Freya Stark, in her 1937 collection Baghdad Sketches (Evanston, IL, 1996), began her journeying as a wide-eyed adventurer, nourished on tales from the Arabian Nights and inspired by a generation of British men and women who preceded her in Iraq. After several journeys and an extended stay, Stark began to write forthrightly about the disillusionment she had experienced, noting: “The inscrutability of the East is, indeed, I believe a myth; the only inscrutable object I know in Iraq is the British Embassy … the ordinary inhabitant is incomprehensible merely to people who never trouble to have anything much to do with him” (162–63). Stark's observation, written in the 1930s, tellingly mirrors Priya Satia's well-researched and absorbing look into the stories the British told themselves about “Arabia” and the lengths to which they went to create an empire there in the early twentieth century.

Satia analyzes a dizzying array of literary and official sources in order to understand how and why the British invested so much time, energy and imagination into its conquest of the Middle East. The book, which begins with freelance travelers and informal intelligence agents around the turn of the century then moves to their incorporation into the wartime establishment and their postwar careers in civil and imperial service. While gathering information for British governmental agencies, albeit not always good intelligence, the self-styled Arab experts also scripted a vision of the landscape and people of Iraq, Syria, and environs that shaped a century of official policy. These experts, among them T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Mark Sykes, David Hogarth, and dozens of others, saw the Middle East as uncharted territory, and in fact “unchartable” territory. They created a fantasy world of mystical insights and intuitive leaps, where traditional scientific surveying would not work. Instead, they argued, individual British experts had to enter the mind of the desert and its people, gradually making sense of the featureless land and “inscrutable” peoples they encountered.

As Satia rightly determines, the empire they envisioned in the Middle East was a modern one, not the empire of their parents. First, through their attempts to gather intelligence and use local peoples to support the British war effort between 1914 and 1918 and later through their creation of the mandate system, Britons practiced a new imperial strategy that relied on a certain level of secrecy, shadowy activity, and romantic gloss. Agents who came to the Arab regions “prioritized intuition over evidence and romantic, quasi-military action over office work” (332). The British government's reliance on this coterie of Arab “experts” therefore had long-term consequences for its ability to really see the people it was seeking to control. When the Iraqi revolt erupted into severe violence in 1920, the “experts” explained it away as an outside conspiracy led perhaps by some pan-Islamic threat or by the Bolshevik menace rather than recognizing the concrete economic and political issues driving the revolt.

Ultimately the years of secrecy and deception as well as the reliance on a small, eccentric and independent-minded group of individuals helped lead to the first aerial surveillance and control system in history. Convinced by its war-hero agents that Iraq was “peculiarly suitable” (241) for air control because of its “empty, unmapped, magical spaces” (242), squadrons of Royal Air Force bombers used Iraq as a training ground in the early 1920s. The RAF practiced disinformation (dropping of propaganda), air control (bombing villages that refused to pay taxes into submission), and surveillance (intelligence gathering by air) at a time when the British government was preaching peace to its constituents at home. Satia pithily summarizes this shift: “it created a space in the air for empire at a time when imperialism was no longer at home in the world” (262). Not only did this system have dire results for many Iraqi civilians who were injured or lost their lives, it established a precedent for aerial control of populations, especially in the Second World War. The air control regime ushered in an era of covert empire that led to an eventual call for accountability at home but that also created a new conception of “air policing” that should sound ominously familiar to audiences today. Indeed, Satia is not shy about asking readers to take her arguments to their logical conclusions in policies practiced in Iraq in the last decade.

This short review simply does not do justice to the nuanced and sophisticated analysis that Satia brings to the topic. By situating the military and political developments in Britain's Middle East policy in the cultural context of the fin-de-siècle critique of rationalism, Satia makes important linkages across historical genres. There are a few places in the book where the author makes claims for the uniqueness of the experiences of those she examines that may be overstated, as with her discussion of recruitment of Arab Bureau agents. Many of the qualities sought for intelligence agents in the Middle East, such as personal ties to those in positions of authority, also held true for other regions of Britain's intelligence empire and for those in the diplomatic community. These are mere quibbles. Satia's excellent book is full of hidden treasures, including a succinct analysis of the mystique of T. E. Lawrence, a good summary of the Mesopotamian campaign's cultural impact in Britain, and my favorite moment of the book, a small yet significant tribute to E. P. Thompson. The author's ability to move between official “group think” and the cultural pretensions of a generation of Britons as well as her utilization of private letters, memoirs, novels and official documents marks this as a crucial addition to the history of Britain, the Middle East, and imperialism generally.