She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels.

Along with T. E. Lawrence, she advocated for independent Arab states in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and supported the installation of Hashemite monarchies in what is today Jordan and Iraq.

Florence Bell's activities with the wives of Bolckow Vaughan ironworkers in Eston, near Middlesbrough, may have helped influence her step-daughter's later promotion of education for Iraqi women.

After graduating from Oxford, she spent two and a half years, from 1890 to 1892, attending the London social rounds of balls and banquets where eligible young men and women paired off, but failed to find a match.

However, she failed in an attempt of the Finsteraarhorn in August 1902, when inclement weather including snow, hail and lightning forced her to spend "forty eight hours on the rope" with her guides, clinging to the rock face in terrifying conditions that nearly cost her her life.

She visited the Hittite city of Carchemish, photographed the relief carvings in Halamata Cave, mapped and described the ruin of Ukhaidir, and travelled on to Babylon and Najaf.

[33] Both Bell and Lawrence had attended Oxford and earned a First Class Honours in Modern History, both spoke fluent Arabic, and both travelled extensively in the Arabian desert and established ties with the local tribes.

"[38] At the conclusion of her trip in Baghdad, Bell met the influential Naqib, Abd Al-Rahman Al-Gillani, who would be an important political figure later after the end of Ottoman rule.

While she could meet with the wives and daughters of local notables without it being a breach of propriety, a possibility denied male travellers, she did not take advantage of this much; she was only mildly curious about the lives of Arab women.

She was part of the Wounded & Missing Enquiry Department (W&MED) that attempted to coordinate information between the British Army, French hospitals, and worried families about the status of soldiers and casualties of the war.

Bell's knowledge of the issues impressed Lord Hardinge, and she was soon sent on to Basra (captured by the British at the start of the war in November 1914) in March 1916 to act as a liaison between India and Cairo.

[70] Cox and Wilson's wartime provisional government drew on British India for inspiration, replicating its legal code and bureaucratic structure, and Bell's assessment was that this was keeping the Iraqi people content.

[76] British officials in London, in particular the new Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill, wanted to reduce expenses in the colonies, including the cost of quashing revolts.

[80] Bell, Cox and Lawrence were among a select group of "Orientalists" convened by Churchill to attend the conference in Cairo to determine the internal boundaries of the British mandates from within the territory Britain had claimed during the Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.

Bell opposed the Zionist movement; she wrote that she regarded the Balfour Declaration with "the deepest mistrust" and that "It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them".

She took a special interest in public relations: arranging receptions, parties, and meetings; discussing the state of affairs with both the British and Arab elite of Baghdad; and transferring requests and complaints to the government.

After sustained lobbying effort over the next years, carefully ensuring that the elites of Iraqi government and society saw the latest excavations from Ur and were invested in the project at parties and events, she finally secured a location for her museum plan on the ground floor of a stationery and printing building in March 1926.

[101][102][103][104] The stress of authoring a prodigious output of books, correspondence, intelligence reports, reference works, and white papers; of recurring bronchitis attacks brought on by years of heavy cigarette smoking; of bouts with malaria; and finally, of coping with Baghdad's summer heat all took a toll on her health.

[118] Bell's upper-class background and training in history led her to hold views that were considered old-fashioned for the time, seeming to pine for an older, nobler aristocratic age.

Her historical training did aid in understanding the Middle East; many Britons of the time were essentially ignorant and uninterested in the history of the region after the era of early Christianity and the late Roman Empire.

[125] Bell's 1920 report on the region showed striking ambivalence on the wisdom and capacity of the imperial project, depicting the tribal culture of the countryside as a centuries-long tradition that had outlasted Turkish rule and would not easily bend to outside intervention.

[76] Bell proposed that many aspects of government be decentralized, both because it was the only feasible way to maintain a heterogeneous multi-ethnic and multi-religion state, and due to a certain degree of parochial romanticisation of classical Arab culture.

[93] Many of Bell's compatriots wrote admiring articles, reports, and lectures upon receiving news of her death, including Vita Sackville-West, Leo Amery, Arnold Wilson, Percy Cox, Henry Dobbs, and others.

Hogarth wrote: No woman in recent time has combined her qualities – her taste for arduous and dangerous adventure with her scientific interest and knowledge, her competence in archaeology and art, her distinguished literary gift, her sympathy for all sorts and condition of men, her political insight and appreciation of human values, her masculine vigour, hard common sense and practical efficiency – all tempered by feminine charm and a most romantic spirit.

[115][80] Winstone also wrote that despite the later fall of the Kingdom of Iraq, Bell's "real work" had been her earlier role as an archaeologist, scholar, author, translator, and adventurer, a legacy that would last long after the Iraqi monarchy was forgotten.

[132] Elie Kedourie, an Iraqi Jew who left the country to become a conservative British historian, denounced Faisal as a "pathetic incompetent", Lawrence as a "fanatic", and Bell for her "sentimental enthusiasm" and "fond foolishness" in her advocacy of an Arab state.

[125] Kedourie admired large multi-ethnic empires and favoured, in retrospect, Arnold Wilson's solution of direct British rule that he believed would better protect minority rights; the Iraqi Jewish community would greatly shrink in the 1940s and 50s in the face of oppression from the hostile government.

[133] Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac described Bell as "one of the few representatives of His Majesty's Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection" in an overview of British policy-making following World War I.

[136] The inscription commemorates her as "Versed in the learning of the east and of the west, Servant of the State, Scholar, Poet, Historian, Antiquary, Gardener, Mountaineer, Explorer, Lover of Nature of Flowers and of Animals, Incomparable Friend Sister Daughter".

In 1927, Florence published two volumes of Gertrude's collected correspondence, albeit not including her more romantic letters out of propriety, as well as omitting material she thought might be embarrassing to the Iraqi government.