This dissertation is a transnational history of twentieth-century anti-colonial
nationalism. It focuses specifically on the connections between the dissenting British left
and Iraqi nationalists during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on extensive
archival research in English and Arabic of official and unofficial sources in London and
Syria, I show how British and Iraqi anti-colonial activists simultaneously sought to
democratize British imperial policy-making in the metropole and periphery of the
Empire. From its early hours, Liberal and Labour leaders opposed to the First World
War campaigned tirelessly for an internationalist settlement without annexations as the
only guarantee of lasting peace for the postwar world. Colonial 'national awakenings' in
Egypt, India, and Iraq, they argued, both challenged the legitimacy of British 'imperial
democracy' and heralded a new era of international democracy deserving British
support. Iraq was, for them, a test case for a nobler approach to maintaining international
security through nurturing, rather than subjugating, national sovereignty. The British
government's unwillingness to relinquish Iraq after the war was taken as evidence of its
unfitness to govern free peoples either at home or abroad. Through my research, I am
able to show how the so-called 'extreme nationalist' editors of Iraq's daily press followed
the development of these arguments globally and adapted them in their attempt to
reorient the development of their state around Iraqi national interests. Playing upon the
sensitivity of British administrators to domestic and international public opinion, Iraqi
nationalists were able to keep the development of their political institutions on a far more
democratic course than either the British or Arab elite desired. Thus I show how British
and Iraqi figures created a network of dissent that sought to undermine the foundations of
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British imperial rule in Iraq and realize the idea of national sovereignty as the capstone of
international law, to the detriment of imperial legitimacy globally. This study, I believe,
demonstrates how transnational approaches can provide us with a richer understanding of
the role of popular nationalism in the birth of the international world in the early
twentieth century