Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Political Economy of Empire before 1914

  • Chapter
The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22

Part of the book series: Studies in Military and Strategic History ((SMSH))

  • 141 Accesses

Abstract

This book is about the logistical challenges involved in the mobilisation and maintenance of large armies of combatants and non-combatants in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian campaigns during and immediately after the First World War. It examines the methods of state control that arose from participation in the lengthy and intensive fighting. This required all belligerents and sub-belligerents to extend state control over every facet of political, economic and social life and necessitated a more authoritarian form of imperial and political control in the Middle East and India as the war economy grew more complex. The sharpening of states’ powers of penetration and tools of resource extraction necessitated moves towards the strategic mobilisation of national resources necessary to sustain the logistical requirements of industrial warfare. This process unfolded across all participants in an uneven manner, and was conditioned by the interplay of domestic political factors with the requirements of the military situation at a regional and international level. In the British case, it involved a gradual rejection of cherished tenets of pre-1914 forms of governance as the logistical requirements of waging large-scale industrialised warfare clashed with prevailing orthodoxies and necessitated a move towards a powerfully penetrative state apparatus.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. H. Bailes (1980) ‘Technology and Imperialism: A Case Study of the Victorian Army in Africa,’ Victorian Studies, XXIV, 96.

    Google Scholar 

  2. I.M. Brown (1998) British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London: Praeger), p.23.

    Google Scholar 

  3. J. Willcocks (1904) From Kabul to Kumassi: Twenty-Four Years of Soldiering and Sport (London: John Murray), p.120.

    Google Scholar 

  4. E. Spiers (1992) The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p.295.

    Google Scholar 

  5. M. Carter (1995) Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.38.

    Google Scholar 

  6. D. Northrup (1995) Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1814–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.53.

    Google Scholar 

  7. F.W. Perry (1988) The Commonwealth Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p.95.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Memorandum by Lord Kitchener, ‘Administration of the Army in India,’ London, 26 April 1904, IOR Papers of Field Marshal Lord Birdwood, Mss Eur D686, file 19.

    Google Scholar 

  9. K. Surridge (2008) ‘The Ambiguous Amir: Britain, Afghanistan and the 1897 North-West Frontier Uprising,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XXXVI, 417.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. T.R. Moreman (1992) ‘The British and Indian Armies and North-West Frontier Warfare, 1849–1914,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XX, 54.

    Google Scholar 

  11. K. Surridge (1998) Managing the South African War (London: Royal Historical Society), p.4.

    Google Scholar 

  12. J. Gooch (1974) The Plans of War: The General Staff and the British Military Strategy c.1900–1916 (London: Routledge), pp.50–55.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lord Kitchener, ‘A Note on the Military Policy of India,’ 19 July 1905, TNA: PRO Papers of Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener, PRO 30/57/30.

    Google Scholar 

  14. G. Cassar (1977) Kitchener: Architect of Victory (London: Kimber), p.140.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Memorandum by Lord Kitchener, ‘Administration of the Army in India,’ Simla, 26 April 1904, IOR Birdwood papers, Mss Eur D686, file 19.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Memorandum by Lord Roberts, ‘India and Military Administration,’ Simla, 5 August 1889, enclosed in Kitchener papers, TNA: PRO PRO 30/57/32, piece CC5.

    Google Scholar 

  17. D. Gilmour (2003) Curzon: Imperial Statesman (London: Farrar), p.254.

    Google Scholar 

  18. G. Barrow (1931) The Life of General Sir Charles Carmichael Monro (London: Hutchinson), p.129.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Hew Strachan (2001) The First World War. Volume I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.26.

    Google Scholar 

  20. T. Moreman (2002) ‘Lord Kitchener, the General Staff and the Army in India, 1902–1914,’ in D. French and B. Holden Reid (eds), The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation c.1890–1939 (London: Routledge), pp.71–73.

    Google Scholar 

  21. T. Moreman (1998) The Army in India and the Development of Frontier Warfare, 1848–1947 (London: St Martin’s Press), p.93.

