The British civil-service concept transplanted a distinctively British model of authority into Palestine

Evidence

The second major innovation wrought by the British Mandate was the cre­ ation, with its base in Jerusalem, of a civil service. Now there is something distinctively British about this term—civil service, civil servant. It embodies a concept of authority and a concept of how one should exercise authority that is peculiarly British and I’m almost tempted to say peculiarly English. The civil servant is a servant and he is civil in several different senses of that adjective. He is something very different from the fonctionnaire or the Beamte or the Chi­ novnik even in Europe, and certainly very different from anything that had been seen previously in this region. And that I think has remained. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 819

Categorization

• XREF: Lewis analytically separates ‘civil servant’ from fonctionnaire/Beamte/Chinovnik — a useful distinction for the reader’s cluster on how Western administrative categories were imposed as seemingly value-neutral systems. — connects to: British rule created the political entity of Palestine and a Palestinian nationality.; British administrative unification, not Ottoman precedent, created Palestine as a single political unit — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 818; A class-detached civil service was the Reformers’ institutional base for Jewish emancipation — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 128 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: British rule created the political entity of Palestine and a Palestinian nationality.; British administrative unification, not Ottoman precedent, created Palestine as a single political unit — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 818; A class-detached civil service was the Reformers’ institutional base for Jewish emancipation — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 128 (+2 more)