British Imperialism & ‘The Tribal Question’ urges the centrality of desert administration to the functioning of Britain's interwar empire. Written in an assured style, it follows a handful of recent books on the British Middle East that see the period as one of imperial expansion rather than unraveling and that incorporate culture and society into the well-known high-political narrative. While highlighting the uniqueness of the British project in the desert “corridor” between Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Transjordan, Robert Fletcher encourages us to understand the history of other regions through the lens of frontier discipline, echoing James Scott, while questioning the dyad of state and nomad that structures Scott's and other scholars’ visions. To escape that dyad, Fletcher probes the specific history of the relationship of nomads in the Middle Eastern deserts to state power as it evolved in the region after World War I when British policy and technology forged links that made the desert corridor a meaningful area of activity—an “interstitial empire” obscured in national histories of Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq.
Fletcher skillfully assembles an on-the-ground picture of how desert administration worked and how it mattered in local politics. He brings debates about desert law, intertribal raiding, and tribal militarization to life, with the stakes for each party—the British, local governments, and tribes—crystal clear. He offers fascinating accounts of how the different desert administration organizations engaged in tasks like development, policing, and tax collection, including where they connected or disagreed. My favorite part was the imaginative study of hashish smuggling, exemplifying how desert administration shaped Bedouin life, how both sides in this “game of chess” shaped one another (p. 155). Fletcher deftly reads the colonial archive against the grain to capture local agency vis-à-vis British organizations.
The book suffers, however, from lack of narrative structure. The chapter on the Royal Central Asian Society (RCAS) offers much new information, but the sources and significance of the society's varying fascinations remain a mystery, abstracted from wider context into a list-like account in a single chapter. Indeed, the narrative context for all Fletcher's provocative details is incomplete. He tells us that British experts and officials perceived common problems from Egypt to India, which historians “seldom acknowledge” but leaves out the paranoid outlook that produced that perception (p. 69). Great Power rivalry may have been in “low gear” (p. 128), but cultural and spatial understandings propagated by British Arabists, at the RCAS too, made British officialdom prey to fears of Bolshevik, German, Pan-Islamic, and nationalist combination against the new British power in the region. This paranoid vision shaped the desert corridor, whose primary objective was policing. Its centerpiece was air control, with which Fletcher presumes familiarity, for he does not introduce it, not even in his study of the imperial air route, but near the book's end we learn that it was “so much a part of British desert control” (p. 255). Readers who need persuading that the interwar period was not one of imperial decline are unlikely to be familiar with air control.
Fletcher similarly fails to adequately introduce the book's protagonists. He claims to anchor his study with three key figures—Claude Jarvis, Frederick Peake, and John Glubb—not as “isolated ‘Great Men’” but as part of a “wider community and field of activity” (p. 12). However, he does not narrate their careers beyond an economical introductory paragraph each—a pity for the uninitiated. Other names like Philby, Hogarth, Kirkbride, Dickson, and so on are dropped prolifically without introduction. Those familiar with such names are hardly the readers who need persuading about the desert's importance. Fletcher also promises to explain the rise of this “new type” of official but does not (p. 14).
In my 2008 book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), I related that story as the product of Edwardian and wartime culture and politics. Without reference to those origins, Fletcher is unable to shed light on his characters’ idiosyncrasies: their prolific writing, trust in their instincts over book knowledge, insistence on seeing things from the Arab point of view, taste for the work of Charles Doughty, and fascinations with nomadism and ancient history. Near the end, he remarks that the war may have produced an appreciation of spiritualism and the Bedouin way of life (and complains that historians of empire do not dwell sufficiently on interwar culture). His observations about British comparisons of the desert to the sea would also have benefited from engagement with contemporary scholarship and sources. Most glaringly isolated from previous scholarship is his chapter on the development ideology guiding desert administration, where he imparts much new and exciting information about Sinai and Trans-Jordan but misses rich connections between the ideology and the technological infrastructure of the corridor. Besides my work, he does not engage sufficiently with the work of Timothy Mitchell and Kristian Coates Ulrichsen.
