From the 1930s forward, Europe’s colonial empires in the Middle East faced mounting challenges. The illiberal qualities and autocratic tendencies of the states they created and backed throughout the region readily stimulated social conflict and political resistance. In retrospect, the growing turmoil – ranging from a plethora of outright rebellions and burgeoning social movements to tax avoidance and subterranean “weapons of the weak” – might seem to portend the demise of the imperial order. But the overwhelming response of colonial officials at the time was not to chart an exit strategy but, instead, to devise new schemes and stratagems to bolster their control.

Drawing on new research from Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, the papers comprising this panel examine the techniques of crisis management that emerged in this era of late colonial upheaval. Together, they argue that such efforts to hold together a fragile imperial order set in motion dynamics that would bedevil the independent nation-states of the region throughout the era of decolonization.

In Syria, French administration targeted the countryside as its revenue base and projected profits and productivity growth would flow from the advance of technical innovation and the revision of “backwards” practices. But the modernization of agriculture found little purchase and instead produced mountains of debt, as the French only belatedly came to recognize that local practices were sensibly attuned to enduring environmental conditions. By then, French management had yielded declining conditions and growing crisis for the agricultural majority. In Iraq, Britain acceded to the new country’s independence in 1932, only to surreptitiously climb back into the cockpit. When the popular nationalist Yasin al-Hashimi threatened to become the Arab Bismarck sought by pan-Arabists, British officials connived in his removal, producing the first coup d’état in modern Arab history. The coup, only recently attributed directly to the British, set Iraq down a dangerous path of dictatorship, militarism, and internal destabilization that has haunted it since. In Palestine, British support for Zionist colonization collided with the interests of Arab Palestinians, who launched what became the greatest interwar uprising in the Arab world (1936-39). During the ensuing internal debate over how to “fix” the Palestine problem, British officials first opted for partition, but then retreated from it when it threatened to capsize their regional standing ahead of World War II. Along the way, their “discovery” of the problems of settler-colonialism helped intellectually justify their awkward attempt to limit the settler project they had spent two decades building up. In Egypt, the unilateral conferral of a qualified independence in 1922 had been accompanied by a tightening of monetary bonds with the British imperial sterling zone. In time, Egypt’s decades-long struggle to delink from sterling revealed to London the power of monetary policy as weapon that could be wielded against nominally sovereign states. The freezing of Egypt’s sterling account in the Suez Crisis of 1956 in this sense presaged the centrality of monetary discipline to the dynamics of postcolonial development across the region.