minister 106, Sollum (Western Desert, Egypt) 86, 263
107, 109 Southern Desert Camel Corps (Iraq) 108,
Samawah (Iraq) 145 109–10, 122, 170, 225, 227, 255
Samuel, Sir Herbert Louis (1870–1963), Special Service Officers 12, 81, 98, 102–3,
High Commissioner for 110, 121, 160, 162, 170, 188, 241,
Palestine 113, 114 246, 248, 249, 252, 257–8, 259, 264
324 Index
Stack, Sir Lee Oliver Fitzmaurice Turner, Frederick Jackson (1861–1932),
(1868–1924), sirdar: assassination of historian 9, 21, 63, 278 n14
(1924) 249
stage theory 58, 196, 215, 218, 235; see Unwin, A.H. (b. 1878), colonial forester 201
also ‘mode of life’
Stark, Dame Freya Madeline (1893–1993), Wadi Araba 152, 153, 173
traveller and writer 178 Wadi Gedeirat scheme (Sinai) 201–3; see
Stein, Sir Aurel (1862–1943), explorer and also agriculture; archaeology; desert
archaeologist 29, 31, 274 development; Jarvis
Storrs, Sir Ronald Henry Amherst Wadi Sirhan 68, 77, 115, 116, 170,
(1881–1955), Arab Bureau and 173, 224
colonial governor 24, 116 Wafd (Egypt) 147–8, 244, 253, 257
‘street Arabs’ 57 Wahhabism 34, 35, 48, 96; see also
Sudan Notes and Records 32, 275 Ikhwan; Ikhwan Revolt
Sudan Political Service 275 Wallace, D.J., Civil Secretary, Frontier
Suez Canal 67, 76, 78–9, 86 Districts Administration 88, 89, 90,
Sulman (Iraq) 212, 217, 264 94, 95, 143, 151
Suq as Shuyukh (Iraq) 145 War Office (British) 41, 86
surveying 24, 36, 72, 74, 77, 85, 186; see Wasfi, Mohammed, Frontier Districts
also cartography; communications Administration officer 245–6, 248,
sun compass see navigation 249, 251, 253 n58, 257
Syrian Desert 2, 4, 63, 67–8, 70, 79, 83, Wavell, Field Marshal Archibald Percival
157, 176–7, 179, 180–1, 218; see also (1883–1950) 23 n30
desert corridor Western Desert (Egypt) 82, 86–7, 88,
Syrian Revolt (1925–26) 75, 243 91, 140 n37, 142, 143, 158, 179,
252–3, 260; see also Frontier Districts
Taba incident (1906) 85, 136, 172, 252 Administration
Tarabin 172 Western Desert Frontier Force (First
Terrier, Captain Charles, Head of the World War) 87, 88; see also Senussi
Contrôle Bédouin, Syria 175 n244 Rebellion
Thesiger, Wilfrid Patrick (1910–2004), Wilson, Sir Arnold Talbot (1884–1940),
District Commissioner, Sudan, acting Civil Commissioner,
traveller and writer 64 n293, 81 Mesopotamia 24, 44, 45, 48, 72, 74,
‘Third Route’ see communications 193 n59, 208
Thomas, Bertram (1892–1950), Assistant Woolley, Flight Lieutenant, Special Service
Political Officer, Mesopotamia, Officer, Iraq 146, 166
Assistant Resident, Trans-Jordan, and World War I see First World War
traveller 24, 45 World War II see Second World War
Thomas, Lowell Jackson (1892–1981),
journalist and broadcaster 49 al-Yawir, Ajil, shaykh of the Shammar and
Tiyaha 172, 201–2 Iraqi politician 99–100, 103, 113,
Trans-Jordan: British presence in 70, 71, 163; see also Shammar
83, 114, 157 Young, Sir Hubert Winthrop
Bedouin Control Board 169, 214, (1885–1950), Political Officer and
252 diplomat 105, 205
Bedouin Control Law 124, 165, 167
Tribal Control Board 119–21 Zaghlul, Sa’d (1859–1927), Prime Minister
See also Arab Legion; Desert of Egypt 252
Administration Zayd, Shakir bin (d.1934), president
Trans-Jordan Frontier Force 116–18, of the Bedouin Control Board,
118–19, 121, 205, 231 Trans-Jordan 113, 120, 121,
Trenchard, Air Marshal Hugh Montagu 124, 167
(1873–1956), Chief of the Air Ziza (Trans-Jordan) 67, 68, 74
Staff 71, 117 Zubair (Iraq) 145, 162, 167

