Arnold Wilson

Arnold Talbot Wilson entered the British Indian Army and later joined the Indian Political Department, serving in Persia and the Persian Gulf before accompanying the British campaign in Mesopotamia. He became deputy and then acting Civil Commissioner, administering occupied territory after the capture of Baghdad.

Wilson favoured direct British control and rejected demands for immediate Iraqi self-government, policies that contributed to mounting opposition before the revolt of 1920. He was replaced by Percy Cox later that year. Wilson subsequently became a Conservative MP and was killed on active RAF service during the Battle of France in 1940.

Ian Rutledge’s Enemy on the Euphrates examines Arnold Wilson as one of the principal British officials behind the occupation of Mesopotamia and the policies that helped provoke the Iraqi revolt of 1920. Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys approaches the same imperial transition through fiction, following Iraqi and Welsh characters from the First World War into British rule and the revolt; Wilson’s administration forms part of the political system whose promises of liberation harden into occupation.