The Establishment of Hashemite Rule: The Evolution of Trans-Jordan

Abstract

Writing in 1924, “Xenophon,” a “commentator on Middle Eastern affairs,” remarked that “of all the provinces of the vast Turkish empire left disorganized at the end of the World War, there was none so abandoned as that part of Arabia now known as Transjordania.” In the midst of the postwar disorder, a separate entity called Trans-Jordan evolved as Sharifian authority supplanted local rule, and great power diplomacy moved fitfully toward implementing the Sykes-Picot agreement and the division of the Fertile Crescent between Great Britain and France. In the course of this process, British attitudes toward Arabian politics underwent fundamental change. The consensus in Whitehall abandoned the pro-Sharifian policy of the war years and embraced instead Ibn Sa’ud. The latter was now viewed as the coming power in Arabia, and his conciliation was seen as the best means of securing British interests in the Hijaz and the Persian Gulf. Thus, despite the resort to a Sharifian solution in Iraq and Trans-Jordan, Hashemite aspirations in the postwar era labored under the double handicap of France’s determination to carve out a Syrian Empire and British hostility or indifference to Hussein’s efforts to protect the Hijaz against Ibn Sa‘ud.