This is a very good book with an awful title. Kristian Ulrichsen provides a thorough account of how the World War I campaigns in the Middle East transformed British imperialism. He argues that the logistical challenges posed by that theater triggered an authoritarian turn in British administrative techniques, which, in turn, provoked the “crisis of empire” that forced a reversion to more traditional forms of colonial control after 1922.

Ulrichsen’s strength lies in his patient exposition, immaculate organization, and clear (if occasionally repetitive) analysis. His ability to recount the details of battle as well as those of agricultural policy is enviably on display. His chapter on labor mobilization, “the most visible and intrusive example of the more aggressive form of imperial control,” is excellent (138). To be sure, some of the material is well known—the transportation difficulties, cosmopolitan workforce, and so on—but Ulrichsen assembles it all into a complete picture of a new extractive imperialism pursued in Mesopotamia, Palestine, India, and Egypt. His work expands our knowledge of the interconnectedness of the Arabian Sea region (although his historiography on this is spotty) and helps globalize the story we tell about how the war transformed the modern state.

The book’s title, however, gives little indication of the breadth of its contributions. South Asianists would certainly not grasp its relevance to their field. Nor would historians of the western front be lured. Something bolder would also have been more accurate: “The Great War and Authoritarian Empire: How the Middle East Campaigns Transformed British Rule from India to Egypt”? Ulrichsen might insert “Temporarily Transformed,” and this is where I part company with him analytically. The book’s overly modest title is perhaps an artifact of a methodological choice: had Ulrichsen expanded his analysis from the logistical and political to the cultural and economic, he might have discerned a more permanent change in British colonial rule.

His claim that wartime authoritarianism was both radically different from prewar colonial rule and only temporary would seem to depend on a fairly rose-tinted view of the prewar and interwar periods. No one familiar with the revenue obsessions of, say, the eighteenth-century East India Company would agree that extraction was not high on the imperial agenda until World War I. Certainly, there was a shift in scale and speed during that war, but few historians of Egypt or India would suggest those countries had known but a “light colonial touch” until then (15), nor does Ulrichsen provide much empirical evidence for this claim. Similarly, no one with even a passing familiarity with the covertly violent and developmentalist preoccupations of the postwar empire would swallow the claim that the British reverted to “traditional” ways after 1922.

More important, reversion was impossible given the extent to which the war had fueled anticolonial sentiment; that genie could not be put back into the bottle. For instance, India’s role as a supply base for Mesopotamia was critical in the passage of the 1919 reforms that put it on a one-way path to greater autonomy (Priya Satia, “Developing Iraq,” Past and Present 197, no. 1 [2007]: 211–55).

Similarly, if the British resorted to “indirect rule” in Iraq, they did so in dramatically new ways, relying heavily on an informal community of intelligence personnel and airpower—what I have called “covert empire” (Spies in Arabia [New York, 2008]). The wartime civil administration did not vanish, and tax rates remained high enough to trigger periodic protest and frequent evasion. In short, confrontation with rebellion taught the British to give away, superficially, powers that they felt they could retain in substance through more discreet means. Without reckoning adequately with such departures from tradition, Ulrichsen’s tale is littered with unexplained idiosyncrasies: the strangely unbureaucratic style of decision making on the Middle East, the weird sway of a few “experts” (83–84), the reliance on airpower (98).

In fact, these were the elements of a real “paradigm shift”—a term that Ulrichsen uses frequently but that connotes something much more than temporary, reversible change: the adoption of a new theoretical framework for empire, a qualitative as much as a quantitative change, which was discursive rather than simply practical. To track that sort of shift, Ulrichsen would have had to stray beyond the realm of logistics into the domain of culture. British officials understood their extractive work not only as military necessity but as an effort to remake the cradle of civilization and redeem the destruction wrought by the war. India’s centrality in that project lent even greater ballast to the notion that empire was a vehicle for the global spread of economic development. However much postwar rebellion ultimately forced the British to dial down visible authoritarianism, it did not dilute their rhetorical faith in technology as something that could justify their continued presence in Asia and enable the more discreet exercise of authoritarian rule there. The idea of “development” remained a permanent recourse to those validating empire in the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, Ulrichsen does not engage with the literature claiming something new was afoot in the Middle East empire, so it is difficult to guess how he might respond to it. But by giving cultural history a wide berth, he renders British activity in the region oddly opaque, despite his faith in its simple responsiveness to practical needs. The numerous instances of ignorance, incompetence, blundering, irrational ambition, intelligence failure, delays, and so on, make the British appear inexplicably bumbling fools when in fact they were captives to a specific epistemological outlook shaped by the cultural exigencies of their time. Without engaging with the work of Timothy Mitchell and environmental historians such as John Broich, Diana Davis, and Terry Burke, Ulrichsen likewise falls into the trap of viewing dams, pipelines, and railways as merely natural responses to practical needs rather than tools for achieving broader political and social ends—besides taking too seriously British descriptions of the region’s “hostile ecological terrain” (6).

For Ulrichsen, the historical problem is how the British addressed “the difficulties of mobilising peasant economies for participation in large-scale, industrialised warfare” (127). For the cultural historian, the central problem is the invention, in the colonial theaters, of the practices that make up large-scale industrialized warfare and of the very idea of a peasant economy. Ulrichsen is struck by the “awkward synthesis between tradition and modernity in the … pre-industrial desert terrain of the Middle East” (138); the cultural historian, by the way Europe’s imperial modernity produced the apparent traditionalism of that terrain (which was not all desert). Despite this yawning methodological gap, however, the cultural historian would highly recommend Ulrichsen’s book as a rich, painstaking account of an important multinational chapter in the history of the Great War, the British empire, the Middle East, and South Asia.