Imperial violence, anti-colonial nationalism and international society : the politics of revolt across Mediterranean empires, 1919–1927

Abstract

This thesis explores the reconfiguration of colonial empires in the interwar years through four cases of anti-colonial nationalist insurrection and imperial repression from the British, French and Spanish Middle East: the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, the Iraqi revolt of the following year, the Rif War in Morocco (1921–26), and the Great Syrian Revolt (1925). Scholars have alternatively portrayed the years between the World Wars—and especially the 1920s—as the era of nationalism, the apogee of European imperialism and the age of internationalism. This thesis investigates four short circuits among the three forces, by comparing the selected cases along two main lines. First of all, my preoccupation has been to trace their international resonance throughout the public debate of the metropolitan powers and the League of Nations bodies. Furthermore, I have attempted to assess whether and how, in each case, this international resonance shaped the policy of the imperial powers. Recently, Erez Manela and Robert Gerwath have portrayed the ‘long’ Great War as the inauguration of a process of imperial decline eventually leading to decolonization. The general picture of Middle Eastern events resulting from my case-studies is rather that of a ‘war of adjustment’ of the Euro-Mediterranean imperial complex lasting from the opening of the Paris Conference up to the ‘pacification’ of the Moroccan and Syrian theaters. Anxious about the preservation of their imperial status and pressed by war-exhausted and public-spending-intolerant national opinions, the European powers employed unrestrained military force to annihilate rebellions as quickly and definitively as possible. Metropolitan authorities accepted negotiations with indigenous elites only when facing the reoccurrence of insurgency—like in Egypt, out of a recalculation of costs and benefits—like in Iraq, or under international pressure—like in Syria. Conversely, although insurgent violence reached impressive peaks of brutality, especially in Morocco, Middle Eastern nationalist ‘agitators’ conceived of armed insurrection in a fully Clausewitzan way, that is, as part of a broader political strategy. Their infatuation with internationalist ideologies or the faith in ‘third’ international institutions never mislead anti-colonial elites up to the point of believing that they could get rid of European control on a complete and permanent basis. Instead, Sa‘ad Zaghloul and his neighbor ‘homologous’ exploited insurgency in combination with international claim-making and appeals to metropolitan public opinions as part a comprehensive effort to force imperial governments to negotiations and reshape colonial rule on more collaborative and progressive bases. In sum, alongside and in strict interaction with petitioning, ‘revolting’ became a way of life of post-1919 colonial subjects.