By Elizabeth Haines, Team Leader, Overseas and Defence, November 2023
A cataloguing project on the series CO 730 opened up new windows onto our collection of Colonial Office correspondence about Iraq under British mandate in the 1920s. This presentation explores stories of belonging and identity in CO 730 that connect 1920s Iraq to East Asia, the Caribbean and beyond.
Elizabeth Haines is Team Leader, Overseas and Defence, and a record specialist in Empire and Commonwealth History.
Transcript
Welcome to this catalogue week presentation. My name is Elizabeth Haines, and I work at the National Archives, UK in the Collections Expertise and Engagement Department, as Team Leader, Overseas and Defence.
The quote that is the title of this presentation describes the uncertainty about the political status of two brothers, Sion and Kadouri Hanania in the words of their London lawyers Gasquet, Metcalfe and Walton, 1921.
In their letter, which is now in the records of the Colonial Office, the lawyers complain that they are unable to advise their clients ‘we find it impossible to tell them whether they are at the present time British Subjects or French Subjects or Arabs. The only thing that seems certain is that they are no longer Turks’.
Claims to national identity can frequently be complicated, but this one appeared particularly tricky. The Hanania brothers were born in Baghdad, educated in a French school in Baghdad, and now resident in France. At the time of their birth, Baghdad was part of the Ottoman empire, in 1921, however for just over a year, it had just become part of the British Mandate for Mespotamia, and in October 1922 it became the Kingdom of Iraq. In this moment of change what was the Hanania brother’s status? Which country might offer them legal protection?
The history of the British administration of Iraq began at the end of the First World War, and was crystallised in the Treaty of Sevres which was signed with the defeated Ottoman Empire in 1920. Iraq was one of a number of territories that were taken from former imperial powers but not considered by the League of Nations to be capable of self-rule. The British were given a mandate to govern the territory and bring it towards self-rule, which they did, in conjunction with the appointed Iraqi monarch Faisal, until 1932.
Some of the most important records for Iraq in that period are therefore in the files of The National Archives in London, and in particular in the files of the Colonial Office who oversaw British administration in Iraq. This March we completed a cataloguing project on some of these records: the series CO 730, which contains correspondence sent to the Colonial Office from and about Iraq.
The project catalogued correspondence that is bound into large books, or volumes like these, and over nearly five years (through a global pandemic) a small group of volunteers, Mac, Janet, Ana, and later Rebecca, meticulously worked their way through 104 of these volumes, each containing hundreds of files of letters. They recorded the subject of each file, and its covering dates, creating new ‘item’ level descriptions.
On the slide you can see a snapshot from the catalogue, Discovery, and where before you just had one entry, for example CO 730/27, this is now subdivided into tens sometimes more than a hundred individual item level descriptions.
The result is that what was previously only identifiable in the catalogue as a volume of correspondence about Iraq from a particular year has been immeasurably enriched.
An important benefit of this work is that we can now search different topics by keyword much more precisely, and more easily track the stories of individual lives, such as that of the Hanania brothers. To illustrate this, I’m going to explore three further stories revealed by the cataloguing of CO 730, that all come from the same year, 1922.
All three stories offer windows into the remarkable lives and travels of individuals from and through Iraq in the 1920s, connecting Baghdad not only with London, where the Colonial Office sat and the records are today but with other sites around the globe: with Marseilles in France, Havana in Cuba, Chicago, Georgia in Eastern Europe, Mumbai in India and Shanghai in China.
This period after the First World War saw huge political shifts and the reshaping of states and identity in many parts of the world. What is especially clear in CO 730 is the attempt to set up forms of paperwork that could track and manage those changes to status and political identity of individuals. Here we see a document held in CO 730/27/82 where various different parts of the British government are trying to agree on the wording for application form for ‘laissez-passez’ (a form of travel document) for those resident in Iraq.
We often think of citizenship as fairly binary, agreed or denied by the state. However, as both the paperwork and legal interpretations of it were in flux in this period, there were many cases that the British government find different to adjudicate. The story of the Hanania brothers echoes the idea of citizenship rights on a kind of legal spectrum (as the historian Sarah Stein describes it) which individuals and states negotiate.
The cataloguing work helps readers identify some of those trends in state bureaucracy more easily, but most importantly it makes the human stories behind them more visible, and the global scope of those individuals journeys and experiences.
The first story is one about which I only know fragments. It is the story of an Iraqi who, in October 1922, is in Havana, Cuba. His name is Joseph Georges Andraos (also known as Abdul Kerim), who describes himself as a member of a Kurdish tribe. He had left Iraq in May 1922 and travelled to Marseilles, where the French had re-issued him identity documents in which he was incorrectly described as Syrian. He now wished to get a visa to travel to the United States but didn’t have the right papers to do so. Here on screen we see the letter from the British Consul in Havana that describes his case.
