into the armed forces. These were suppressed by the Iraqi government with assistance from the RAF Iraq Command, with Kedourie writing that the "killing, it seems, was indiscriminate, and old men, women and children were the victims." An armed revolt which broke out in 1937 over agrarian issues and conscription was also "put down with the help of indiscriminate aerial bombing." During these disturbances, Shia religious leaders were expelled from Iraq due to being Persians. Kedourie describes the monarchy as despotic, with a record "full of bloodshed, treason and rapine" and "however pitiful its end we may know that it was implicit in its beginning." In his assessment of the British mandate and the Iraqi monarchy, historians Kanan Makiya considers the British mandate and its institutions more as "agents of modernisation" than colonialism: Kedourie's judgement, however, is different: If Makiya is referring to economic development in his account of the British modernising legacy in Iraq, an authoritative study demonstrates that Iraq's productivity in agriculture, the most important sector at the time, in fact declined from 275 kg per acre in 1920 to an average of 238 kg per acre between 1953 and 1958. Under the British mandate a new ruling class of 'government shaikhs' was created. "Many of them [the Shaikhs], reported Major Pulley to the British commissioner in Baghdad in 1920, "were small men of no account until we made them powerful and rich." The Civil Commissioner Wilson reported on his part that the Shaikhs "were in most cases directly dependent on the civil administration for the positions they held; realising that their positions entailed corresponding obligations, they co-operated actively with the political officers." In a dispatch by a British official to London in 1928, there was a description of how the electoral system worked: the government's provincial governors were in fact election agents who drew up lists of those to be elected and of those who would do the electing. Elections to "the chamber of deputies and appointments to the senate," comments Keeourie, "were an additional weapon in the hands of the government wherewith the better to control the country." Independence On 3 October 1932, the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq became a fully-sovereign state. Ruled by the Hashemites, it lasted until 1958. Economy Oil concession Before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) had held concessionary rights to the Mosul wilaya (province). Under