Imagining an Imperial Future: Partition Planning in British Mandate Palestine

This paper examines how British officials inscribed an imagined future imperial presence on Palestine as they mapped out partition plans and the contours of new independent states from the late-1920s to late-1930s. Neither the imagined new states nor the British areas of control were in the end realized in the forms delineated on the se maps and in these plans, but the planning itself tells us a good deal about the tensions between imperialism and decolonization at a particular moment in the interwar British empire. The partition plans also raise questions about the boundary between earnest policy proposals and more experimental imperial imaginings, and the role each type of thinking played in the end of empire.

Through an examination of private papers, administrative documents, maps and reports, this paper highlights the often cross-cutting ways in which partition worked as both an abstract concept and as a worked out policy proposal. British imperial careers and cross-imperial thinking that were critical to the genesis and development of partition plans for Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, and so, not surprisingly, partition proposals envisioned a permanent, albeit altered, British imperial future in Palestine. Paying close attention to those alterations, this paper proposes that we read partition plans as encoding a new kind of ethno-national imperial sovereignty.