The Infrastructure of Mandatory Power in the Steppe

Abstract

Mandatory Trans-Jordan has been characterized as a “standstill society,”¹ a garrison state engineered almost by imperial design to police communications between Haifa and Baghdad and to maintain a stable buffer along the eastern marches of Palestine. In the “standstill” version, Britain’s failure to allocate investment or resources to developmental ends resulted in order without change, in societal stasis and economic stagnation, and a failure to embark on even the first steps of capitalist development.² The “standstill” version borrows the terminology of dependency theory but skirts the theoretically inconvenient fact that British subsidy flowed into, rather than local surplus out of, Trans-Jordan. It fails to explain what incentive or interest there was for large-scale commercial capital in such a dusty and remote corner of the Middle East, one whose value in British eyes was for the most part strategic and political.³