Manufacturing Sovereignty
International Law, Labour Struggle, and the Making of Iraq
Series: Hart Monographs in Transnational and International Law;
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Product details:
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
- Date of Publication 11 December 2025
- Number of Volumes Hardback
- ISBN 9781509952878
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages352 pages
- Size 234x156 mm
- Language English 700
Categories
Long description:
This book delves into the legal and labour history of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq to explore the role international law and its institutions played in Iraq's state formation.
Focusing on a turbulent period in global and Middle East history, it shows how the case of Iraq became a laboratory for experimentation with the concept of sovereignty by the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in Geneva. This resulted in the development of a doctrine of 'semi-peripheral sovereignty' to justify Iraq's independence from the Mandate process. This novel doctrine and its operation within the provisions of the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty ensured the maintenance of British dominance over Iraq, especially to safeguard the extraction and transportation of its valuable oil resources to Western markets.
The book traces how this legal doctrine impacted the everyday lives of working class Iraqis. It explores the governance of the extraterritorial spaces of capitalist accumulation and labour exploitation, in particular the Iraq Petroleum Company oil fields, the Iraq State Railways and the Port of Basra. It goes on to detail how the oil, railway and port workers led by the Iraqi Communist Party effectively organised themselves into a nationalist revolutionary labour movement. They waged an anti-colonial struggle against these imperial legal structures to improve their lot, leading up to the 1948 Wathba, the 1953 Intifada, and ultimately the July Revolution of 1958, which upended the British-sponsored monarchy.
Spanning various international archives and Arabic primary source materials, this book offers an example of a social, legal and labour history written from below, centering ordinary working peoples' agency in the historiography of international law. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Marxist methodologies, it emphasises the significance of the semi-periphery in the making of the international legal order.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Specificity of the Geo-political Region of the Middle East, the Logic of Sykes-Picot and the Making of Iraq
The Semi-periphery in the Making of International Law
Chapters Outline and the Structure of the Book
A Note on Primary Sources
1. Enclosing Mesopotamia: Frontier Governmentality, The Rule of Property and the Origins of Underdevelopment in Hashemite Iraq
I. Introduction
II. British Tribal Administration and the Invention of Customary Law in Iraq
III. The Tribal Criminal & Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR): its Origins, Juridical Characteristics and Wide Implications
IV. Legal Fragmentation and the Plasticity of Tribal Law
V. The Rule of Property, the Destruction of the Tribal Commons & the Origins of Capitalist Relations in Iraq
VI. How the 'Rule of Property' Underdeveloped Iraq: the Necessity of Law in the History of (Semi) Colonialism
VII. Conclusion
2. Manufacturing Iraqi (Semi-peripheral) Sovereignty in Geneva: Dominance through De Jure 'Independence'
I. Introduction
III. The 'Wilsonian Moment' in the Middle East, the legal architecture of the Mandate System & the Geopolitical Significance of the 'A' Mandates
V. The Concept of the 'Semi-periphery' & its Significance in International Law
VII. Manufacturing Iraqi 'Independence': The 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty and the Doctrine of Semi-peripheral Sovereignty
VIII. The Principle of 'Economic Equality' or the 'Open Door': the Freedom of Capitalist Accumulation under International Law
IX. The Independence of Oil Pipelines: The Constitutive Link between Iraqi Semi-Peripheral Sovereignty and the IPC Oil Concession
X. Conclusion
3. Civilizing Labour Relations in Baghdad: The ILO and The Making of the Iraqi Working Class
I. Introduction
III. The JAS and the Formative Years of Iraqi Trade Unionism
IV. The 1930 Railway Workers' Strike as a 'School of Struggle'
IV. The 1931 General Strike and the Entry of the Iraqi Working Class into the Political Arena
VI. The ILO, the 1936 Labour Law and the Expansion of 'Civilized' Labour Relations
VI. Conclusion
4. Disrupting the Circuits of Capitalism: The IPC Workers' Struggle against the Legal Infrastructures of the Oil Frontier of the Middle East
I. Introduction
III. Urban Migration & the Question of Labour Transition in Post-war Iraq
IV. Everyday Life in the IPC Enclave of Kirkuk & the Miserable Conditions of the Iraqi Oil Worker
V. The Gawurbaghi Strike and the Effects of the Legal Spatialities of the IPC Enclave
VI. The Company Narrative of the Gawurbaghi Strike and its Ideology of Trade Unionism
VII. Law and Space in the Mosul Oil Frontier: the Infrastructure of Law in a Desert Space
VIII. Pressure Points in the Circuits of Capitalism: How to Use Infrastructure to Subvert Law
IX. Conclusion
5. Forging Independent Labour Unions: The Railway and Port Workers' Struggles against the Arteries of Imperial Communications and Trade
I. Introduction
III. The Iraqi State Railways as ImperialArteries of Communications in the Middle East
IV. The Legal Structures that Govern the Iraqi State Railways Directorate
V. The First 'Experiment' in Strike Action at the Schalchiyyah Railway Workshops
VI. The Port of Basra: The Legal Structures of the Port Directorate and its Extraterritorial Enclave
VIII. Seeing like an Expert: Trade Unionism as Subversion & Reform as Counter-Revolution
IX. Conclusion
6. Permanent Emergency and the Criminialization of Dissent as Technologies of Semi-Colonial Governance
I. Introduction
II. 'Grobba's Law Against Bolshevik Communists' and the Criminalization of Dissent in Iraq
III. The 'Magical Weapon' of Emergency Rule as a Technique of Governance
A. Tracing the History of the Doctrine of Emergency
B. The Advent of Emergency Rule in Iraq
C. The 1952 Intifada and Permanent Emergency Rule as Governing Technique
D. The Rule of Semi-Colonial Law: Hussein Jamil and the 'Legal Aporia' of Emergency
IV. Conclusion
7. The Defeat of the Portsmouth Treaty: al-Wathba and its Contribution to the Conjuncture of Decolonization in International Law
I. Introduction
II. The Limits of the Study of Revolutionary Agency in TWAIL
IV. The British Empire's 'New Clothes of Treaties and Pacts'
V. The Making of the 1948 Portsmouth Treaty and Its Implications
VI. The 'Wathba of the People' Takes Form
VIII. The British View of the Wathba and the 'Logic of the Resisting People'
IX. The Wathba from the Lens of the Labour Movement
X. The Wide Implications of the Wathba and its Contribution to the Conjuncture of Decolonization in International Law
X. The Role of Labour & Working-Class Agency to the Conjuncture of Decolonization
XI. Conclusion
Conclusion
I. The Lines of Expansion and Contraction of the International Legal Order
II. The Juridical Forms of Sovereignty in International Law and their Relations to Capitalism and Imperialism
III. Legality as a Question of Strategy and Tactics in Revolutionary Struggles for Decolonization
IV. Conjunctural Analysis and The Writing of History For the Present
