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Iraq
SOCIAL SYSTEMS
The impact of Western
penetration on the indigenous social and demographic structure
in the nineteenth century was profound. Western influence took
the initial form of transportation and trading links and the switch
from tribal-based subsistence agriculture to cash crop production--mostly
dates--for export (see Agriculture , ch. 3). As this process accelerated,
the nomadic population decreased both relatively and in absolute
numbers and the rural sedentary population increased substantially,
particularly in the southern region. This was accompanied by a
pronounced transformation of tenurial relations: the tribal, communal
character of subsistence production was transformed on a large
scale into a landlord-tenant relationship; tribal shaykhs, urban
merchants, and government officials took title under the open-ended
terms of the newly promulgated Ottoman land codes. Incentives
and pressures on this emerging landlord class to increase production
(and thus exports and earnings) resulted in expanded cultivation,
which brought more and more land under cultivation and simultaneously
absorbed the "surplus" labor represented by the tribal, pastoral,
and nomadic character of much of Iraqi society. This prolonged
process of sedentarization was disrupted by the dismemberment
of the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I, but it resumed
with renewed intensity in the British Mandate period, when the
political structure of independent Iraq was formed (see World
War I and the British Mandate , ch. 1).
This threefold transformation of rural society--pastoral to agricultural,
subsistence to commercial, tribal-communal to landlord-peasant--was
accompanied by important shifts in urban society as well. There
was a general increase in the number and size of marketing towns
and their populations; but the destruction of handicraft industries,
especially in Baghdad, by the import of cheap manufactured goods
from the West, led to an absolute decline in the population of
urban centers. It also indelibly stamped the subsequent urban
growth with a mercantile and bureaucratic-administrative character
that is still a strong feature of Iraqi society.
Thus, the general outline and history of Iraqi population dynamics
in the modern era can be divided into a period extending from
the middle of the nineteenth century to World War II, characterized
chiefly by urbanization, with a steady and growing movement of
people from the rural (especially southern) region to the urban
(especially central) region. Furthermore, the basic trends of
the 1980s are rooted in the particularly exploitive character
of agricultural practices regarding both the land itself and the
people who work it. Declining productivity of the land, stemming
from the failure to develop drainage along the irrigation facilities
and the wretched condition of the producers, has resulted in a
potentially harmful demographic trajectory--the depopulation of
the countryside--that in the late 1980s continued to bedevil government
efforts to reverse the decades-long pattern of declining productivity
in the agricultural sector.
The accelerated urbanization process since World War II is starkly
illustrated in the shrinking proportion of the population living
in rural areas: 61 percent in 1947, fillowed by 56 percent in
1965, then 36 percent in 1977, and an estimated 32 percent in
1987; concurrently between 1977 and 1987 the urban population
rose from 7,646,054 to an estimated 11,078,000 (see table _, Appendix).
The rural exodus has been most severe in Al Basrah and Al Qadisiyah
governorates. The proportion of rural to urban population was
lowest in the governorates of Al Basrah (37 percent in 1965, and
1 percent in 1987) and Baghdad (48 percent in 1965 and 19 percent
in 1987). It was highest in Dhi Qar Governorate where it averaged
50 percent in 1987, followed closely by Al Muthanna and Diyala
governorates with rural populations of 48 percent. Between 1957
and 1967, the population of Baghdad and Al Basrah governorates
grew by 73 percent and 41 percent respectively. During the same
years the city of Baghdad grew by 87 percent and the city of Basra
by 64 percent.
Because of the war, the growth of Al Basrah Governorate has been
reversed while that of Baghdad Governorate has accelerated alarmingly,
with the 1987 census figure for urban Baghdad being 3,845,000.
Iranian forces have mounted an offensive each year of the war
since 1980, except for early 1988, seeking to capture Basra and
the adjoining area and subjecting the city to regular bombardment.
As a result, large numbers of the population fled northward from
Basra and other southern areas, with many entering Baghdad, which
was already experiencing overcrowding. The government has attempted
to deal with this situation by moving war refugees out of the
capital and resettling them in other smaller cities in the south,
out of the range of the fighting.
Data as of May 1988
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