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Spies in Arabia - The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Hardcover)
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Spies in Arabia - The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Hardcover)
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At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents
began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the
Ottoman Empire, drawn by the twin objectives of securing the route
to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in an antique land.
But these competing objectives created a dilemma: how were they to
discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were
drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and promise of fame and
escape from Britain? Spies in Arabia tracks the intelligence
community's tactical grappling with this dilemma and its myriad
cultural, institutional, and political consequences during and
after the Great War. Arguing that violence and culture were more
closely allied in imperial rule than has been recognized, it tells
the story of an imperial state dependent on equivocal agents
groping through a fog of cultural notions and an interfering mass
democracy towards a new style of "covert empire" centered on a
brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of
archival sources - from the fictional to the recently declassified
- it explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with
the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire - how
imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and
anti-imperial world. In doing so, it offers the first cultural
history of Britain's Middle Eastern empire, anchored in a radically
new interpretation of the institutions and practices of
intelligence-gathering and the state. The result is a new
understanding 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 start tale of poetic
ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption - and the prehistory
of our present discontents.
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