Britain Created Iraq to Control Its Oil — Then Installed Its Own King
Modern Iraq was not born from ancient national identity or popular will. It was engineered by British imperial planners in the aftermath of the First World War. Britain welded together three Ottoman provinces that had never formed a single political unit, secured long-term control over the region’s suspected oil wealth, and placed a foreign prince on a newly invented throne. The result was a state designed to serve British strategic and commercial interests while presenting the appearance of Arab self-rule.
When Britain entered the First World War, Mesopotamia mattered primarily as a buffer protecting the oil fields of neighbouring Persia and the sea lanes to India. The Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil, and Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had already arranged for the British government to take a majority stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Ottoman territory that controlled access to the Gulf therefore became a wartime priority. British and Indian forces occupied Basra in 1914 and gradually advanced north, taking Baghdad in 1917. After the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, they pushed further and seized Mosul, even though the fighting had formally ended.
The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 had already divided much of the Ottoman Arab lands between Britain and France. Under its original terms, Mosul was assigned to the French sphere. Britain later reversed that arrangement. Growing appreciation of Mosul’s oil potential, combined with the desire to create a contiguous zone of influence from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, led London to insist on retaining the northern province. France eventually accepted compensation in the form of a share of future oil revenues. The three provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul were thus combined into a single administrative unit under British control.
In April 1920 the San Remo Conference formalised the arrangement. Britain received a Class A League of Nations mandate for Mesopotamia, later renamed Iraq. The mandate required the mandatory power to prepare the territory for eventual independence, yet in practice it conferred extensive administrative, military and economic authority. The new borders paid little attention to the region’s ethnic and sectarian realities. Sunni Arabs were concentrated around Baghdad, Shi’a Arabs dominated the south, and Kurds formed the majority in the north. These communities had different languages, tribal structures and historical memories. Binding them into one state was an act of imperial convenience rather than organic nation-building.
Local resistance soon followed. In the summer of 1920 a widespread revolt broke out against British rule. Tribal fighters, urban nationalists and religious leaders rose in different parts of the country. Britain responded with ground forces and the newly formed Royal Air Force, which used aerial bombardment to suppress the uprising. The human and financial cost was high. Public opinion in Britain, already weary after the Great War, grew critical of expensive colonial commitments. Officials in London began searching for a cheaper method of control.
The solution emerged at the Cairo Conference of March 1921. Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill gathered senior officials, including T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, to redesign Britain’s Middle Eastern policy. They decided to create an Arab government under a Hashemite ruler while retaining decisive British influence over defence, foreign affairs and finance. The chosen candidate was Faisal bin Hussein, third son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Faisal had led Arab forces alongside the British during the wartime revolt against the Ottomans. After the war he briefly claimed the throne of Syria, only to be expelled by the French in 1920. Installing him in Iraq offered several advantages: it partially fulfilled wartime promises to the Hashemites, placed a known collaborator in power, and created a monarch dependent on British support.
Faisal arrived in Basra in June 1921. It was the first time he had set foot on Iraqi soil. He spoke a Hijazi dialect unfamiliar to many of his future subjects. British officials, led by High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox and his influential adviser Gertrude Bell, organised a carefully managed referendum. Political officers encouraged local notables to support Faisal, and the process produced a reported 96 percent approval. On 23 August 1921 he was crowned king in Baghdad. The ceremony was a curious hybrid of Arab pageantry and British imperial ritual; the band played “God Save the King.”
The new monarchy operated under the shadow of the mandate. A series of Anglo-Iraqi treaties formalised the unequal relationship. Britain retained the right to maintain air bases, move troops across Iraqi territory, and exercise strong influence over foreign and defence policy. Even after Iraq gained formal independence and League of Nations membership in 1932, these privileges continued under the 1930 treaty. Real sovereignty remained limited.
Oil was never the only motive for British policy, but it quickly became central. Officials repeatedly linked political control to resource security. Leaving Iraq, they warned, risked handing valuable oilfields to rivals. In 1925 the Turkish Petroleum Company—later renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company and dominated by British interests with French and American participation—received a 75-year concession covering most of the country. The terms were highly favourable to the company and denied Iraq meaningful equity participation. Large-scale production began after the major discovery at Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk in 1927. For decades, British and foreign companies controlled the extraction and export of Iraqi oil while the Iraqi treasury received only modest royalties.
The artificial foundations of the state created lasting problems. Faisal and his successors struggled to forge a coherent national identity from communities that had little shared history as a single polity. Sectarian and ethnic tensions, tribal rivalries, and resentment of foreign influence persisted. The Hashemite monarchy survived until the 1958 revolution, when army officers overthrew and killed the royal family. Throughout its existence, successive Iraqi governments operated within constraints established by the original British settlement: dependence on external military support, limited control over natural resources, and a political system designed more for imperial convenience than for internal legitimacy.
Britain’s creation of Iraq illustrates a broader pattern of post-war imperial state-making. Faced with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the need to secure strategic routes and energy supplies, and the rising cost of direct colonial administration, British policymakers chose to invent a kingdom, install a pliable outsider as king, and lock in long-term commercial advantages. The oil beneath the ground and the strategic position of the territory justified the effort. The resulting state, born of mandate and monarchy rather than popular consent, carried the consequences of that origin for generations.
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