Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (review)

Evaluating the abilities of those engaged in espionage, Priya Satia observes at the outset of Spies in Arabia, is a subject that is perhaps best left to intelligence experts. The cultural assumptions guiding the actions of spies, however, can and indeed should be a subject for historians. In her wide-ranging, impressively researched and forcefully argued book, Satia demonstrates how cultural preconceptions regarding Arabia shaped the actions of agents and officials of the British Empire from the turn of the century to the beginning of the Second World War. Her analysis provides a compelling explanation of the shift from the “gentlemanly” and amateurish intelligence efforts of British agents in the region prior to the First World War to the institution of a brutal postwar air control regime in Iraq, and the debates which this engendered in the age of mass democracy in Britain.

Although historians have analyzed the interwar air control regimes which the British Empire instituted in Africa and Asia, Satia relates the deployment of air power to broader cultural currents and in particular to British assumptions about Arabia. The use of air power in the Middle East did not depend solely on economic or strategic reasons; rather, it was grounded in cultural assumptions about the landscape of Arabia and its inhabitants. British agents in Arabia developed “an intuitive intelligence epistemology modeled on their understanding of the ‘Arab mind,’” an outlook that valued intuition above empiricism (5).

By the early twentieth century, Arabia had become part of the Great Game, and the Middle East “offered an update on the traditional image of the solitary British officer managing a vast area by sheer force of personality,” a major reason for the appeal of T.E. Lawrence (179). Satia offers an important revision of Edward Said, and reveals the operation of a more subtle and complex Orientalism than a “saga of unremitting, European ‘othering’ of the Orient.” Satia notes, for instance, Edwardian constructions of Arabia as an ancient biblical homeland which offered a sort of homecoming to British agents. The most obvious implications of Orientalism were “not only that it empowered the British to dominate the ‘Orient,’ but that it provided them with an excuse for unscrupulous behavior in doing so” (141).

Indeed, the very nature of the British intelligence project was shaped by cultural assumptions about Arabia. Experts on Arabia were valued for “their ability to see, like Arabs, beyond surface deceptions to the buried, deeper truth, to discern the real from the unreal, the mirage, the lie” (123). During the Great War, the individual heroism of agents in the Middle East such as “Lawrence of Arabia” stood out sharply in contrast to the anonymous slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front. This was also the first time, Satia argues, that the “the British freely admitted, without recourse to euphemism, that they were intriguing without scruples, and were doing so because the place they operated in provided them with a ready excuse for dishonorable and certainly ungentlemanly behavior” (141).

After the First World War, Arabia took center stage in the British official mind as the nexus of Communist, Islamist and anti-colonial activity. Bolshevism and Islam were both conceptualized as secret societies on a grand scale, and fears arose of an elaborate “Moscow-Berlin-Irish-Egyptian-Persian-Indian conspiracy” (221). This in part reflected realities of postwar nationalist and anti-colonial contacts, but also the fact that those working on the Middle East relished “the opportunity to steep themselves in extraordinary fictions and romantic scenarios, to face in theory, if not in practice, the situations faced by spies of lore” (221).

Cultural assumptions also helped to give rise to a postwar air control regime in Iraq. According to Satia, air power constituted the “mechanical apotheosis” of an imperial ideal of networks of British agents maintaining political control over a volatile region (243). Aerial bombing of civilians...