Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement of Iraq, A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba’thists and Free Officers is an all-time classic in Iraqi history. It is one of the early attempts to apply modern social science to the country. Batatu had extensive access to British, Iraqi government, Communist and Baathist papers along with interviews. Not only that it was published in English so it was accessible in the West. His main thesis was that the entrance of European capitalism into Iraq forever changed the economy and politics of the country and shaped the major events up the 1970s when his work ends.
The Old Social Classes begins with explaining the elite under the Ottomans and how they were changed by the arrival of English businesses and eventually the British taking over and creating Iraq after World War I. Under the Ottomans there were local economies based upon things like self-sufficient tribes to local industries that made boats for traveling up and down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Then British companies entered the market replacing everything from handcrafted clothes with ones manufactured in places like Birmingham to the local boat trade and river transportation business being displaced by English steamboats. Agriculture also shifted to landowning elites who were often tribal sheikhs who gained control of land and turned tribesmen into semi-serfs to grow cash crops. Just as important relations shifted from kinship and religion to material possessions. Batatu goes into each group of elites and how their lives were changed by capitalism and the English.
The second part of the book is about how political parties were created in response to the change in the economy with emphasis upon the Iraqi Communist Party. Batatu argues that the displaced classes gave rise to a variety of parties from the Communists to the to the Free Officers and pan-Arabists to the Baathists that challenged the new status quo that the Iraqi monarchy came to rule over. One of the strongest bases for the Communists for instance was in a neighborhood of Baghdad where the textile industry had been devastated by the British. They also drew from the flood of peasants who sought to escape the landlords by moving to Baghdad for better opportunities. Likewise many Baath members were from families in western Iraq who had lost their traditional trade relations with Syria when Iraq was founded. The Free Officers and Baathists were able to eventually seize power in a series of coups while the Communists became the largest party in the nation only to be repressed by those two organization. The Communists and their relations with the other parties and the government dominates this section of the book. There are entire transcripts of meetings of the party for instance to discuss whether it should take up armed struggle against the regime. There are discussions of the Syrian Communists and their ties and differences with their Iraqi counterparts and more.
Even the conclusion is enlightening. There the author talks about how oil transformed Iraq a second time. The wealth generated eventually allowed the Baath Party to become independent of society and not rely upon taxes or popular support. Instead the state came to dominate the country becoming the major force in business and in the labor force with civil workers, the military and pensioners. This opportunity was open to the monarchy when petroleum revenues first became a dominant part of public funding but the elite were too tied to the old landed classes to change. This is the state of Iraq today where oil dominates the country and the ruling parties feel they do not have to answer to the public rather the people should follow them as they provide them with jobs and opportunities.
The Old Social Classes is probably the most famous book in Iraqi history. Its depth and amount of research is hard to match. It gave rise to a whole slew of other writings and is still discussed today. The problem is that it is over 1,000 pages which makes it a challenge for the average reader to take on. Still if one wants to gain a real in depth understanding of modern Iraq it is one of the required readings.
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