Percy Cox - Appointment As High Commissioner of Iraq and Iraqi Revolt (1920)

Appointment As High Commissioner of Iraq and Iraqi Revolt (1920)

Following the Iraqi Revolt of 1920, British colonial administrators felt a more effective and cheaper method to rule the area would be to create an Iraqi government in which British influence was less visible. It was in this environment that Percy Cox took up residence in Baghdad as the first High Commissioner under the Iraq Mandate. Later, reflecting on Britain’s new policy and the difficulties involved, Cox wrote to the mother of Gertrude Bell,

The task before me was by no means an easy or attractive one. The new line of policy which I had come to inaugurate involved a complete and necessarily rapid transformation of the facade of the existing administration from British to Arab and, in the process, a wholesale reduction in the numbers of British and British-Indian personnel employed.

Acting as High Commissioner, Cox collaborated with former Ottoman officials and tribal, sectarian, and religious leaders and oversaw the creation of a largely Arab provisional government, or “Council of State,” with the purpose of seeing the nascent country through the turbulent period following the revolt. Cox selected as president the (Sunni) religious leader Abd al-Rahman al- Kaylani, the Naqib of Baghdad. Council members were culled from local elites whom Cox felt could be relied upon to support the British agenda. The satisfactory functioning of this interim government allowed Cox to attend the Cairo Conference, convened by the new Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill in 1921.