Indian Policy and the Oil Question

Abstract

It was only to be expected that the great expansion of British power in the Middle East after 1918, which seemed one of the principal consequences of the Great War, and the expedients adopted by British ministers to conserve the main fruits of victory there, would have repercussions on the rest of the British imperial system. The problems of imperial policy provided something like a test case for the post-war relationship between Britain and the self-governing states of the Empire, which the dominions resolved, at the time of the Mesopotamian uprising and subsequently of the Chanak crisis, by showing that the military and political integration of the Empire in wartime would not be prolonged into the peace. Perhaps more significantly, the reconstruction of the Middle East brought into focus the latent strains and tensions between the imperial government in London and its administrative agents in British India, increasingly sensitive to the special anxieties of communities and electorates in India, and increasingly unhappy at their involuntary association with British imperial policies elsewhere in the world. Lastly it remains to be considered whether Britain’s policy in the Middle East reflected to any real extent the growth of new economic preoccupations; in particular, the question of how the actual and potential oil resources of Iraq and Persia influenced the makers of policy, and to what degree their dispositions revealed a demotion of the old strategic priorities of Palmerston, Salisbury and Grey in favour of a new economic imperialism.