Satia, Priya. Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East.

• Author: Michelsen, Niall
• Position: Book review

Satia, Priya. Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 472 pages. Cloth, $55.00.

This fascinating book traces the intricate linkages between British intelligence, military, and political arenas as World War I and its aftermath played out in the Middle East. This is no ordinary diplomatic or military history. Rather, it approaches the subject through an exploration of the way that images and epistemology shaped policies and outcomes. In fact, the author claims to have written a cultural history, even though the subject matter is diplomatic-military. On the way to this goal, the book provides tools and insights that can help one understand current Middle Eastern adventures and misadventures.

The book's narrative begins with intellectual discontent with the bureaucratic materialism of the modern world, and culminates with the violently coercive "covert empire" the British established in the Middle East following World War I. Satia contends that disaffected intellectuals saw the Middle East as a vital region due to its importance in ensuring access to India and as a venue for heroic actions. They saw the Middle East as a region impervious to the coldly rational analyses produced by and demanded by bureaucracies. Rather, the Middle East would only bend to the will of Britain if she truly understood the region. And, to understand the region, one had to understand the "Arab mind." This perspective, of course, conflicted with the use of traditional diplomatic and military approaches to understand the Middle East. The author depicts the inevitable struggles between these intellectual-heroes and the military and diplomatic hierarchies by chronicling the conscious efforts of intelligence agents and their journalistic admirers to engage in public relations battles with government officials. In the final third of the book, Satia ties this struggle for public support to the travails facing a democratic empire. The tensions that exist between the imperial need to use coercion and the public's limited ability to understand and accept the necessity of that coercion typically lead to government actions taking place in secret, or at least out of range from the public eye.

The central thesis of Satia's work, that self-image and image of the Other can illuminate the development of British Middle East policy during and after World War I, is well supported...