(Oxford Historical Monographs) Robert S. G. Fletcher - British Imperialism and 'The Tribal Question' - Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in The Middle East, 1919 - 1936-Oxford University Pre

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Oxford Historical Monographs) Robert S. G. Fletcher - British Imperialism and 'The Tribal Question' - Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in The Middle East, 1919 - 1936-Oxford University Pre

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND

‘THE TRIBAL QUESTION’

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables xi

Introduction: The View from the Frontier 1

Appendix: Dramatis Personae 285

I.1 The Middle East in 1923 5

4.1 ‘Peake’s Garden in the Town of Amman, the Site of a Ruined

1.1 RCAS Membership, 1907–1934 25

deserts, nomads, and empires in the interwar world provides a thread

routes of empire—required only a limited and littoral presence in the

ALEXANDRIA JERUSALEM N S- I R A Q KARBALA

Map I.1 The Middle East in 1923

evidence—from a most unlikely place—of its ongoing vitality. This was

nomads themselves to be ‘the ultimate administrative nightmare’.18 As

imperial expansion.24 Thinking with new conceptions of frontiers and bor-

The return of the biographical method—‘the profession’s unloved step-

to contemporaries, if less so today.35 Educated with no particular profes-

but neglected by professional historians. Regular news items, lectures, and

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

analysis, offering a new understanding of its inhabitants and administra-

Many questions assume a very different aspect when viewed from a

Victory, armistice, and protracted diplomacy brought the British Empire

This chapter argues for one such act of reorientation. It reconstructs

authority told the Society, ‘and have never been on an aeroplane in

ASKING ‘ THE TRIBAL QUESTION’:

The cooling of Anglo-Russian tensions had caused interest in the

Members 107 127 133 180 761 1,293 1,465

patterns and connections which influenced the conduct of administration

postwar printing costs.43 This is not to dismiss the personal dimension

medium for a man trained in arms’.49 Despite Jarvis’ intervention on

is, if anything, under-represented in the membership lists, where military

the prospect of returning to regular duty ‘disheartening’: ‘I cannot bear

improved communications, a ‘Bedouin Industries’ programme, and

e­ xamples . . . resonated throughout British colonial security policy’.97 Yet

fear of Russian railways, to the emerging potential of wartime trans-

wider reflections on the centrality of water management in defence and

pedigree: since antiquity, the social order of nomads—those ‘eaters of flesh

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a budding professionalism within Britain’s

(1926), fisheries (1928), agriculture (1929), and animal health (1930).

region required.143 The records left by Special Service Officers attest to

statement of their suitability.151 The grant of a royal charter, adoption of a

forum, not a consensual old boys’ network. In 1929, Arnold Wilson

Some members openly advised against importing Indian administrative

the Foreign Office commented on Jarvis’ suitability.178 The following

tribal system’ without further explanation.219 In this sense, debating the

sown’. However well-worn the dichotomy between pastoralists and

in mandatory Palestine, for example, reinforces long-standing assump-

formed an intellectual package that was sometimes crude, sometimes

contradictory prisms through which Britons perceived their empire. At

Tribes lived’.279 Glubb, trained as a Royal Engineer, copiously illustrated

objections, and working through this ambitious worldview. As Owen

proved notoriously difficult to define. Peveril Meigs’ scientific formulation—a common

‘easygoing’ in their religion, cannot be reduced to this alone.293 Instead,

as we seldom have to date, the shape, scope, and dynamics of a greater

What commonalities lay behind these conceptions of ‘the corridor’?

defined in the Hadda Agreement, bridging an ‘all-red’ route to Iraq and

HA'IL R.S.G FLETCHER 2011

Map 2.1 Trans-Desert Communications Routes, 1919–1939

1926 1,910 15,936 4,980 26,060,377

of ‘Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Canadians, Australians and South

of a metalled road through Trans-Jordan’s lava field in 1938–1940, bridging

prospectus imagined it passing through the lava field to arrive at Rutbah,

Certainly, the Canal continued to loom large in numerous interwar confer-

e xamples . . . resonated throughout British colonial security policy’.97 Yet