The Pomegranate Tree has Smothered Me: International Law, Imperialism & Labour Struggle in Iraq, 1917-1960

This dissertation delves into the legal and labour history of Hashemite Iraq (c. 1921-1958) to explore the role international law and its institutions played in Iraqs state formation, as well as, the imperial control of the semi-peripheral region of the Middle East. By highlighting the historical specificity of the semi-periphery in international legal history, it shows how Iraq was a laboratory for experimentation with the concept of sovereignty. A unique doctrine of semi-peripheral sovereignty was skillfully developed by the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in Geneva and embedded in the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty to ensure Iraqs independence in 1932 maintained geopolitical and imperial interests that were specific to the region, especially the extraction, production and transportation of Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean. The material effects of this international legal doctrine on the everyday lives of working class Iraqis is traced by looking at how it intersected with British imperial law, land law, the transnational law of oil concessions and pipeline agreements, criminal law and emergency law. The spaces and semi-colonial enclaves of capitalist production and trade of the oil fields in Kirkuk, the railways in Baghdad and the Port of Basra, and their corresponding governing structures are then detailed in micro-histories with the aim of analyzing the manner in which the oil, port and railway workers organized against the semi-colonial and imperial legality that was imposed upon them. The dissertation ends with an analysis of the massive 1948 Wathba uprising against the revision of the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty. The Wathba, successfully prevented the re-imposition of imperialism in Iraq, and would turn into the seed of the July Revolution in 1958. It is situated here within the wider history of decolonization in the Third World to advance a novel methodological approach of the conjuncture to understand anti-colonial and labour agency in relation to international legal history. This study illustrates that undertaking a conjunctural analysis illuminates how the agency of the ordinary peoples of the Third World influenced international legal transformation. The doctrine of semi-peripheral sovereignty and all juridical forms of semi-colonialism would be unequivocally rejected through the Iraqi contribution to the drafting of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. This dissertation therefore reveals the unique constitutive relationship between international law, imperialism, and capitalism in the semi-peripheral Middle East, while maintaining the importance of integrating the history of class formation, agency and labour into international legal history. The material effects of this international legal doctrine on the everyday lives of working class Iraqis is traced by looking at how it intersected with British imperial law, land law, the transnational law of oil concessions and pipeline agreements, criminal law and emergency law. The spaces and semi-colonial enclaves of capitalist production and trade of the oil fields in Kirkuk, the railways in Baghdad and the Port of Basra, and its corresponding governing structures are then detailed in micro-histories with the aim of analyzing the manner in which the oil, port and railway workers organized against the semi-colonial and imperial legality that was imposed upon them. The dissertation ends with an analysis of the massive 1948 Wathba uprising against the revision of the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty. The Wathba, successfully prevented the re-imposition of imperialism in Iraq, and would turn into the seed of the July Revolution in 1958. It is situated here within the wider history of decolonization in the Third World to advance a novel methodological approach of the conjuncture in relation to understanding anti-colonial and labour agency in international legal history. This dissertation illustrates that undertaking a conjunctural analysis illuminates how the agency of the ordinary peoples of the Third World influenced international legal transformation. The doctrine of semi-peripheral sovereignty and all juridical forms of semi-colonialism would be unequivocally rejected through the Iraqi contribution to the drafting of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. This dissertation therefore reveals the unique constitutive relationship between international law, imperialism, and capitalism in the semi-peripheral Middle East, while maintaining the importance of integrating the history of class formation, agency and labour into international legal history