‘The most contrived of all the Middle Eastern states’ (Louis, 1984, 349), Transjordan was an almost accidental by-product of the San Remo conference of 1920, at which Britain and France finally divided between them the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

After the war the sparsely populated area east of the river Jordan had in theory been administered from Damascus by Hashemite scion King Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca. Faisal’s installation and rule had been encouraged as part of the British rewards that had been promised for Hijazi assistance during the war – Faisal had commanded the Arab ‘Northern Army’, and had joined with Allenby’s forces near Damascus. However, the British decision to honour the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement with France, in which she had specified her interest in Syria, led to Faisal being ousted by main force after British control was passed to the French in July 1920 (Dann, 1984, 1; Wilson, 1987, 39-40).

While the ousted Faisal would subsequently be offered the crown of British Iraq, Transjordan was eventually awarded to his elder brother, Amir Abdullah bin Hussein, whose candidacy (the ‘sharifian solution’ to the problem of administrating the territory) had been advanced by Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence at the Cairo conference of March 1921. On 1 April, Abdullah took over the administration of Transjordan, with a personal stipend of £5000 a month to be paid by the government of Palestine. The arbitrarily defined territory that he took under his nominal charge corresponded to no historical lines of ethnic, linguistic or political demarcation, and contained barely 225,000 people, around half of whom were nomads (ibid., 49-53, 56).

Abdullah, a mercurial and intermittently canny operator with some rather fantastical dreams of founding a new Arab kingdom (‘Greater Syria’), had been raised in Mecca within the grand traditions of the Sharifian Hijazi nobility, and had been educated as a young man in late Ottoman Istanbul. His upbringing and background were in some ways very well suited to his new position: he was, as Wilson puts it, ‘thoroughly familiar with the indirect exercise of power in circumstances not of his creation and not wholly within his control’ (ibid., 16). If nothing else, his time as head of state during the mandate certainly seems to provide evidence of an astute ability to avoid major confrontations with the British, even with those officials who were openly hostile to him. (The departure of Churchill and Lawrence from positions of direct relevance left Abdullah shorn of high-level British advocates for many years, though he did develop a good relationship with the man in whose hand true power was held, namely Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British ‘Resident’ in Transjordan from 1920 onwards.)

Though he had little choice in the matter, his overall reliability during the mandate years did gradually deliver him increasing security and responsibility in his role, if not any greater measure of real independence for Transjordan, which in administrative terms was ultimately still part of Palestine. The appearance of indigenous rule in the country, fostered throughout the mandate period by a regularly renewed series of treaties, was merely a ‘façade’, writes Louis, and Abdullah was not held high in the esteem of either the Arab world or British officialdom in general, the former viewing him as a quisling, the latter adjudging him an unaccomplished statesman (Louis, op.cit., 348). Nevertheless, he was loyal, and during the Second World War Transjordanian units, principally the Mechanised Desert Force and John Bagot Glubb’s Arab Legion, acquitted themselves well in Syria and Iraq (see WPN 145 for a feature on the Transjordan Frontier Force).

In part a reward for this wartime fidelity, a ‘treaty of alliance’, heralding the termination of the mandate and the ostensible granting of sovereign independence, was signed in London on 22 March 1946. There were of course various strategic and geo-political concerns involved, since continuing British influence in other Middle Eastern states was looking increasingly shaky (for Palestine in particular the situation looked beyond resolution). Transjordan, previously something of a backwater, was re-imagined in this light as Britain’s most reliable ally in an increasingly unstable area – it was already of great strategic significance, not least because the Iraq-Haifa pipeline ran the breadth of the territory. The treaty drawn up with these issues in mind granted Transjordan an ‘independence’ of a tightly qualified kind. Britain would still supply Transjordan with money ­(around £2 million a year in ‘aid’); would have complete freedom to station ground and air forces within the country, and move these military forces around at will; would have the right to develop and use the strategically important port of Aqaba; and would be entitled to develop a ‘signal communication system’ within the country (Louis, op. cit., 353-6). In fact, the truth was that in higher official circles there was no question of allowing Abdullah a truly independent state: the intention was to grant merely ‘the outward semblance of sovereignty’ (Louis, ibid., 353, quoting a telegram sent by G. A. Cunningham, High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan).

Nevertheless, Abdullah agreed without demur to all of the various provisos. At the Foreign Office in London on 22 March 1946 Abdullah’s representative, Ibrahim Pasha Hashim, signed the treaty, and on 25 May that year the Legislative Council of Transjordan declared in Amman the independence of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, pledging their allegiance to Abdullah as its newly crowned king.