Mosul, the Ottoman legacy and the League of Nations

This article looks into the workings of the special Commission on Mosul sent by the
League of Nations after World War I. The Commission was assigned to determine
whether the province of Mosul should be part of the new Republic of Turkey or of
British mandatory Iraq. Its chief guiding principal was the new notion of national
self-determination. Yet the people of Mosul, like other Ottoman communities, had

belonged to multiple groups simultaneously, identifying by family, location, occu-
pation and faith. Such plural notions of identity were inconsistent with the nation-
state model that had recently been reified by the League of Nations. The effort to

define affiliations based on a European taxonomy that emphasized ethnicity and

nation clashed with Mosulis’ older Ottoman-style affiliations, proved initially con-
fusing and then quite frustrating to the Commissioners.