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Spies in Arabia - The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Paperback)
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Spies in Arabia - The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Paperback)
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents
began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the
Ottoman Empire, a region of crucial geopolitical importance
spanning present-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They
were drawn by the twin objectives of securing the land route to
India and finding adventure and spiritualism in a mysterious and
ancient land. But these competing desires created a dilemma: how
were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region
they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and by the
promise of fame and escape from Britain?
In this groundbreaking book, Priya Satia tracks the intelligence
community's tactical grappling with this problem and the myriad
cultural, institutional, and political consequences of their
methodological choices during and after the Great War. She tells
the story of how an imperial state in thrall to the cultural
notions of equivocal agents and beset by an equally captivated and
increasingly assertive mass democracy invented a wholly new style
of "covert empire" centered on the world's first brutal aerial
surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival
sources--from the fictional to the recently declassified--this book
explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the
actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire. As it vividly
demonstrates how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly
democratic and anti-imperial world, what emerges is a new
interpretation of the military, cultural, and political legacies of
the Great War and of the British Empire in the twentieth century.
Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of
espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a stark tale of poetic
ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption--and the prehistory of
our present discontents.
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