ABSTRACT
WHEN hostilities came to an end the Middle East presented an air of tremendous, superficial prosperity to the casual visitor. It had done extremely well out of the war and suffered from it nothing more serious than a shortage of imported consumer goods and the presence on its soil of bitterly disliked foreign armies. In the space of six years (1940-1946) well over one million Allied troops had lived in the Middle East and fought along its fringes. The bulk of their equipment and rations had been specially imported, but their local spending in that time had been enormous. Local contractors had made impressive fortunes by constructing roads and landing-grounds, barracks, and bridges; by providing fresh fruit and vegetables and other items to supplement the imported rations; by manufacturing anything from aspirin to leather hand-bags to save space on Allied shipping. Hotels, cafés, restaurants, cinemas, night-clubs—all had known an unparalleled prosperity. Although the major portion of all this vast flow of money went into the pockets of the few—another outstanding characteristic of the entire Middle East—sufficient of it did slip through greedy, grasping fingers to bring about a slight improvement in the standards of living and, anyway, the presence of these Allied armies and all their auxiliary and ancillary services did ensure regular, well-paid employment for hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had never before known such a phenomenon. There was, of course, a sharp rise in the cost of living. The Allied authorities did all they could to check this, but their efforts were uniformly nullified by pressure upon the local governments from what is called 'the Pasha class'—the unscrupulous, conscienceless tiny minority of wealthy men who were, and are, all-powerful in their respective countries. This is particularly true of Egypt, which was the main Allied base in the Middle East. The common man, and his wife, frittered away their war profits on luxuries they had never before dreamed of possessing, and practically everything that could be procured, either legitimately or by obtaining 'under-the-counter' import licences (not difficult, but the scale of bribes rose steeply), or by theft from Allied dumps, was sold for fantastic prices. Motor-tyres fetched hundreds of pounds; nylon stockings sold as fast as they could be obtained for ten pounds and more a pair; fountain-pens, frequently bought by people who could not write, and watches for people who could not tell the time, cost anything from twenty pounds to fifty pounds each. As the war moved away from the Middle East there was more shipping space available for civilian goods, and by VE Day the shops of Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and even the open-fronted stores of Amman were bulging with a mass of unusual and, for the majority of people who bought them so eagerly, mostly useless articles. The really rich—and therefore really powerful —classes had increased their wealth so fabulously that they could not possibly spend more than a fraction of it and by legal or illegal means had managed to build up large bank balances in America, Switzerland, France and elsewhere, to be disposed of profitably when controls were lifted.
