(No, I'm not talking about mad cowboys)
I just read something interesting. During WWI, when the British finally got their act together and fired their incompetent generals, the Indian army operated the Mesopotamian campaign. By 1917, the territory of modern-day Iraq had been secured for the King-Emperor by his suitably colourful Doghra foot, Gurkha rifles and Punjabi lancers (does it show I'm an aficionado of the Raj?) the government in Delhi pondered whether the territory should not be subsumed under Anglo-indian control (a suggestion very quickly quashed by the Foreign Office, who wanted something to give their Arab allies). That would have meant:
- the ICS (Oxbridge graduates with at least three oriental lnguages) run the administration rather than Foreign Office old-boys in concert with dissolute Hashemite kith-and-kin
- the local currency is the Sterling-pegged Indian rupee
- unlimited immigration for Indians, including highly qualified graduates of the various civil-service colleges and a skilled engineering labour force for the oil fields
- No Hashemite 'encirclement' of Saudi-Arabia, hence no need for the king to escape from the British sphere through his deal with Aramco
- quite possibly something resembling common law and Westminster democracy in Baghdad
What do you think Iraq would look like today if it had been run by the Sirkar bandobast rather than the Hashemi clan? And could Saudi Arabia have remained a British client state into the 1950s, on the model of places like Oman or Yemen?
I just read something interesting. During WWI, when the British finally got their act together and fired their incompetent generals, the Indian army operated the Mesopotamian campaign. By 1917, the territory of modern-day Iraq had been secured for the King-Emperor by his suitably colourful Doghra foot, Gurkha rifles and Punjabi lancers (does it show I'm an aficionado of the Raj?) the government in Delhi pondered whether the territory should not be subsumed under Anglo-indian control (a suggestion very quickly quashed by the Foreign Office, who wanted something to give their Arab allies). That would have meant:
- the ICS (Oxbridge graduates with at least three oriental lnguages) run the administration rather than Foreign Office old-boys in concert with dissolute Hashemite kith-and-kin
- the local currency is the Sterling-pegged Indian rupee
- unlimited immigration for Indians, including highly qualified graduates of the various civil-service colleges and a skilled engineering labour force for the oil fields
- No Hashemite 'encirclement' of Saudi-Arabia, hence no need for the king to escape from the British sphere through his deal with Aramco
- quite possibly something resembling common law and Westminster democracy in Baghdad
What do you think Iraq would look like today if it had been run by the Sirkar bandobast rather than the Hashemi clan? And could Saudi Arabia have remained a British client state into the 1950s, on the model of places like Oman or Yemen?