After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, British and Empire troops remained in many of the former power’s territories for a number of years, overseeing the move back to peace. These areas included Persia and Mesopotamia; modern day Iran and Iraq. These countries must have been strangely exotic to the ordinary British troops deployed there. The people, food and buildings were unlike anything they had seen before and unsuprisingly men who had cameras took photographs to show thier families pictures of a world that was largely unchanged since the time of the bible. This week we have a wonderful set of photographs taken in 1919 in Persia and Mesopotamia. The captions on the back indicate that they were taken across a number of locations including Nasiriyeh, Mohammerheh and Basrah. The pictures are a mixture of images of the soldier’s friends as well as landscapes and pictures of the more picturesque local people:

My thanks go to Michael Whittaker who very kindly gave these photographs to me.