Ever since America and Britain invaded in Iraq in 2003, a debate has raged among historians and foreignpolicy experts about whether we are living in a new Imperial age. The belief that America has inherited the mantle of the British Empire finds adherents on all sides of the political spectrum, though whether this development is to be celebrated or mourned depends on the observer.There is a suggestive irony in the fact that two important recent books have shared the title “Empire”: Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s neo-Communist attack on the American-dominated new world order, and Niall Ferguson’s exhortation to America, an “empire in denial,” to take up Britain’s civilizing mission.

But the best evidence so far that Iraq has indeed marked a revival of imperial traditions — the good as well as the bad — may be “The Prince of the Marshes” (Harcourt, 396 pages, $25), the new memoir by Rory Stewart. Mr. Stewart’s career and sensibility have such a late-Victorian flavor that he seems like a character from one of Kipling’s Indian stories, or perhaps a John Buchan spy novel. Born in 1973, he is Scottish by ancestry, but grew up in Hong Kong and Malaysia, among the ghosts of empire. (His father was a civil servant who spent most of his life in Asia; his grandfather had lived in India.) After a stint in the Army, Mr. Stewart joined the Foreign Service and was posted to Indonesia and Yugoslavia. Next he spent almost two years trekking across Afghanistan and writing a book about it (“The Places in Between”), a feat in the best Richard Burton tradition.

So it was less daunting for Mr. Stewart than it would be for most 30 year-olds when, in September 2003, he was made the deputy governorate coordinator of Maysan province in southern Iraq.”I spoke little Arabic,”Mr. Stewart readily acknowledges, “and had never managed a shattered, unstable, and undeveloped province.” But this did not stop him from flying to Jordan, taking a taxi to Baghdad, and talking himself into a job where he would be responsible for keeping the peace among 850,000 angry and frightened Iraqis. The nonchalance with which Mr. Stewart assumed this burden; his combination of altruism, arrogance, and toughmindedness; his familiarity with power and how to use it — all of these qualities seem practically genetic, the bredin-the-bone legacy of generations of British colonial officers.

“The Prince of the Marshes,” then, has a double fascination. As an eyewitness account of the first year of the American-led occupation, the book sheds light on the deep-rooted social dysfunctions that have kept Iraq on the brink of civil war to this day. More than any pundit, Mr. Stewart knows how insoluble those problems are, since he spent months trying (and failing) to solve them. At the same time, his book is also an apology, and an elegy, for a certain style of imperial authority, which in Iraq enjoyed a brief posthumous revival. Indeed, while he is no Blimp, and would certainly not subscribe to Kipling’s racial hierarchies, Mr. Stewart seems to have approached his time in Iraq in the spirit of Kipling’s now-scandalous hymn, “The White Man’s Burden”:

Take up the White Man’s burden —
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

There are, of course, obvious differences between what Mr. Stewart was called on to do in Iraq and what his grandfather would have done in India. The British Empire was meant to be permanent, and its servants, civil and military, made it their lifelong careers, coming home to England only for furloughs and retirement. The Coalition Provisional Authority, on the other hand, was self-abolishing. From the moment Mr. Stewart took up his post, his goal was to prepare his province for the handover of power that would take place the following year. However grandiose the promises of politicians back home about building democracy in Iraq, Mr. Stewart’s superior officer defined the Coalition’s mission in deliberately modest terms: “If I can come back in a year’s time and see that the province is reasonably quiet and has not descended into anarchy and you are able to serve me some decent ice cream, I will be satisfied.”

Yet it was the very modesty of its mission and powers, Mr. Stewart suggests, that made the Coalition unable to achieve even that limited goal. When Mr. Stewart insists that, despite the accusations of Iraqis and many Westerners, “we were not colonial officers,” he is really suggesting that old-fashioned colonial officers would have stood a better chance of making a difference in Iraq. “Colonial officers in British India,” he writes, “served for forty years, spoke the local languages fluently, and risked their lives and health. … They put a strong emphasis on local knowledge, courage, initiative, and probity.” CPA officials, on the other hand, were parachuted in to areas they knew nothing about, and had to communicate through unreliable translators. Because “they had no long-term commitment to ruling the country,” they did everything possible to avoid losing or taking life, even when the use of force might have had beneficial effects.

One has the feeling that Stewart, who prefaces most of his chapters with pointed quotations from Machiavelli, would not have objected to a more forthright exercise of power. Instead, he and his colleagues were condemned to tinker around the edges of vast social and political problems. “Iraq,” he writes,”needed decent security, education, and health; the rule of law; a good economy; less corruption; the protection of human rights; robust civil society structures; and a democratic government.” These needs were especially dire in Maysan province, home to the Marsh Arab tribes who had been a major target of Saddam’s oppression.With their traditional ecosystem deliberately destroyed, the Marsh Arabs’ ancient folkways had been replaced by urban poverty. The old authority of the tribal leaders was on the wane, usurped by extremist Shiite clerics, many of them linked to Iran.

Mr. Stewart considered himself lucky, however, if he could get a few schools refurbished, or convince warring leaders to sit down in the same room. One major accomplishment, forced through over endless obstacles, was to create a make-work jobs program that got wages to 2,500 Iraqi men. Yet even after this success, Mr. Stewart acknowledges,”the job scheme was not really econcomic policy: We were transferring money to win political support; it was doubtful whether the work would be productive or sustainable: our successors would be landed with supporting a scheme they would find difficult to discontinue. Seven thousand people who applied did not get jobs.” At best, the CPA was putting band-aids on a mortal wound.

Above all, Mr Stewart writes, what he lacked was reliable local knowledge, of the kind you can only get from long experience. Most of his job, as he describes it in “The Prince of the Marshes,” involved negotiating with local leaders — to award a building contract, or settle a vendetta, or get a hostage freed. The titular Prince, Abu Hatim, was the most important of these leaders, a wealthy and charismatic man whose relatives and clients dominated the provincial government. Yet every concession to the Prince meant alienating the Sadrists, the radical Shiite party, which Mr. Stewart hoped to coopt into the government.And both of these factions distrusted the Iranian-linked Shiites of SCIRI, who had gained prestige by their long resistance to Saddam. Mr. Stewart and his fellow occupiers could only look on helplessly as these factions assassinated and kidnapped one another, reducing the goal of peaceful transition to a pipe dream.

When, at the end of the book, Mr. Stewart (now transferred to Dhi Qar province) finds his office besieged by Sadrists armed with mortars and RPGs, the futility of his mission is exposed beyond any further doubt. Far from remaking Iraq, the Coalition was not even able to keep its own personnel safe. And when he returns to Iraq in March 2005, just nine months after he left, Mr. Stewart finds “no record of our projects and initiatives”: No one there, British or Iraqi, remembers him or anything he had done.What remains of Mr. Stewart’s time in Iraq, then, is not an accomplishment but an experience, whose absurd and adventurous moments he has preserved in this elegant, disturbing book.

akirsch@nysun.com