New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

MOOERS: Nostalgia for Empire 129
than being reproduced through social sanction, colonial custom was
enforced with a whip, by a constellation of customary authorities – and,
if necessary, with the barrel of a gun, by the forces of the central state.” 83
The ethnic and tribal conflicts that have so plagued postcolonial Africa –
opposed but never fully overcome by postcolonial governments – are the
direct legacy of colonial rule. In short, far from forging a lasting legacy of
democratic citizenship based on accountable administrative and political
institutions, Britain’s most lasting contribution “may lie in the inherited
impediments to democratization.” 84
Similar policies were implemented with the same predictable outcomes
in the Middle East. After World War One, the victorious
imperialist powers set about carving up the remnants of the Ottoman
Empire. Britain was to get Palestine – where it favoured setting up a
Zionist state – Arabia and Mesopotamia; Syria and Lebanon were to go to
France. Egypt was to serve as “a laboratory of indirect rule.” 85 The British
had effectively ruled Egypt since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869
and remained there until 1952. Indirect rule was now redefined as a
“mandate” to satisfy U.S. opposition to formal empire and the terms
of the League of Nations. 86 But its substance remained the same. The
British established regimes with compliant rulers: in Arabia, Ibn Saud
and Hussein served the purpose; in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) they
imported Faisal from Mecca and established the Hashemite monarchy. In
order to impose the Hashemite regime the British resorted to gassing and
bombing resistance by the local population, inflicting 98,000 casualties. 87
They then set about shoring up decaying tribal structures through the
creation of large landed estates ruled by a class of “government sheikhs.”
Their aim, as Peter Gowan observes, was to,
revive dying traditional authority relations, resulting in economically
and socially regressive consequences, undertaken for thoroughly
modern imperialist political purposes – namely, to create a ruling
class dependent upon British military power and therefore
committed to imperial interests in the region. 88
Ferguson casts all of this in a positive light. He likens the challenge facing
the Americans in Iraq today to that faced by Britain in its seventyfour-year-long,
but officially unacknowledged, military occupation of
Egypt. The main lesson to be drawn from Britain’s “veiled protectorate”
in Egypt “is that it is possible to occupy a country for decades, while