The British Army and Its Ethnic Intermediaries: Collaboration and the Creation of Military Power and Security in Iraq, 1914-1927

This dissertation analyzes how the British imperial state constructed military power in Iraq between 1914 and 1927 through calculated collaboration with Arab, Kurdish, and Assyrian communities. I argue that, rather than relying on centralized institutions or overwhelming force, British military and political elites built a flexible security network by recruiting, training, and deploying ethnic auxiliaries to defend imperial interests and suppress local resistance. Drawing from British archival records, military correspondence, and officers’ memoirs, my analysis of these documents reveals how imperial officials assessed the reliability of different ethnic groups using Cynthia Enloe’s concept of ethnic security. These moments of reflection on and evaluation of collaborators informed the evolving strategies for frontier governance in Iraq, particularly in areas such as Kurdistan. By centering the role of ethnic collaboration in imperial military planning, this study challenges the prevailing historiography of the Middle East, which instead emphasizes institutional failure and civil-military breakdown. It also complicates British imperial histories that overemphasize airpower or portray Assyrian loyalty as an exception. Instead, it situates military collaboration in Iraq within a broader, trans-imperial pattern of improvisational rule that relied on ethnic intermediaries for military labor. In reframing the mandate as a contingent project of racialized military governance, the study offers a new approach to the politics of manpower, ethnicity, and coercion at the heart of Britain’s empire in Iraq, and often at the heart of other contemporary empires around the world.