    Google Scholar 

  22. C. Hordern (1941) Military Operations. East Africa. Volume I — August 1914–September 1916 (London: HMSO), p.85.

    Google Scholar 

  23. D.A. Washbrook (2001) ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism,’ in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol.3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.418;

    Google Scholar 

  24. C.A. Bayly (2004) The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.233.

    Google Scholar 

  25. R. Owen (2004) Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p.233.

    Google Scholar 

  26. P.J. Cain (2006) ‘Character and Imperialism: The British Financial Administration of Egypt, 1878–1914,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XXXIV, 183.

    Google Scholar 

  27. A.L. Al-Sayyid-Marsot (2001) ‘The British Occupation of Egypt from 1882,’ in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol.3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.655.

    Google Scholar 

  28. A. Milner (1892) England in Egypt (London, Edward Arnold), p.24.

    Google Scholar 

  29. P.G. Elgood (1924) Egypt and the Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.10.

    Google Scholar 

  30. J. Darwin (1981) Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War 1918–1922 (London: Macmillan), p.59.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  31. M.W. Daly (1998) ‘The British Occupation, 1882–1922,’ in M.W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt: Volume 2. Modern Egypt, From 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.240.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  32. D. French (1987) ‘The Dardanelles, Mecca and Kut: Prestige as a Factor in British Eastern Strategy, 1914–1916,’ War and Society, V, 46.

    Google Scholar 

  33. R.L. Tignor (1984) State, Private Enterprise and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952 (Princeton, Princeton University Press), p.32.

    Google Scholar 

  34. H. Keown-Boyd (2002) The Lion and the Sphinx: The Rise and Fall of the British in Egypt, 1882–1956 (Spennymoor: The Memoir Club), p.63.

    Google Scholar 

  35. G. Baer (1962) A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.57.

    Google Scholar 

  36. R. Owen (1969) Cotton and the Egyptian Economy 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p.xxiii.

    Google Scholar 

  37. R.J. Moore (20001) ‘Imperial India, 1858–1914,’ in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol.3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.444.

    Google Scholar 

  38. M.D. Morris (1983) ‘The Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947,’ in D. Kumar & T. Raychaudhuri (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2: c.1757–c.1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.601–02.

    Google Scholar 

  39. K. Roy (2003) ‘Equipping Leviathan: Ordnance Factories of British India, 1859–1913,’ War in History, X, 400.

    Google Scholar 

  40. J. Terraine (1963) Douglas Haig, The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell), p.48.

    Google Scholar 

  41. B.R. Tomlinson (1979) The Political Economy of the Raj 1914–1947: The Economies of Decolonisation in India (London: Macmillan), p.27.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Lord Hardinge, ‘Note by His Excellency the Viceroy,’ 30 August 1911, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), Papers of Lord Hardinge, volume 82.

    Google Scholar 

  43. P.K. Davis (1981) ‘British-Indian Strategy and Policy in Mesopotamia: November 1914–April 1916,’ unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, p.4.

    Google Scholar 

  44. G.M. Jack (2006) ‘The Indian Army on the Western Front, 1914–1915: A Portrait of Collaboration,’ War in History, XIII, 334.

    Google Scholar 

  45. W. Reid (2006) Architect of Victory: Douglas Haig (Edinburgh: Birlinn), p.149.

    Google Scholar 

  46. J. Onley & S. Khalaf (2006) ‘Shaikhly Authority in the Pre-oil Gulf: An Historical-Anthropological Study,’ History and Anthropology, XVII, 202.

    Google Scholar 

  47. J. Onley (2007) The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.64.

    Google Scholar 

  48. N. Beatrice (2007) ‘The Baluch Role in the Persian Gulf during the 19th and 20th Centuries,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, XXVII, 396.

    Google Scholar 

  49. P. Marr (1985) The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder: Westview Press), p.22.

    Google Scholar 

  50. R. Visser (2005) Basra: The Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (Lit Verlag: Munster), p.17.

    Google Scholar 

  51. H. Bolitho (1936) John Lyle Mackay — First Earl of Inchcape (London: John Murray), p.37.

    Google Scholar 

  52. C. Tripp (2007) A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.32.

    Google Scholar 

  53. H. Mejcher (1976) Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928 (London: St Antony’s Middle East Monographs No.6), foreword by Elizabeth Monroe.

