“The Creation of World-Mind”: British Civil Servants, Education, and the Mandates for Iraq and Palestine

This paper investigates British civil servants employed by the Education Departments of Iraq and Palestine from the beginning of British control of the region during World War I through the end of the Mandate for Palestine in 1948.  By examining British individuals who were frequently granted jurisdiction over educational administration, this presentation highlights the clashes and synergies between local and colonial policies during a global shift from explicit to implicit imperialism. The author employs a variety of archival sources; official reports, diaries, colonial and foreign office records as well as interviews with former pupils in order to demonstrate how British officials alongside native-born educators shaped education in paradoxically idiosyncratic and yet universalizing forms during this period of late-stage colonialism and nation-building. The officials analyzed in this paper were employed as Directors, Deputy Directors and advisors in the Middle East and Africa, meant to impose a British model of colonial education regardless of local conditions and local personnel. This paradigm included an elitist education for a select few and basic literacy for the remaining population. Colonial educators were often caught between their desires, duties to their own governments and to the Mandate inhabitants as well as the contradictions inherent in an educational system designed to promote political stability while paying lip-service to an international civilizing and democratizing mission.  This paper explores how colonial educators rationalized and negotiated between political pressures, their own careers and the mundane business of state-sponsored education, highlighting a transnational network of powerful individuals but also challenges to their authority and the unintended consequences of British educational policy in the Middle East.