The British Mandate In Iraq, 1914-1932

The British Mandate In Iraq, 1914-1932

Britain in Iraq: an introduction

Britain’s direct intervention in Iraq lasted 18 years. 

This time, during which Britain struggled to build an Iraqi state, can be usefully divided into four stages, 1914-1920, 1920-1923, 1923-1927  and  finally 1927-1932.  

The move from one period to another was triggered by major 

changes in British government policy as it attempted
to meet international commitments under the Mandate,
pacify an increasingly hostile Iraqi public whilst also
diffusing the growing resentment at home about the costs
of state building. The British state did not commit the time,
amounts of money or levels of expertise necessary to fulfil
its obligations to the League of Nations or to the people
of Iraq. In 1932 the new Iraqi governing elite appointed
by the British inherited a badly built and unstable state.
This elite, along with British influence in the country, was
swept aside 26 years later in a brutal military coup that
ushered in an era of violence and instability that persists
up until the present day.

Britain’s formal involvement in the creation of the Iraqi
state began in the early months of the First World War.
On 6 November 1914, troops from the British Indian
Expedition Force landed on the Fao Peninsula in Ottoman
territory at the head of the Persian Gulf. Six years later,
in April 1920, the British government formally accepted
responsibility for building an Iraqi state out of the post-
war wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. It received the
‘sacred trust’ of a League of Nations’ Mandate at the
San Remo conference. It publicly and self-consciously
committed itself, under the oversight of the League’s
Permanent Mandates Commission, to turn three former
provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Basra, Baghdad and
Mosul, into a modern self-determining state. However,
within 12 years the British government had persuaded the
League to recognise Iraq’s full independence. Britain had
successfully divested itself of the very costly responsibility
for Iraq’s creation. It was during this period, from 1914
to 1932, that the institutional basis of the Iraqi state

should have been built. It was the failure of successive
British governments to fulfil the terms of the League of
Nations’ Mandate; to construct a stable, sustainable state
in Iraq, that created the basis to the political instability.