Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2009
E-ISSN: 1532-5768
DOI: 10.1353/cch.0.0063
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Priya Satia
Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (review)
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History - Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2009
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Project MUSE - Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History - Empires of
Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914
(review) Project MUSE Journals Journal of Colonialism and Colonial
History Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2009 Empires of Intelligence:
Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (review) Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2009
E-ISSN: 1532-5768 DOI: 10.1353/cch.0.0063 Reviewed by Priya
SatiaStanford University Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and
Colonial Disorder after 1914. By Martin Thomas. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2008). The author is, indeed, dead: this is one of
three new books identifying something novel and strange afoot in the
colonial states of the modern Middle East.1 Perhaps it is the spirit of
our own age screaming down our throats: intelligence, and more
especially intelligence failure that have been at the heart of Western
engagement with the Arab world. The amanuensis of the present work, the
prolific Martin Thomas, generously embraces two European empires in a
single comparative study to argue that intelligence was so much a
central preoccupation and crutch of interwar Middle Eastern colonies
that they comprise a distinct category of "intelligence states."
Sweeping effortlessly across North Africa and the Middle East, Thomas
highlights the role of intelligence in the survival of French and
British states in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine,...