ABSTRACT
Military modernization in the Middle East between the wars took place, for the most part, under alien rule. The Middle East in 1965 comprised eighteen sovereign states; forty years earlier there had been no more than five. Britain’s military development policies in its Middle East dependencies were far from uniform. They were, it is true, inspired by the Indian experience, but that experience was itself long and varied. Natives were recruited in the seventeenth century for the defense of company property, and in the eighteenth for the acquisition and subsequent defense of an incipient empire. The experience in Algeria conditioned French military policies in North Africa and, later, in the mandate for Syria and Lebanon to an even greater degree than had the Anglo-Indian experience in Britain’s sphere. In North Africa uniformity could be achieved because the countries were contiguous, the populations comparable, and the spurts of expansion spaced to allow for the consolidation of French power.
