The Infrastructure of Mandatory Power in the Towns

Abstract

Marooned in Amman by the imperial division of Greater Syria, and faced with a “tiny heterogeneous population that owed no allegiance to the Hashemites,” it has been argued that ‘Abdullah “overcame Jordan’s geographical, economic, and demographic handicaps” by creating a “neo-patrimonial rentier state.” External revenues, supplied by the British in the form of an annual grant-in aid, provided the means to co-opt and conciliate “potential opponents” bequeathing a factionalized pattern of “political association” that posed little threat to the Amir or British colonial control. In fact, the Trans-Jordanian state was very much a British rather than a Hashemite creation, although its imperial architects built upon foundations laid down by Ottoman reform.¹ After containing the threats posed by recalcitrant tribes and the radical wing of the Istiqlal in the early 1920s, Great Britain proceeded to complete the centralizing project begun by the Ottomans. The British Residency took charge of state finances and administrative appointments in 1924 and, having reduced the Arab Legion to what was little more than a colonial gendarmerie, went on to integrate Trans-Jordan’s security structures into a system of Air Control firmly under imperial command.