More troublingly, the chapter on the RCAS repeats my argument that it and other societies were unofficial yet imperial institutions, bridging the worlds of government and scholarship on the region through social bonds and the writings of experts moving between these settings. Spare citation of existing scholarship may be a stylistic choice, but tactically, using a monograph as a vehicle for allowing the archives to speak without interpellating its revelations risks producing redundant and fragmentary analytical conclusions. Fletcher's concluding revelation is that British desert administration was most distinguished by the peculiar British notion that they understood and handled nomads better than anyone else—the very subject of my book, Spies in Arabia. There I describe the exceptional latitude and mobility of desert officials, which allowed British influence to increase even as personnel dwindled, as a new kind of covert empire for an age of anticolonialism and mass democracy. Strangely, in his only engagement with my work beyond an introductory reference, Fletcher accuses the book of considering desert administrators as primarily “intelligence officers” (p.47 n180), though it is precisely about the entanglement of intelligence with administrative, diplomatic, military, scholarly, and commercial work in the region; hence “covert empire.” By creating this straw man, Fletcher winds up reproducing many of my findings without acknowledgment. At a purely practical level, by engaging more appropriately with earlier work, Fletcher might have given us a better sense of how and where he is moving the scholarship.
Fletcher abstains from theoretical framing such as “covert empire” to describe desert administration, remarking only that it emerged in the context of anticolonial nationalism. This light touch often works well, allowing the reader to arrive at obvious conclusions on her own. Fletcher knows that “personnel, practices, and politics” made the corridor's networks of coercion and collaboration (p. 71), that nationalists were paranoid about British desert officers, that Glubb's work combined policing and development, and that the RAF's Special Service Officers combined political and intelligence work. We know what to think when we hear that the British kept key desert posts to themselves on the premise that good Egyptians were not available. Yet at times, without heavier analytical structure, the book slips into unwarranted even-handedness. This was not after all a fair “game of chess.” Fletcher says Bedouin attacks on the RAF prompted officials to make a case for desert control, but in fact the attacks responded to desert control. British Desert Law was not merely “generous” but colonial (p. 175). Fletcher regrets that the RCAS did not realize its hopes for a pan-imperial “tribal service” to prevent repeated mistakes across frontier areas (p. 125); surely we shouldn't be wishing the British had been more effectively imperial? He shrewdly deduces that in framing their notions of nomad and townsman, British officers partly absorbed the prejudices of “local communities,” but how did distinct local nomad and townsmen communities exist if the British were partly inventing them? And did not the prior colonial relationship shape how local people shared information with the British? A twinge of nostalgia for desert administration is evident in Fletcher's regret for post-World War II officers’ more “militarized understandings” of the region; surely the scandal was continued British oversight, with or without human intelligence?
Fletcher notes the danger of echoing contemporary notions of the corridor, yet occasionally speaks of “tribal affairs” as something real and takes the “Tribal Frontier of the British Empire” as more than a contemporary imaginary (pp. 34, 273). Certainly, tribal connections transcended the new borders, but we must not reify the desert as a space as British officials did; deserts were as much tied to one another as they were to near and distant urban centers. Even for the British, the corridor may have been a distinct unit but not self-contained; its very danger lay in its liability to disturb imperial concerns to the north, east, and west. Likewise, Fletcher calls out gendered anthropological views of nomads, but does not explain his own gendered account.
Fletcher rightly insists on Britons’ emotional investment in desert administration, and his monograph offers much new detail about its practical functioning. He also rightly urges the profit in studying seemingly minor frontier hostilities long ago, but we must enroll them in a structure hospitable to the uninitiated, perhaps more chronological than thematic. Rather than a chapter on the RCAS straddling the entire period, Fletcher might have begun at the beginning, showing us, with all his spectacular details, how desert administration grew up after the war, laying out each key institutional and human player. I have written several critical reviews of monographs organized topically; this will be my last. A highly empirical mode of scholarship with a light analytical touch has its advantages. But any work striving to persuade (rather than serve as a reference) eschews the full-throated simple power of narrative at our collective peril. It is indispensable to making a case comprehensible to those who most need to hear it; there is much at stake.