    Google Scholar 

  54. P. Sluglett (1976) Britain in Iraq 1914–1922 (London: Ithaca Press), p.3.

    Google Scholar 

  55. B.J. Slot (2005) Mubarak Al-Sabah: Founder of Modern Kuwait 1896–1915 (London: Arabian Publishing Ltd), p.296.

    Google Scholar 

  56. M. Gholi Majd (2006) Iraq in World War I: From Ottoman Rule to British Conquest (Lanham: University Press of America), p.3.

    Google Scholar 

  57. John Grigg (1985) Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912–1916 (London: Methuen), p.146.

    Google Scholar 

  58. B. Schwarz (1993) ‘Divided Attention: Britain’s Perception of a German Threat to Her Eastern Frontier in 1918,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XXVIII, 103;

    Google Scholar 

  59. R. Holland (1999) ‘The British Empire and the Great War, 1914–1918,’ in J. Brown & W.R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV — The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.115.

    Google Scholar 

  60. A. Offer (1989) The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p.221.

    Google Scholar 

  61. J.E. Peterson (2009) ‘Britain and the Gulf: At the Periphery of Empire,’ in L.G. Potter (ed.), The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave), p.279.

    Google Scholar 

  62. M.M. Ruiz (2009) ‘Manly Spectacles and Imperial Soldiers in Wartime Egypt, 1914–19,’ Middle Eastern Studies, XLV, 356.

    Google Scholar 

  63. J. Newell (1990) ‘British Military Policy in Egypt and Palestine, August 1914–June 1917,’ unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, p.34.

    Google Scholar 

  64. R. Storrs (1937) Orientations (London: Nicholson & Watson), p.157.

    Google Scholar 

  65. W. Elliot & A. Kinross (1925) ‘Managing Allenby’s Armies: A Footnote to History,’ Royal Army Service Corps Quarterly, XIII, 117.

    Google Scholar 

  66. G.E. Badcock (1925) A History of the Transport Services of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force 1916–1918 (London: H Rees), p.140.

    Google Scholar 

  67. J.C.B. Richmond (1977) Egypt 1798–1952: Her Advance Towards a Modern Identity (London: Methuen), p.169.

    Google Scholar 

  68. M.W. Daly (1997) The Sirdar: Sir Reginald Wingate and the British Empire in the Middle East (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society), p.203; Strachan, To Arms, p.702.

    Google Scholar 

  69. Memorandum by General Sir Archibald Murray, ‘Martial Law in Egypt,’ 26 November 1916, TNA: PRO FO 371/2930.

    Google Scholar 

  70. J.E. Marshall (1928) The Egyptian Enigma (London: John Murray), p.141; Marshall was a Judge in the Egyptian Court of Appeal throughout the war years.

    Google Scholar 

  71. P.G. Elgood (1928) The Transit of Egypt (London: Arnold), p.218.

    Google Scholar 

  72. D. French (1986) British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–1916 (London: Allen & Unwin), p.48.

    Google Scholar 

  73. F.J. Moberley (1923) History of the Great War Based on Official Documents. The Campaign in Mesopotamia 1914–1918, volume I (London: HMSO), p.118.

    Google Scholar 

  74. G.R. Atiyyah (1973) Iraq: 1908–1921. A Socio-Political Study (Beirut: The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing), p.86.

    Google Scholar 

  75. R. Popplewell (1990) ‘British Intelligence in Mesopotamia, 1914–1916,’ Intelligence and National Security, V, p.141

    Google Scholar 

  76. B.C. Busch (1971) Britain, India and the Arabs (Berkeley: University of California Press), p.70.

    Google Scholar 

  77. W. Philpott (2009) Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown), p.40.

    Google Scholar 

  78. D. French (1982) ‘The Rise and Fall of “Business as Usual”,’ in Kathleen Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914–1919 (London: Allen & Unwin), p.27.

    Google Scholar 

  79. M. Farr (2002) ‘A Compelling Case for Voluntarism: Britain’s Alternative Strategy, 1915–16,’ War in History, IX, 279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  80. J. Horne (1997) State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.12.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  81. A. Stockwell (1988) ‘The War and the British Empire,’ in John Turner (ed.), Britain and the First World War (London: Routledge), p.43.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

    Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (Kuwait Research Fellow)

Authors
  1. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2011 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Ulrichsen, K.C. (2011). The Political Economy of Empire before 1914. In: The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914–22. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297609_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297609_2

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31318-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29760-9

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation