Contemporary Authors

• Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2008

1. Spies in Arabia : the Great War and the cultural foundations of Britain's covert empire in the Middle East LCCN 2007028405 Type of material Book Personal name Satia, Priya. Main title Spies in Arabia : the Great War and the cultural foundations of Britain's covert empire in the Middle East / Priya Satia. Published/Created Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. Description xiii, 458 p. : map ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780195331417 (hbk. : alk. paper) 0195331419 (hbk. : alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0722/2007028405.html Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15541 CALL NUMBER DS63.2.G7 S28 2008 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution - April 10, 2018 Penguin Press,

• Stanford - https://history.stanford.edu/people/priya-satia

  Priya Satia
  Professor of Modern British History
  Field:
  Britain
  Ph.D., UC Berkeley 2004 (History)
  M.A., UC Berkeley 2004 (History)
  M.Sc. London School of Economics (Development Economics)
  B.A. Stanford (International Relations)
  B.S. Stanford (Chemistry)
  Priya Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.

  Prof. Satia uses the methods of cultural history to study the evolution of the material infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire--state institutions, military technologies, economic development. Her work examines the ways in which the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed.

  Prof. Satia has explored these questions in studies of British policing of the Middle East in the era of World War One, the invention of radio during the Boer War, the British Indian development of Iraq, state secrecy in mass-democratic Britain, the gun-making exploits of a Quaker family during the industrial revolution, and other projects. Her work on aerial policing has also informed her analysis of American drone use in the Middle East. Prof. Satia also works on the Partition of British India in 1947.

  Her first book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008) won the 2009 AHA-Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize.

  Her second book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press, 2018) uses the gun industry as a window onto the relationship between wars of imperial conquest and the industrial revolution, focusing on the ethical dilemmas faced by the Galton family, Quakers who owned Britain’s largest gun-making firm.

  Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, Technology and Culture,Humanity, Annales, History Workshop Journal, edited volumes across a range of fields (e.g. environmental history, Middle Eastern history, the Indian Ocean world, British politics, aerospatial theory, humanitarianism), and mainstream media (the Financial Times, the Nation, Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon, the Tribune, Slate.com, CNN.com, and other sites).

• Stanford - https://profiles.stanford.edu/priya-satia

  Academic Appointments
  Professor, History
  Administrative Appointments
  Associate Professor, Department of History, Stanford University (2011 - Present)
  Assistant Professor, Department of History, Stanford University (2004 - 2011)
  Acting Assistant Professor, Department of History, Stanford University (2003 - 2004)
  Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (2013 - 2014)
  Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (2013 - 2014)
  All Administrative Appointments (14)
  Honors & Awards
  Invitation to Kandersteg Seminar, Remarque Institute, NYU (2012-2013)
  Book Prize, Pacific Coast Conference of British Studies (2010)
  Featured Scholar, British Scholar (2009)
  Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, American Historical Association (2009)
  Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, American Historical Association (2009)
  Invitation to Global Creative Leadership Summit, Louis Blouin Foundation (2009)
  Walter D. Love Article Prize, North American Conference on British Studies (2007)
  Article Prize, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (2007)
  Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
  Advisor, Between the Rivers Productions, LLC, makers of “Letters from Baghdad” (2013 - 2013)
  Member, Advisory Board for The 1947 Partition Archive (2011 - Present)
  Participant, Stanford scholars trip to Nellis and Creech Air Force Bases, Nevada (2013 - 2013)
  Member, The British Empire at War Research Group (2013 - 2013)
  Member, International Board, Twentieth Century British History (2008 - 2013)
  All Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations (74)
  Professional Education
  Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, History (2004)
  M.A., University of California, Berkeley, History (1999)
  M.Sc., London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, Development Studies (Economics) (1996)
  B.S., Stanford University, Chemistry (1995)
  B.A., Stanford University, International Relations (1995)

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2143292/priya-satia

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Priya Satia is a Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, The Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She received a MSc in Development Studies (Economics) at the London School of Economics and a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Stanford, California with her family.

• AEON - https://aeon.co/users/priya-satia

  Priya Satia
  Professor of History, Stanford University
  Priya Satia is professor of modern British history at Stanford University in California. Her latest book is Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (forthcoming, 2018). Her first book, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2008), won three prizes, including the American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize. Her academic and popular writing has appeared in American Historical Review, Technology & Culture, Financial Times, Slate, and The Nation, among others.

• Stanford Daily - https://www.stanforddaily.com/2017/04/07/against-interdisciplinary-majors-an-interview-with-professor-priya-satia/

  Against interdisciplinary majors: An interview with Professor Priya Satia
  April 7, 2017 0 Comments

  Maximiliana Bogan

  We have messy lives that we try to construct around our complicated interests, and for many of us, college is where we lay the foundations. The Big Question, of course, is where we want those foundations to lead.

  I always figured that interdisciplinary majors were the way to go. They look so much like an opportunity to incorporate two or more disparate fields into a single glorious degree. As a pathologically indecisive person, they seemed like an easy, clean-cut answer to the very hard question of “What interests you?”

  But according to Priya Satia, that’s exactly the wrong way to look at interdisciplinary majors. She suggests that, although interdisciplinary majors are designed to allow students to tailor their studies and pursue their specific interests, they may not offer the clarity and self-knowledge we expect.

  Professor Satia is a professor in Stanford’s History Department and specializes in British Empire history – particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. She has more degrees than most college students have average hours of sleep, and her studies span chemistry, international relations, economics, and history.

  And yet, with a veritable menagerie of academic perspectives, Priya Satia knows where she stands – with both feet firmly planted in history. And she emphasizes that lens, that consistent method of thought, is both an intellectual priority and an incredible asset.

  The merits of classical disciplines, as Satia describes them, lie primarily in shaping the method of a student’s thoughts. “They give you a set of tools,” Satia commented, which you can cross-apply and take with you no matter where your interests wander. “I think it really helps you, just kind of psychologically, to have that core, and it gives you an intellectual identity.” This mental toolbox can be hard to develop in interdisciplinary majors without already knowing exactly how you think best.

  Satia juxtaposes history and the STS major as an example. “Say, you know, right now between the ages of 18 and 22, ‘I’m really interested in the relationship between society and technology… I’m going to study that as a historian, and supplement it with x, y, z.’ Now, zoom forward 10 years, and now the question I’m most preoccupied with is inequality. As a historian, I learned that you can read texts from the past, you can think about them critically and put them in conversation with each other. Those are the tools I’m going to use to now answer these questions.”

  The way that we think about problems is incredibly important in efficiently working toward solutions, and interdisciplinary majors – while designed to explore the cross-sections of student interests – may become too specific to be widely applicable. “It doesn’t arm you with tools that will enable you to answer any number of questions,” Satia concludes.

  Satia argues that the more you pursue an interdisciplinary major simply because it has the right name or the right description that includes the words you’re looking for, “without a really good understanding of what the disciplines are that make up that program, the more that could backfire intellectually.

  “You could come out with less of a sense of who you are as a thinker; you may come out unable to complete the sentence ‘I am a ___. I am a historian, I am a sociologist, these are the set of tools I have acquired to answer this question about society, or science, or what have you.’”

  This interview wasn’t the brutal critique of interdisciplinary majors that it might sound like. Satia herself completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in international relations, and she makes it clear that the mix of methodology offered by interdisciplinary courses can work for some people. “If you come to it having a really clear sense of what its [an interdisciplinary major’s] component disciplines are and you want that sum of all parts, that’s great. But if you go to it because the name lines up with subjects that you’re interested in, you may end up with no clarity and a lot of confusion.” The difference for her is whether a student is “going into it well-informed versus going into it lost.”

  Satia draws on her own experience to further illustrate her point. While talking about her chemistry and IR double major, she explained, “I had two interests; I was interested in inequality, and I was interested in how the universe worked. That’s what I wanted to explore philosophically as a science major, but I had this other interest too, this real world interest – why are some places poor and some places rich – and those two big questions are separate to me.

  “Most students come in here with one or two big questions like that, and you need some guidance as to what is a discipline that works best for you, what’s most compelling to you and what you buy. I tried economics, I did a master’s in economics, and I could see the power of that, but I didn’t buy it in the end. I didn’t think it was arriving at the right answers to that question of inequality; I thought history made more sense to me.”

  Going further in that vein, Satia touches on a foundational element of college in the U.S. “I think that, so far as college is about figuring out your identity as a thinker, and having some confidence in your ability to think that way, you really need a discipline. And the word is literal, right? Mental discipline.”

  Finding your discipline, understanding and exploring varying (and sometimes opposing) schools of thought, is a huge part of The College Experience™. And while interdisciplinary majors are neatly packaged to encompass two or three disciplines, Satia suggests that exploring each discipline in depth may be of greater benefit to students.

  “I think sometimes students come with a kind of preconceived sense of what they’re interested in and they don’t realize — let’s say you’re interested in international relations, you could major in the interdisciplinary major by that name, but you could also study IR as a political scientist or as a historian. I think the only kind of intellectual case for doing it as international relations is if you’re conscious that you want to have exposure to all those different disciplines. You shouldn’t think that that is the only way to approach the subject.”

  In the end, Satia recommends studying under a major that will send you into the future with an understanding of your own mind – how it works best, what skills you use best and most enjoy using. “You’ve got to be really clear what you are first, and what you are second. You want to know what step to take first when you’re thinking about how to solve a problem.”

  When it comes down to it, of course, people work well with different approaches, and diversity of thought is imperative. On the broad set of influences in her life, Satia says, “Everything stays with you. My interest in flying has been a huge influence on the work I’ve done as a historian. All those things stay a part of what you do, it’s not like anything is wasted. It’s just what you prioritize. How much you want to devote your life to one thing over another. So is something an influence? Or is it your profession – is it what you do?”

  Contact Maximiliana Bogan at ebogan ‘at’ stanford.edu.

• Toynbee Prize Foundation - http://toynbeeprize.org/interviews/priya-satia/

  Guns, Spies and Empire, Or, Why Good People Do Bad Things: An Interview with Priya Satia
  By Chloe BordewichApril 23, 2018Category: Interviews

  Author Priya Satia.
  Source: Penguin RandomHouse

  U.S. power today relies on sophisticated global surveillance networks, which the world is keenly aware of but rarely sees. In Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008), Priya Satia explains how it became possible to possess an empire that was both vast and possible to ignore—how an empire could hide in the skies. Her account is not a story of the United States in the last half-century, but of Britain in the first decades of the twentieth. Through what she defines as a cultural history of intelligence, Satia traces how intelligence agencies came to wield unbridled executive power.

  Satia argues that the making of Britain’s “covert empire” was bound up in intelligence-gathering tactics pioneered by British agents in the Middle East (Arabia and Iraq, specifically). The ultimate tool of covert empire—aerial surveillance—came to be used far beyond the Middle East; but, Satia argues, its initial deployment there resulted from the marriage of a cultural epistemology peculiar to British agents in Arabia with the emergence of mass democracy, and a new suspicion of empire, in Britain itself.

  Priya Satia’s second book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution came out this month with Penguin. I sat down with Satia to discuss Spies in Arabia, how she got from writing about spies in the twentieth century to guns in the eighteenth, and her commitment to writing history that people will read. Satia received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is now Professor of Modern British History at Stanford University. She teaches courses on Britain and its empire, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia.

  –Chloe Bordewich

  CHLOE BORDEWICH: Where did your idea for Spies in Arabia come from?

  PRIYA SATIA: I had an interest in South Asia before I had an interest in the Middle East. I was looking into the Indian Army, which did most of the fighting in Iraq during World War I, and became distracted by the Indian Army’s British officers. They arrived thinking that they were in the land of the Arabian Nights, that this place was mysterious and unknowable. But they were there to perform very practical tasks. I became curious how their cultural outlook shaped what they did and how they did it.

  When I got to the National Archives at Kew, without much training in what to expect, I didn’t know where to start. So I began with A because it was the beginning of the alphabet, and I opened the Air Ministry files on Iraq. I discovered that there was something called air control, and it was invented in Iraq. I started to wonder if I could draw a line between the British officers who felt they were in a fog, unable to know anything, and the hyper-surveilling air control regime ten years later. So I hunkered down to make sense of the archives—the Air Ministry, Colonial Office, Foreign Office, and personal papers of the key players involved before, during, after the war. What if I had opened the Admiralty files first? The project could have been very different.

  Air control over northern Iraq, 1920s. Source: airminded.org

  BORDEWICH: You make the case in the book that British intelligence agents’ mystical conceptions of Middle Eastern, specifically Arabian, culture were so significant as to stimulate the development of a new approach to information gathering, the “intuitive mode.” Why was Arabia any different from other parts of the British Empire—India, for example?

  SATIA: The British had an Orientalist outlook toward India, too. India was exotic, exemplified by the trope of the bazaar. But in the Middle East at the turn of the twentieth century, there was a particular Orientalism centered on the desert. Its deceptions and apparent infinitude, in their view, made the desert much more challenging from an intelligence point of view than India. The British also became interested in Arabia later, at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when intelligence itself was becoming a kind of science. The conjunction of these factors at that particular time made the Middle East different. These British agents concluded that “Arabia” could not be known empirically; it had to be known intuitively. And only those who had spent enough time there, in the desert especially, would be able to “think like an Arab”—to understand the place intuitively.

  BORDEWICH: In other words, we can’t understand spying without a fuller picture of the epistemological universe in which spies operate. How was the development of intelligence gathering linked to contemporaneous trends in science and philosophy?

  SATIA: The nineteenth century saw a celebration of empiricism and rationalism, but by the end of the century, an influential avant-garde culture in philosophy and literature emerged in response, arguing that empiricism and rationalism could only go so far. Scientific discoveries of the time seemed to confirm this—the encounter with invisible forces that made things like radio communication possible. There was a growing interest in the occult, because if you can communicate wirelessly, you might also be able to communicate with the dead. Those who were gathering intelligence in the Middle East were influential in this culture, and influenced by it in turn. It’s all part of the same cultural backdrop, a willingness to suspend disbelief.

  BORDEWICH: Spies in Arabia is very much a human story as much as it is a story about the state. Everyone knows T.E. Lawrence, at least Peter O’Toole’s version of him. Are there any other stories that particularly captivated you while you were writing this book?

  SATIA: The Philby story is very interesting. St. John Philby came out of an Indian milieu, born in Ceylon, then became a Middle East expert. He really absorbed orientalist notions of Eastern fatalism, to an extent that really, practically guided his life decisions. He had a vision for himself of an almost Christ-like journey, in which he would repeatedly be banished. And he fulfilled it, over and over again. Eventually he defected to Saudi Arabia. His decisions and outlook also shaped the fate of his famous son Kim, whom he named after Kipling’s novel about a boy spy, Kim. Kim Philby became the most notorious of the “Cambridge Five,” the group of high-ranking members of British intelligence who were Soviet moles. Kim’s story in turn became central to how, culturally, we understand the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.

  They’re not just boring bureaucrats—but are they ever? I’m writing about the eighteenth century now, and realized I already made this same point about the twentieth century.

  BORDEWICH: A stereotype persists today of Middle Eastern societies as particularly inclined toward conspiracy theories. You devote a chapter, however, to inverting common assumptions about conspiracy theorizing. Confounded by unrest in the 1920s, British imperial bureaucrats became obsessed with the notion that there was a single secret control center sowing global chaos. They believed this node of insurrection was in Iraq.

  SATIA: The intensity of contemporary paranoid thinking in Middle Eastern states comes completely out of this colonial experience. It’s part of the hangover of covert empire. The very discreetness of British rule in the region—through the air force and “advisory” bureaucrats and intelligence networks—made it impossible for people in the region to know when sovereignty was real and substantive, when they could be sure that a hidden agent of some kind was not pulling the strings of power from behind the scenes. Imperialism is crazy-making.

  In the chapter on conspiracy theories, I emphasized how off-base the British were, how outlandishly exaggerated their theories were. But there were some real conspiracies, people forming secret connections. Some people did have a mystical outlook—and this was a challenge to colonialism. When I wrote Spies in Arabia, I was so sure that the British were so wrong in what they assumed about native inhabitants that I didn’t pay enough attention to their actual interactions. This dimension comes out more in my current work on global anticolonial networks than it did in Spies. I’m now looking at the conspiracy theory chapter from the other side, in a sense.

  BORDEWICH: You join other scholars practicing new imperial history in examining how domestic politics in Britain shaped and were shaped by the imperial experience in Arabia. What was the connection between mass democracy in Britain, the rise of the British Labour Party, and how the empire behaved in Arabia?

  SATIA: At the moment of self-assertive mass democracy after World War One, new mechanisms of more discreet kinds of colonial control emerged—aerial control, intelligence networks with administrative power. State institutions evolved to continue to pursue certain imperial interests, despite the check that democratic expressions of opinion increasingly provided. The state was acting out of a paranoid understanding of the Middle East, and mass democracy channeled the anxieties of a society which, in the 1920s, was recovering from a horrible war and was paranoid about whether it could trust the state.

  BORDEWICH: Air control plays a key role for you in understanding what happened to the British Empire as British people became more and more critical of it. Empire was no longer fashionable, so the empire moved to the air. It became invisible.

  SATIA: Air control was cheaper than older ways of maintaining control, so it was less dependent on taxpayers approving it, and it required fewer personnel. This made it easier to hide from a mass democracy increasingly keen to assert its control over foreign policy after the disaster of the First World War. Air control was also less perceptible by Middle Eastern people. It was a very discreet version of empire in an increasingly anti-colonial time. At the same time, the British people knew just enough about it, and it was just enough shrouded in secrecy, that their imaginations could run wild—conspiracy theories imagining undercover British agents and oilmen behind every global news item flourished.

  Poster for an air pageant at Hendon, 1922: “Bombing a Desert Stronghold”. Source: airminded.org

  BORDEWICH: Most American readers probably come to this book thinking about American intervention in the Middle East, which escalated in the twilight of the story you’re telling. You mention the first CIA interventions in Iraq in the ‘60s and include epigraphs from American officials like Paul Bremer who served recently in Iraq. Did writing this book change the way you thought about the nature or trajectory of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East?

  SATIA: I was sitting in the Map Room of the British Library, researching this book, when 9/11 happened. As the American case for the war in Iraq was being prepared, the conversation revolved around intelligence and failures of intelligence—and about what we could and could not know. The prominence of aerial strategy in the Iraq War made me feel that the U.S. really had inherited the myth of the success of British air control. The echoes with my project were uncanny; it motivated me to finish the book as quickly as I could. I saw the gurus of American intelligence clearly influenced by the generation of the Spies in Arabia, the British Arabists. I wanted to call it out, but all I could convey was that there were resonances.

  This made me reflect on how one can best be a historian and an active citizen in a democracy. What is the point of the critique you make? What kind of truth-telling can the craft do?

  BORDEWICH: In writing about secrets, did you have to grapple with restricted access to sources?

  SATIA: Sometimes there were things blacked out. But because of the way the bureaucracy works, if it’s blacked out in the Foreign Office files, the copy that was sent to the Air Ministry is not blacked out.

  This was such a formative moment in the professionalization of intelligence. Agents were making up the system of classification and bureaucratization. But I end my book just where access to sources would have gotten tough, in the 1930s. In the 1910s and 1920s, they didn’t have the techniques for secrecy standardized.

  BORDEWICH: Because you’re trying to understand the epistemological framework of these agents, you also talk about the spy novel, the romance of which might attract people to reading the book in the first place. In doing so, you give a great example of how we can use literature to understand the history of institutions.

  SATIA: It’s so disappointing for people who buy the book because they love spy novels, and realize the book’s so boring! But there is a close relationship between literature and the state actors I write about—it’s no coincidence that the greatest living spy novelist from the British world is still John Le Carré, a former spy himself. Another way to get around the need to work with materials that might have been classified is that these spies were such prolific writers. Even if details were blacked out in official documents, they were blabbing in their letters, in their diaries, and in their minutes. They had a lot to say, and they said it in a literary tone. That’s why they got into this business in the first place.

  BORDEWICH: They were acting out the novel they wanted to star in.

  SATIA: Spying is about fantasy and leading a double life, which is also what fiction is.

  BORDEWICH: Your next book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, will be out in April. How did you get from spies in the twentieth century to guns in the eighteenth?

  Empire of Guns, published in April 2018 (Penguin RandomHouse)

  SATIA: Spies in Arabia had made me think about democracy, active citizenship, and state secrecy, and in doing so really affected what I thought I should be doing as a historian. E.P. Thompson’s father, who was an army chaplain in Iraq in World War One and appears in Spies in Arabia, thought of the historian’s craft as essentially about truth-telling. At this moment in our unending War on Terror, this is something historians should be doing more. We’ve abdicated our responsibility. We’ve let political scientists and economists and “security experts” talk about everything, and they don’t know about anything’s past. With this in mind, I wanted to do something that spanned a longer period, something that lots of people would want to read; I wanted to use my understanding of the inequities produced by colonialism to intervene in public debate.

  I had a long, consistent interest in military technology. In addition to Spies in Arabia, I had written on wireless and radio, and on dams and rivers in Iraq. But what is missing from Spies in Arabia is a political-economic angle. I did a master’s in economics at LSE, and my outside field for my oral exams was in economic history, with Barry Eichengreen and Brad DeLong at Berkeley. I felt political economy was missing from a lot of academic history on the British Empire, and arms trading was one way to bring these together.

  As a historian of the twentieth century, I thought I would write on shifts in the arms trade during decolonization. But while I was looking for background on how the arms trade started, I stumbled on an article by Barbara Smith about the Galton family, who were Quaker gun-makers in Birmingham. That was all the information there was about them, though, and there was not much on the eighteenth-century arms trade at all.

  I went to Birmingham to see the Galton family’s papers there. In 1795, the Quaker church in Birmingham told them they should not be making guns, and Samuel Galton published a defense of his trade. He said he was publishing this defense for his children and for posterity, so that people would not judge him. This was a hand reaching out to me, saying “write about me.” What he said made sense. He asked, “What would you have me do in industry that would not be related to war?” This was paradigm-shifting for me. What if he was right? Then the way we’ve been thinking about the Industrial Revolution is all wrong. So I completely switched gears and decided I needed to think about the Industrial Revolution.

  BORDEWICH: Where does the story end now?

  SATIA: The main story ends at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, but the last two chapters very quickly get us to the present. How did the arms trade proceed after that, especially guns, and how have people protested against the spread of small arms since then? It has such obvious connections with the American gun control debate and UN efforts to regulate small arms trading, which never seem to succeed. I try to make those connections explicit. The moment of controversy around Galton as a Quaker gunmaker echoes today. If his fellow Quakers saw him as merchant of death, his defense was to say that “all of you are bad,” including the states that buy the guns. This was a formative moment setting the terms by which we judge, by which we exculpate some of us and hold others morally responsible for the spread of violence.

  BORDEWICH: The way people grapple with the ethical dilemmas inherent in empire is obviously something that engages you. These Quakers are a clear example. But the British spies in Spies in Arabia also find themselves in morally complicated positions. As the empire is shrinking and changing form, as mass democracy is on the rise and empire becoming less palatable, how are the agents who are implicated in this project grappling with the ethical dilemmas inherent in their situation?

  SATIA: So many of them love the Middle East, and Arabs, and there’s a seeming contradiction in that: they become experts on this place because they love it, and then they destroy it. How do they live with that? How do they rationalize it? Do they even recognize what they are doing? From a human angle, that is fascinating.

  I’m now interested in the global Left. I was drawn to it by my older interest in the Partition of India, and partitions everywhere. How do neighbors become enemies? How do the British abdicate responsibility and walk away, after professing to be responsible? It’s the same set of questions over and over: Why do good people do bad things?

  BORDEWICH: What are you working on now?

  SATIA: I became a historian because I wanted to write a book on Partition. I shifted to British history, but it has stayed with me. I am currently interested in anti-colonial bonds across colonies in the modern period. What else besides India and Pakistan was possible? What federations, communist organizations, pan-Islamic organizations, and other ideas were people playing with?

  I am looking at Indian Ocean connections, from India to East Africa. I’m also interested in Indians in California and their Ghadar Movement, which drew inspiration from the Irish. They were revolutionaries, global in their consciousness yet committed to going back to Punjab and liberating it. The imaginaries of these cosmopolitan anti-colonialists do not fit neatly into the nationalist narratives we tell about independence. The nation-state system was completely failing during World War II, yet it came back, and was again seen as the only way to organize the world. My project is a recovery of lost causes.

  BORDEWICH: What are you reading at the moment?

  SATIA: I’m teaching two classes right now, so I’m mostly reading what I’ve assigned my students: Lots of Orwell, Fanon, C.L.R. James, Cesaire, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I also have Ishiguro’s new book halfway done on my bedside, which I interrupted to reread Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time in anticipation of seeing the new movie with my kids. Before that, I read and loved Mahmood Farooqui’s A Requiem for Pakistan—the World of Intizar Husain.

  BORDEWICH: You’ve published a number of op-eds in non-academic publications. Do you have any advice for our readers, many of whom are graduate students, for how to go about packaging their research for general audiences? How do you identify the right audience and then strike the right tone?

  SATIA: I think as we research, we are often aware of the way in which our research question relates to current political debates. And writing those shorter pieces forces you to articulate that relationship explicitly and succinctly. It’s not so much translating or repackaging your work for a general audience but learning a different genre of writing. And I think it has the really healthy impact of helping you see where you are being needlessly obfuscatory in your academic writing and thinking.

  For an op-ed, you have to be quite clear on what you are arguing and why it matters. It’s a win-win exercise in that you will help inform the public, and you will come away with more clarity about what you are doing and why it matters. There are so many media venues now that it’s possible to share both the extremely timely aspects of your work when the news cycle demands it, and the more timeless aspects.

  As I said earlier, I do think this is part of our duty as historians, especially since many of us receive public funding for our work. Our research is supposed to benefit the public.

  BORDEWICH: Earlier in our conversation, you cited E.P. Thompson’s father, Edward John Thompson, as a historian who envisioned the craft as one fundamentally about truth-telling. Are there historians working today whom you consider models in bridging rigorous scholarship with Thompson’s vision?

  SATIA: There are different kinds of truth-telling, so I see people doing this in different ways. I’ll narrow it to my own field of modern Britain: My teacher Tom Laqueur always inspires me for the way he probes what you might call the existential truths of human existence—he does this with rigor but also poetic wonder. His writing exudes both those kinds of truth. Catherine Hall inspires me for the way she is continually discovering enormously important and yet strangely forgotten histories—of women, empire, national pasts. Emma Rothschild’s way of writing about economic life is another kind of truth-telling, a kind of unmasking of historical reality and method. Caroline Elkins’s work on decolonization in Kenya changed minds—and lives. Almost anyone trying to be helpful in the history-of-guns world is engaged in an endlessly exasperating effort at truth-telling.

  As I’m answering this, I’m realizing that the work I most admire is defiant in its dogged empiricism rather than shrilly denunciatory—and work that is rigorously empirical but with a poetic quality too, and a kind of emotional intimacy…a hangover of the old idea that poetry offers a kind of transcendental truth—that feeling of existential relief when you read, say, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

Print Marked Items
Satia, Priya: EMPIRE OF GUNS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Satia, Priya EMPIRE OF GUNS Penguin Press (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-7352-2186-4
Mr. Owen, meet Mr. Colt: a wide-ranging if overlong history of the role of arms manufacturing in the
Industrial Revolution.
The rise of mechanized industry in Britain, writes Satia (History/Stanford Univ.; Spies in Arabia: The Great
War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East, 2009), corresponded to a
period of "more or less constant war." There was always France to fight, of course, but also the rebellious
American Colonies and uprisings elsewhere in the empire, and the Dutch and the Spanish. An economy
flourished, therefore, in the manufacture and sale of armaments and other military provisions. One of Satia's
perhaps unlikely case studies is Samuel Galton, a nominally good Quaker who managed to reconcile that
belief system with making a fortune in weaponry. Then as now, the arms merchants were not especially
particular about where their products wound up. As Satia observes, in the 18th century alone, millions of
guns sprang forth from workshops and factories in the Midlands and London, winding up in the hands of
buyers everywhere in the world; in 1715, "the government discovered that London gunsmiths were making
15,500 guns," with some 4,000 of them "for Service not Known," as a contemporary document put it. A
century later, and more than 151,000 British guns were bound for India, Indonesia, and China. This early
military-industrial complex also valued interchangeability, standardization, and mass production, which
would come to define the manufacture of nearly everything else. While standardization was not
commonplace until after the Crimean War, it was at a premium well before. After 1815, Satia writes, the gun
business faded somewhat as slavery wound down, for the slave trade was bound up part and parcel in
armaments. She closes with a sharp look at today's mass shootings, which she considers "historically
specific"--i.e., the product of a time in which guns are used for private grievances more than empirebuilding.
A solid contribution to the history of technology and commerce, with broad implications for the present.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Satia, Priya: EMPIRE OF GUNS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248054/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=546d21eb.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248054
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of
the Industrial Revolution
Publishers Weekly.
265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p51+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution
Priya Satia. Penguin Press, $35 (528p) ISBN 9780-7352-2186-4
Stanford history professor Satia (Spies in Arabia) hastily probes the relationship between war and
industrialization in 18th-century Britain using the story of Samuel Galton Jr., aprominent Birmingham gun
manufacturer. In 1795, Galton was accused by his fellow Quakers of promoting an immoral trade in the
manufacturing of guns. In response, Galton claimed that gun-making could not be isolated from the British
industrial economy of the time--which had grown out of Britain's nearly continuous state of war over the
past century. Satia uses Galton's defense as a window into the central role of the arms industry in
precipitating the Industrial Revolution. She goes on to argue that indeed it was changes in the nature of
violence and the social role of guns in the age of British imperialism that provided the Impetus for statedriven
industrialization. Yet she provides little evidence for her sweeping claims, failing to address the fact
that perpetual warfare was a reality for all European states during the era, not just Britain, and paying scant
attention to shifts in agricultural production and demography that were critical to industrial takeoff. Nor
does she engage with scholars who argue that the state served as a barrier, rather than an impetus, to
industrialization. This book eschews the big picture for a series of stylized historical set pieces. (Apr.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p.
51+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810420/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f80e5080. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810420

"Satia, Priya: EMPIRE OF GUNS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248054/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018. "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 51+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810420/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018.

• The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/dealbook/review-empire-of-guns-challenges-the-role-of-war-in-industrialization.html
  Word count: 1137

  BOOK ENTRY

  Review: ‘Empire of Guns’ Challenges the Role of War in Industrialization
  Image
  “Empire of Guns” aims to overturn the conventional wisdom about the role of firearms in the world’s economic development.
  By Jonathan A. Knee

  April 9, 2018
  Adam Smith, in his classic “The Wealth of Nations,” was an early proponent of the now mainstream view that wars are unfortunate accidents that have “crowded out” more productive investments.

  In “Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution,” the Stanford history professor Priya Satia aims to overturn this conventional wisdom about the role of guns specifically, and war and conquest more generally, in the world’s economic development.

  Given that “Britain was involved in major military operations” for most of the years leading up to and during the Industrial Revolution, Professor Satia argues that imagining an alternative universe in which peace prevailed is a fool’s errand. (“It is impossible to factor the violence out.”) She contends, rather than crowding out infrastructure development, perpetual war actually “produced the financial structures that could fund it.”

  Professor Satia’s detailed retelling of the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s relentless empire expansion notably contradicts simple free market narratives. She demonstrates that the deep partnership between the public and private sectors underpinned economic growth. Professor Satia argues convincingly that the expansion of the armaments industry and the government’s role in it is inseparable from the rise of innumerable associated industries from finance to mining.

  Government planning played a central role even in the new technologies that are “arguably the most iconic developments of the industrial revolution,” like the steam engine and interchangeable parts manufacturing. Government investment “in manufacturing and technological progress” was viewed as “a national obligation in a time of political vulnerability.” Just as the United States government’s establishment of Arpanet, the precursor to today’s internet, laid the foundation of the current digital revolution, the British government’s financing of a wide range of technological and organizational innovations — many directly or indirectly associated with small arms manufacture — spawned the original Industrial Revolution.

  On the subject of guns, “Empire of Guns” seeks to elucidate not only their industrial history but also their social and moral history. To tell these parts of the story, Professor Satia uses the Quaker church’s decision in 1796 to disown the prominent British gun maker, Samuel Galton Jr.

  On its face, the decision by the Society of Friends to censure a flagrant arms merchant in its ranks may not seem surprising. Pacifist principles were central to Quaker ideology, as was opposition to slavery. Guns fueled not just war but the slave trade. Yet Mr. Galton’s father, and his father before him — and indeed many other Quakers who long dominated Birmingham’s arms industry — had been unapologetic gunmakers for 70 years without attracting rebuke. What had changed in the interim, in ways that are deeply interrelated, were society and the guns themselves.

  Guns, for long after their introduction, were rather clumsy instruments of death. The unpredictability of guns had previously made them more suitable to terrorize than inflict harm. Despite their availability, guns were rarely fired in homicides, in robberies, in riots or even on the battlefield throughout most of the 18th century. But the British government, through enforced standardization and sponsored experimentation, drove “countless small innovations” that improved gun performance significantly by the end of the century.

  Enhancements in gun technology increased both their ubiquity and their use in violent human interaction by the end of the 18th century. This, in turn, corresponds with the shifting social and moral meaning of these inanimate objects, which remain so profoundly associated with the “impersonal, casual violence they enable.”

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  Professor Satia examines these changes not only across time but across cultures. Although much of this exploration is fascinating, the detail can be numbing. Tracking the exhaustive catalog of Quaker family intermarriages and gun part transactions that characterized the 18th-century armaments trade, for instance, is quite a slog.

  The biggest disappointment of “Empire of Guns,” however, is how little detail there is on the history of gun culture in the United States and its deep hostility to government regulation. The contrast with Britain — and, indeed, all other developed nations — is so striking that it begs for some kind of explanation, particularly given that Britain was historically more economically reliant on this sector of its economy.

  Although Professor Satia does include a discussion of the role of guns from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 through the Revolutionary War, she focuses on the use of guns in the colonists’ interactions with Native Americans and various competing European powers. In the last pages of the book, she does include a critique of the historical myths underpinning the sweeping 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. The short discussion is provocative but seems disconnected from her writing on colonial life, which didn’t mention early state gun regulation or the Second Amendment at all: “The Second Amendment was not about protecting Americans from federal government [gun] seizure; it addressed the practical danger that militias might be disarmed by federal inaction, providing reassurance that if the federal government neglected to arm the militias, state governments might do so.”

  Under this view of the framers’ intent, the “issue was not self-defense, but national defense.” Even if Professor Satia is correct about the problem originally targeted by the Second Amendment, “Empire of Guns” provides few clues as to how or why the focus has shifted so drastically in America over the ensuing centuries.

  Despite mounting a vigorous public defense, Mr. Galton was ultimately unsuccessful in escaping rebuke from the Quakers. Many of the arguments he proffered have parallels to those made by contemporary gun rights advocates. Professor Satia has shown how the revolutionary changes in the very nature of guns and their role in society and the economy require those arguments to be considered in a very different light. To do that effectively at this time of national debate over our political, social and moral relationship to the modern gun, more work must be done to fully understand the source of “American exceptionalism” when it comes to our attitudes toward guns.

  Jonathan A. Knee is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School and a Senior Advisor at Evercore. His latest book is “Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.”

• SF Gate
  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Empire-of-Guns-by-Priya-Satia-12829555.php
  Word count: 1132

  ‘Empire of Guns,’ by Priya Satia
  By Glenn C. Altschuler Published 1:00 pm, Thursday, April 12, 2018

  1

  Priya Satia Photo: Steve Castillo
  Photo: Steve Castillo
  IMAGE 1 OF 3
  Priya Satia

  One hundred years ago, amid armed combat around the world, Randolph Bourne, a contributing editor at the New Republic, proclaimed that “war is essentially the health of the State.” The moment a government declares war, Bourne wrote, the vast majority of its citizens identify with its purposes. The state, now “an august presence, walks through their imaginations” and becomes “the inexorable arbiter and determinant” of attitudes and opinions. As the masses allow themselves “to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction,” the state maintains and augments “the prerogatives of power.”

  In “Empire of Guns,” Priya Satia, a professor of history at Stanford University, provides a perspective that complements Bourne’s. Focusing primarily on 18th century England, Satia claims that war, and, more specifically, the gun industry, helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, redefined the roles of public and private sectors and the functions and contours of the state, and facilitated imperial expansion.

  “Empire of Guns” covers a lot of ground. Extraordinarily (and, at times, excessively) detailed chapters address the evolving state of the gun trade in Birmingham; the “myth” of pacific British industrialism and the reality of continuous war; the “social life” of guns in England, Africa, India and North America; the relationship between guns, money and private property; changes in the firearms industry after 1815; and opposition to the gun trade over the past 200 years.

  Satia makes clear where she stands. “Deeply bound up with the rise of the very principle of property,” she writes, guns (along with the law) protected its impersonal, bourgeois qualities. “The sheer insanity of mass production of arms and the uses to which they were put,” she indicates, pervaded 18th century England.

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  “Industrial-capitalist society survives,” Satia asserts, “by focusing critical energy on elimination of particular evils and abuses rather than on the perniciousness of that entire mode of existence.”

  These days as well, recognition of “wide areas of complicity” in arms manufacturing and sales is accompanied by a failure to indict “the mode of industrial-capitalist imperialism in which these iniquities have flourished — at least since the collapse of Marxism.”

  Satia illuminates many of her key themes in an account of the controversy between the Birmingham Chapter of the Society of Friends, which in 1795 censured Samuel Galton Jr., one of the most prominent gun manufacturers in England, for violating the pacifist principles of the Quakers. In his defense, Galton pointed out that his family had been engaged “in this Manufactory” for 70 years before receiving “any Animadversions” from the society. The assets of the gun business, he pointed out, were not easily convertible to other purposes.

  Galton emphasized as well that arms manufacturing did not in and of itself cause or promote offensive war. Scripture, he added, sanctioned war. In any event, he was no more responsible for the uses to which guns were put than were distillers for the abuse of alcohol. Most important, by paying taxes and engaging in many, many other activities, all Quakers “furnished the means of war” in some incremental way.

  His logical exercise, Galton concluded, demonstrated that “the Practice of your principles is not compatible with the situation in which Providence has placed us.” Echoing an emerging tenet of capitalism, that consumers, not producers, should exercise moral principles in the economy, Galton suggested that the answer was to respect the “Right and Duty of Private Judgment.”

  Although she takes Galton to task for failing to recognize differences in degrees of complicity, Satia notes that his defense helps us understand “how what appears hypocritical might have felt ethically consistent in a different imagining of the world.” She reveals as well that although the Birmingham Meeting did not find his arguments persuasive and “disowned” him, Galton did not accept the verdict. He continued to attend worship, engaged in charitable work, and emerged with little damage to his reputation.

  By focusing on a single toxic activity, Satia concludes, rather harshly, both sides avoided “the truth that modern life is founded, intrinsically, on militarism and that industrial life has historically depended on it.”

  Satia appears to believe that things have not gotten better in the 21st century. To be sure, four “developed” countries (Japan, Great Britain, Australia and Canada) have enacted legislation to reduce gun violence. In the United States, however, in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protected the right of individuals to possess firearms unconnected with militia service. And, Satia emphasizes, small arms “remain the most abundant and most destructive category of weapons and the only category that continues to proliferate virtually unregulated.”

  Six hundred and forty million small arms, concentrated in “the unhappiest parts of the world,” most of them in private hands, increasing each year by 8 million, with the war of terror accelerating their spread, cause the death of one human being every minute. A $72 billion industry, with England as the second-biggest supplier, augmenting the political power and economic prowess of governments and “private” contractors, arms exports are not likely to decline anytime soon.

  Like Samuel Galton Jr., Satia reminds us, gun manufacturers these days suffer no pangs of conscience. During a liability lawsuit before 2005, when Congress shielded them from litigation, she reports, Paul Jannuzzo, an executive at Glock, justified his company’s refusal to police sales, insisting that “there’s nothing intrinsically evil about these things.”

  Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

  Empire of Guns

  The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution

  By Priya Satia

  (Penguin Press; 528 pages; $35)

• Book Page
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22540-priya-satia-empire-guns#.WwG0z9MvxR0
  Word count: 365

  Web Exclusive – April 10, 2018

  EMPIRE OF GUNS
  The dark heart of progress
  BookPage review by Roger Bishop

  The Industrial Revolution in Britain is usually portrayed as the transformation of an agricultural economy to an industrial one through the rise of visionary inventors and technology supported by private enterprise. Historian Priya Satia challenges that understanding in her sweeping and stimulating Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1688 and 1815, Britain was either at war, preparing for war or recovering from war. During those years, Britain declared war eight times. War and the development of a modern state demanded military necessities that set the context for an industrial-military-economic complex in which the Industrial Revolution took place. Manufacturers in Birmingham were the center of “war machine” activity. Satia describes this activity in significant and interesting detail in this extensively researched and carefully crafted narrative.

  Satia is also concerned with the role of the gun in society, as well as the moral responsibility of those involved in war efforts and what it meant for future generations. We learn of Samuel Galton Jr., a prominent Quaker whose family’s wealth came from gun manufacturing. In 1795, Quaker leaders questioned the conflict between Galton’s pacifist faith and his business. Galton understood guns and war to be products of the entire nation’s economy rather than an individual’s moral decision. He was part of an economy focused on war, and his business was essential to the spread of civilization based on property. Britons understood war as something that happened abroad and kept them safe at home as their empire and economy expanded. Galton’s family story shows how the military-industrial economy worked. There were no villains. But often, horrible developments happen because of incremental decisions of decent people.

  The book traces the evolution of the literal and symbolic uses of small arms down to the present day, when sales of weapons remain robust. The various international attempts to control or limit small-arms sales are discussed. This important book helps us to look at British and United States history in an unconventional way and makes for great reading.

• H-Net
  https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15541
  Word count: 1837

  Priya Satia. Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East. Oxford University Press, 2008. 472. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-533141-7.
  Reviewed by Michelle Tusan
  Published on H-Albion (September, 2008)
  Commissioned by Mark Hampton (Lingnan University)

  Cultural Explanations of State-Sponsored Violence in the Middle East
  Priya Satia tells a timely story about British engagement with the Middle East in the period surrounding the crisis of the Great War. Well researched and cogently argued, the book analyzes the exploits of intelligence agents in order to understand British cultural, military, and political perceptions of the region that came to be known as Arabia (present-day Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq). This “cultural history of the interwar British imperial state” incorporates the fields of diplomatic and military history by using a combination of sources that include Foreign Office reports, the papers of individual agents, literary and travel narratives, and private correspondence (p. 7).
  At the heart of the narrative is what Satia calls the “state that could not see,” a British bureaucracy that uses violence to control a region that it does not understand (p. 4). Intelligence gathering in Arabia during the early twentieth century transformed from an “informal, even accidental, work of world-weary Edwardians to the paranoid preoccupation of a brutal aerial surveillance regime after the war” (p. 5). Nine thematic chapters that move back and forth between the British and Arabian contexts trace the evolution of this process before and after WWI. The “Spies in Arabia” include D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell as well as lesser- known figures, all of whom used their culturally bound understandings of the region and status as semi-autonomous agents of the state to shape military policy.
  The book opens by exploring how Arabia came to be defined in the Edwardian imagination. Geographically imprecise, the term “Arabia” evoked a romantic attachment to a land considered the cradle of civilization. Chapter 1, “The Foundations of Covert Empire,” describes how Britain built an empire in the Middle East through a series of informal spy networks that linked metropole and colony in a tangled web of power relations. The Levant Consular Service made up one part of an overlapping system of surveillance that oversaw a network of consuls who kept watch over the region and helped set the stage for the founding of Britain’s covert empire during WWI. The nature of the work coupled with the immense distances traveled meant that informal personal networks mattered a great deal in information gathering.
  Back at home, a “trendy” cultural industry focused on Arabia had grown up around literary modernism. “The Cultural World of the Edwardian Agent” described in chapter 2 had its foundations in what Satia calls a “literary and artistic cult of the desert” (p. 67). This Arabia did not reflect a current history and culture but rather harkened back to an ancient idea of the region as the land of the Bible. Agents who traveled to Arabia and gathered information for the government thus understood their work through “a particular cultural lens” which “refracted what they saw” (p. 97).
  Arabia’s incorporation into Britain’s “covert empire” during and after the war, according to Satia, happened as a result of military conquest and the literary and cultural representation of the work of intelligence agents. The final three chapters in part 1 build the case for understanding the Middle East as a central text in wartime discourse over the future of the British Empire. A new sort of anti-Enlightenment project takes hold when it comes to intelligence gathering. With few maps of the region in existence before the war, the project of surveying the region fell to agents who helped created a picture of the landscape by combining limited knowledge of topography with “thick descriptions” that read like literary texts to create what Satia calls an anti-empirical way of knowing (p. 106). The absence of a complete scientific survey of the region had important military consequences in terms of how military men created a strategy for a place that remained, even after mapping had been completed, largely unknown.
  The point, of course, is not that the British should have used empiricism to more accurately understand the region that they were about to conquer but rather to illustrate how war strategy relied on a cultural construction. Chapter 4, “Cunning in War,” sketches the world of the agent on the ground who used rumors and deceptive tactics to gain power and glean information. This new “irregular” thinking about war looked to control Arabia by imitating what agents believed reflected an Arab way of knowing that valued intuition over empiricism (p. 156). Air surveillance, used for intelligence work in the Middle East unlike in western Europe, promised control through covert action that combined the “intuitive” knowledge of the agents with aerial photography.
  Chapter 5 turns to discuss what WWI represented for Britons looking to reclaim Arabia for the modern world in order to prove the nobility of wartime sacrifice. Lawrence looms large as a chivalric figure who constructs a redemption narrative of the West by forging connections between Arabia and England in the popular imagination. Here Satia interestingly contrasts Lawrence’s romantic war writing about Arabia to the terror-filled writing of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon about the Western front. The modernist literati and the public held up Lawrence as representing a sense of heroic Englishness that society longed for in the midst of a protracted and brutal war.
  Part 2 turns to the postwar world and it is here that the main argument of the book takes shape. To understand “how contemporaries made sense of these events” in Arabia in the postwar period, Satia offers four chapters that put military tactics in conversation with public perceptions of the postwar situation (p. 203). Faced with a series of rebellions in Arabia that resulted from the failed promises of the Western powers as embodied in the flawed Treaty of Versailles, Britons looked to explain why Arabs resented British rule. Here structural causes like the failed mandate system, considered by many to be colonialism under a different name, take a back seat to cultural explanations. “Official conspiracy theories” abounded after the war to explain discontent with British rule for those who wanted Iraq, in particular, to remain part of Britain’s contiguous land empire. Reports full of unconfirmed information reminiscent of the intrigue of the Great Game served to justify Britain’s holding on to the region to prevent anarchy.
  This system of rule set the stage for the preferred method of British control of Iraq: aerial bombardment. The conspiracy theories that surrounded the rebellions contributed to a sense that only a show of force would end Arabs' resistance. Chapter 7, “Air Control,” remarkably demonstrates how air control was used as a technique of colonial administration and ushered in the world’s first “air control” regime. Aerial bombardment offered the false promise that Britain could hold the regime with agents, not armies. This, coupled with the paranoid delusions of the British military, according to Satia, created “a half-baked intelligence mosaic” that led to an “incoherent” policy of covert empire (p. 274).
  The final substantive chapter of the book, “Seeing Like a Democracy,” examines how the state attempted to manage public opinion in the wake of its failed policy in the Middle East. The press set the terms of the debate as a conflict between the public and the government. Outrage over secrecy, censorship, and a general lack of information about the Middle East policy gradually grew after the war. In this way, “Middle Eastern policy was thus central ... to the movement for democratic control of foreign policy” (p. 299). Satia paints a portrait of an impotent press corps unable (or possibly unwilling) to represent the public interest. The government plays the role of the “spin-doctor,” bending information whenever it can in order to conceal its brutality of its covert regime. Here Britain emerges as a somewhat weary conqueror faced with an unpopular campaign in Iraq that it seems to have little hope of winning on the battlefield or at home.
  One of the book’s key contributions to both cultural history and the history of the British Empire is how it pushes the boundaries of cultural explanations of the interwar period by placing violence at the center of the story. Drawing on the work of historians such as Mark Mazower, Isabel Hull, and Caroline Elkins, Satia counters the notion of interwar Britain as a peace-loving democracy that existed as a counterpoint to the rising tide of fascism in continental Europe.[1] State terror campaigns undertaken in Arabia during the 1920s had their roots in a culture of violence that came out of the Great War. British policymakers justified the “humanity” of aerial bombardment by comparing it with the brutality of other wartime combat practices. As Satia points out, these tactics were being used for the first time on largely civilian populations in peacetime. One explanation for using aerial surveillance in this way is found in how the British perceived their enemy as intractable, existing in a world that held a very particular place in the British imaginary.
  This is a deeply historical and politically relevant book. The very nature of the subject matter makes it essential reading for British Empire specialists and general readers looking to understand how Iraq emerged in its modern form out of the crucible of empire and war. Spies in Arabia, however, does not belong in the category of books that use the history of Britain’s involvement in the region to explain the current failed United States policy in Iraq.[2] This critique of British imperialism in the Middle East as a paranoid and brutal arm of military policy questions the liberal underpinnings of imperial ideology, namely that an empire always acts in the best interests of itself and those it colonizes. What specific lessons it draws for the present day Satia wisely leaves for the reader to decide.
  Notes
  [1]. Mark Mazower, “Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1158-1178; Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005); Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
  [2]. Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

  If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-albion.
  Citation: Michelle Tusan. Review of Satia, Priya, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. September, 2008.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15541

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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