The British-American Imperial Agenda in Iraq: the Oil and Railway line from Kirkuk to Haifa, 1920-1932

By using data from the Records of Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Asia, 1910-1929 and the Iraqi Administration Reports, in regards to the railway and pipeline infrastructure, along with integral secondary source material like Peter Sluglett’s Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (2007, 2nd ed.), this study addresses the concept of identity among the Sunni Arab elite as well as Kurds within Iraq, who were embedded within this new imperial reality of oil and railways between 1920 and 1929. This study has found that the U.S. had a covert interest in the shaping of the Iraqi nation, while most research has focused on the British imperial agenda concerning railways. Furthermore, the question of Mosul implicated a desire of the British to include the former province in Iraq between the years 1920 to 1926. However, it seems through U.S. correspondence that the potential pipeline within the Mosul region, suggested prior to the settling of the Mosul question between Britain and Turkey that surveying the area was a paramount issue though much of the U.S. correspondence, though British Iraqi Reports cite it rarely. The methodology employed within this research project consists of both the imperialist agenda of Britain and the U.S. embryonic interests in Iraq, while conveying the consciousness of those imperialized and/or colonized. Therefore, this had implicated that there was a vested interest in the creation of Iraq, and more specifically the railways and pipelining were a burgeoning concern for these imperial powers throughout the primary source documentation. This interest in surveying the newly fashioned Iraq led to what one scholar terms as an “emerging fault line” among the ethnically heterogeneous populations throughout the former vilayets, which had not existed prior to the formation of the Iraqi nation