Seeing Iraq: Intelligence, State Capacity, and Imperial Control

• In Event: Historical Political Economy of the Middle East

Abstract

Using a novel data set built from archival material from British Mandate-era Iraq, this paper investigates how colonial powers manage resource constraints when apportioning information-gathering strategies across territory. Colonial power rests on repression, and repression necessitates gathering information about potential threats to colonial control across territory. At the disposal of the colonial power are a number of different information-gathering strategies, ranging from the direct collection of information by agents of the colonial apparatus to indirect forms of information-gathering from key power-brokers or local elites. Colonial powers also sometimes implement sub-optimal information gathering approaches in areas in which unrest is a serious possibility. Why? This project argues that variation in legibility emerging from the interplay between the nature of the colonial entity and characteristics particular to the regions the colony is trying to control forces colonial powers to apply “next-best” strategies of information collection, resulting in stunted repressive information capacity. To do so, it introduces and employs a novel time series data set, the Air Control Data Set, that provides comprehensive information about the British use of airpower for monitoring and repression in early twentieth century Iraq.

Author

• Samuel Edward Rolfe Dunham, Yale University