ABSTRACT
IN the four years, 1914 to 1918, British arms completed what three centuries of British commerce and diplomacy had begun. The military operations which resulted in the occupation of Basra, then of Baghdad in 1917, and finally of the whole of Turkish Arabia as far north as Mosul, have been ably recounted elsewhere. 1 It is germane here only to indicate how the motives which lay behind the forward movements and the administration of the occupied territories arose partly from immediate circumstances and partly from the long established Middle East policy of Great Britain.
