Bruce Westrate. The Arab Bureau: British Policy in the Middle East, 1916–1920. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1992. Pp. xvi, 240. $35.00.

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partly how to find the money, at a moment when fiscal questions were becoming a matter of bitter controversy within their ranks, and partly how to impose the necessary organiza- tional reforms on services whose political connections were largely with their party. Fisher’s work as First Sea Lord, steadily supported by Balfour, made it possible to improve the efficiency of the navy and to contain its cost, but the reorganization of the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers to provide the framework for the expansion needed in time of emergency to enlarge and relieve the regular army roused a vociferous vested interest. Where Brodrick and Amold-Forster had failed, their Liberal successor, Haldane, susceptible to the Unionists’ pressure because of the need to placate their majority in the Lords, was induced in effect to implement Balfour’s principles, with the conversion of the militia into a Special Reserve to reinforce the army in time of war and the creation of the Territorial Force for home defense. Building his case from a microscopic survey of politicians’ papers, Williams convincingly shows the extent of cooperation on defense issues between Liberal and Unionist front benches after 1905 and the impotence of groups like the Navy League and the National Service League to force the Unionist leadership into more aggressive and partisan postures. Balfour and his colleagues both trusted the Liberals’ patriotism and disliked some of the nostrums that the gadflies were urging. Conscription, especially, struck them as a serious infringement of freedom; in any case, even its Unionist supporters had doubts about its practicality and cost and shied from its presumed electoral unpopularity. It is true that the Unionist leaders’ assumption that they could rely on the “imperialists” in the Liberal cabinet to restrain their more radical colleagues desire for economies in defense expenditure was a delusion; but, when the govemment initially failed to commit itself to eight new dread- noughts in 1909, Balfour is shown as knowing how to convert amiable collusion into fierce assault, both in Parliament and on the hustings in the January 1910 election. If, in the more harshly polarized political climate after 1909, defense issues formed one count in that indictment of his failure to give the Unionists a sufficiently distinctive and combative set of policies that undermined his leadership, that was largely unfair, and Bonar Law did not significantly depart from his bi-partisan approach. Williams has done well to remind us that the much-trumpeted activists of the “radical right” were far from taking over the party, on defense or anything else, and that the kind of political and official network exemplified by the cooperation between Balfour, Fisher, Lord Esher, and Haldane was much more powerful than, and not easily deflected by, the vaporings of pantomime figures like Lord Charles Beresford or waspish journalists like Leo Maxse. Populism was still a technique of opposition, not a style of leadership, in the Conservative party. University of Southampton PAUL SMITH Bruce Westrate. The Arab Bureau: British Policy in the Middle East, 1916-1920. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1992. Pp. xvi, 240. $35.00. Professor Westrate’s book adds another piece to the intricate jigsaw of the Middle East in the First World War. The Bureau “was a small collection of British intelligence officers othered in Cairo durine 1016 for the numoce of centralizine the collection and discemina.