The people of Mosul, whose fields and wells were the prize, were not in the room.

Britain sponsored Iraq into the League of Nations as the final signature on a deal the population had never seen, negotiated in rooms where not one of them sat.

The people who lived there did not sign.

Before 1932, there was no Iraq. There were three Ottoman provinces, Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, administered separately for four centuries. Mosul looked north to Anatolia, Baghdad centered the river trade, Basra faced the Gulf. They shared water. They did not share a polity. No sultan governed them as one unit. When the British Empire dismantled the Ottoman order, it merged them anyway. The population was not asked. The absence of consent was not an oversight. It was the condition upon which the state was built.

The merger served a sequence of interests. None belonged to the people inside the lines.

The first interest was oil. British capital held the Turkish Petroleum Company concessions in Mosul before the war ended. The Royal Navy’s shift to oil made that concession a strategic........

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