For at least some of his journey, Andraos had travelled with a Reverend of the Nestorian Church and wished to travel to another Nestorian community in Chicago. The Nestorian Church was one of several Christian sects that was based predominantly in the Middle East but that already by the 10th Century had Bishops in India and China. Religious persecution meant that by the early twentieth century there was a huge Nestorian diaspora. Members of the Nestorian Church in Iraq had been persecuted under the Ottoman Empire and had allied themselves to the British in the First World War. In this case, the British government agreed to award Andraos the papers he needed to declare his Iraqi origins and get the papers he needed to travel to Chicago.
The second story I’m going to pick out of these volumes isn’t linked to a single name, but points to an important moment in the history of refugee rights. It is correspondence related to refugees from the Caucasus who are in Iraq in 1922. The letter you see on screen is from The British Armenian Committee in London who were petitioning the Colonial Office for assistance. The file records 9,000 refugees in Iraq who were due to travel to Batumi (a city in today’s Giorgia). Batumi was suffering from food shortages in the wake of the First World War and if the refugees travelled there without their own supplies they would be at extreme risk.
The scale of the movement of people through and from the South Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia and Azerbajan), as well as through Iraq and Turkey in the 1920s was unprecedented. The historical persecution of religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire had displaced many people prior to the First World War, and the Russian revolution had created further mass migration. This new moment of refugee movement through to Europe, the Middle East and beyond led to an entirely new system of documentation for refugees that began in 1922, the Nansen passport.
The Nansen passport was a project of Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, and the High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations. Various international agreements led to reciprocal arrangements between fifty-two governments that agreed to provide temporary asylum for refugees, but also allowed a refugee to take their paperwork onward to other countries where they might have had family or other contacts or prospects.
On the screen is a specimen version of the Nansen passport, now held at the Norwegian National Library. The precarious position of these refugees, points to another way in which the post First World political landscape was creating new processes for regulating identity. 450,000 Nansen passports were issued before the scheme came to a close in 1938 indicating the huge scale of forced migration in that period.
The final story that I’m going to share today from 1922 is that of Ben-sion Aaron Somekh. Here on screen we have more correspondence about disputed status and rights. Somekh is a member of a large Iraqi Jewish community in Shanghai, primarily in business as merchants. Somekh in fact died in 1927, with an estate of a value that was estimated to be (in today’s terms) about three hundred million dollars.
Somekh, born in Baghdad (again while it was part of the Ottoman Empire), had lived in India for four years, and had been resident in Shanghai was seeking to understand what his status was now that Iraq was British. The trading networks of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora through India to China had been very useful to the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and they had offered many individuals in the diaspora naturalisation in return. However by the early twentieth century the British were becoming more reluctant to offer legal protection to this community via naturalisation or the status of ‘Protected Person’ (in which the individual didn’t have full rights but could ask for some assistance from British embassies and consuls). As described in a letter from the Consul in Shanghai to the Colonial Office, through ‘stricter’ interpretation of their guidance.
In 1911 the Chinese had overthrown the imperial government and the country was becoming politically much less stable. So, for the Iraqi Jewish community in China, including Somekh, despite his wealth, British protection was becoming increasingly important in a period where their lives and their livelihoods were more often at risk.
On the left letter from Somekh himself outlines his biography and the case he is making for British protection for himself, but also very importantly for his sons aged 11, 8 and 3 who were born in China.
On the right we see a note from the Consul to the Foreign Office, (forwarded to the Colonial Office) in which he expresses doubts about adhering too strictly to regulations in Somekh’s case.
Somekh’s application for British protection was rejected (as were many in that period), on the grounds (as the British officials write) that he didn’t intend to resume permanent residency in Iraq.
Several similar cases appear in the 1920s. Interestingly in 1931, just a few years later the British Supreme Court in Shanghai ruled that the administration of the will of another Jewish-Iraqi businessman, Silas Hardoon, did fall under British jurisdiction. This was surprising because Silas Hardoon, like Ben-sion Somekh had been denied British protection twice in the years before his death. We see again here the ways in which these forms of identity are negotiated through the correspondence circulating between lawyers, the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office.
The legacy of the Iraqi Jewish community in Shanghai was, nonetheless considerable and deserves another presentation in itself. But it can be seen even in the cityscape itself. Here on screen we have two images of the Ohel Rachel synagogue in Shanghai that was built in 1921 by the Jewish Iraqi community, one from around the time of the correspondence in CO 730, and one showing it still standing in 2013.
This is the last of the stories from CO 730 for today although there are many many more to uncover. The complications of their paperwork and legal status have left us a trail to follow those journeys of individuals from and through Iraq to nearly the entire globe.
So again, I’d like to emphasise that all this history and all these histories are made much more visible through the amazing cataloguing work done by TNA volunteers. Thank you again, Mac, Janet and Ana, in particular, for your contributions in making these incredible stories more accessible. Thank you to you, for listening.