Satia, P., Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East [Book Review]

The striking image on the cover of Priya Satia’s impres-
sive study—a small Wapiti airplane whizzing over a
camel party striding in the desert—is a perfect emblem
of this book’s theme: the role played by the informal
network of Edwardian British spies in the construction
of Britain’s “covert empire” in Arabia, that “new form
of imperial rule, invisible, barely existing on paper, de-
signed for an increasingly anti-imperialist postwar
world” (p. 7). Juxtaposing the romance of the timeless
dunes with the violence of modern warfare—contrast-
ing the slow movement of the caravan’s horizontal
progress with the airplane’s all-encompassing vertical
gaze—the photograph suggests how the creation of
Britain’s brutal aerial surveillance regime in post-
World War I Iraq was rooted in the physical nature of
the Arabian desert, constructed in the British imagi-
nation as an unfathomable, unreadable space, which
must be made legible to the emerging colonial state, “a
state that could not see” (p. 4).