The End Of Empire In The Middle East

An original and perceptive study of Britain's withdrawal from her last Arab dependencies - the Sudan, South West Arabia and the Gulf States.

This book is a major and wide-ranging re-assessment of Anglo-American relations in the Middle Eastern context. It analyses the process of ending of empire in the Middle East from 1945 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Based on original research into both British and American archival sources, it covers all the key events of the period, including the withdrawal from Palestine, the Anglo-American coup against the Musaddiq regime in Iran, the Suez Crisis and its aftermath, the Iraqi and Yemeni revolutions, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts. It demonstrates that, far from experiencing a ‘loss of nerve’ or tamely acquiescing in a transfer of power to the United States, British decision-makers robustly defended their regional interests well into the 1960s and even beyond. It also argues that concept of the ‘special relationship’ impeded the smooth-running of Anglo-American relations in the region by obscuring differences, stymieing clear communication, and practising self-deception on policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic who assumed a contiguity which all too often failed to exist. With the Middle East at the top of the contemporary international policy agenda, and recent Anglo-American interventions fuelling interest in empire, this is a timely book of importance to all those interested in the contemporary development of the region.

With the end of the British Raj in 1947, the Foreign Office replaced the Government of India as the department responsible for the Persian Gulf, and would proceed to manage relations with the Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates, UAE) until British withdrawal in 1971. This work is a comprehensive history of British policy in the region during that period, situated for the first time in its broad historical and political context. Tancred Bradshaw – an academic historian with extensive experience in the region – sheds light onto the discovery of oil in Abu Dhabi in the 1950s, Foreign Office attempts to instigate a long-term development policy in the region, the slow end of the British Empire, the origins of the UAE and – most importantly – the British legacy in this geopolitically crucial region today. The book relies on 40,000 pages of archival material, much of it previously unused, and will be of interest to Imperial historians, as well as anyone working on the history and politics of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Britain's Moment in the Middle East: was it an imperial triumph or a decisive staging post in the end-of-empire story? Sir Percy Cox (1864-1937) was a vital figure in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East, part of the pantheon with such legends as T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. As High Commissioner in Iraq from 1920 to 1923 he presided over the birth of modern Iraq - the climax of his career - but left an infant state fraught with political, ethnic and religious problems which have bedeviled Iraq and the Middle East to the present day. John Townsend paints a convincing picture of Britain's global empire and brings Cox to life as an archetypal patrician proconsul. This is the first major biography of Cox, based on extensive research in original sources and long experience in the region. It strikingly illustrates the troubled contemporary history of Iraq and the modern Middle East and will become the standard work on Cox.

An account of the politics of the Middle East over the last 50 years. It is an attempt to make sense of the Middle East in the New World Order.

A fast-paced short history that moves between London, Washington, and Cairo to reveal the crisis that brought down a prime minister. Includes photos, a timeline, and a special afterword examining the parallels with the 2003 Iraq war In 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, ending nearly a century of British and French control over the crucial waterway. Ignoring U.S. diplomatic efforts and fears of a looming Cold War conflict, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden misled Parliament and the press to take Britain to war alongside France and Israel. In response to a secretly planned Israeli attack in the Sinai, France and Britain intervened as “peacemakers.” The invasion of Egypt was supposed to restore British and French control of the canal and reaffirm Britain’s flagging prestige. Instead, the operation spectacularly backfired, setting Britain and the United States on a collision course that would change the balance of power in the Middle East. The combined air, sea, and land battle witnessed the first helicopter-borne deployment of assault troops and the last large-scale parachute drop into a conflict zone by British forces. French and British soldiers fought together against the Soviet-equipped Egyptian military in a short campaign that cost the lives of thousands of soldiers—along with innocent civilians. This book, by a prominent historian specializing in the Middle East, tells the story.

Partitioning Palestine is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition, and why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers yet ultimately proved so difficult for them to enact. Taking a broad view not only of local and regional factors, but also of Palestine’s place in the British empire and its status as a League of Nations mandate, Sinanoglou deftly recasts the story of partition in Palestine as a struggle to maintain imperial control. After all, British partition plans imagined space both for a Zionist state indebted to Britain and for continued British control over key geostrategic assets, depending in large part on the forced movement of Arab populations. With her detailed look at the development of the idea of partition from its origins in the 1920s, Sinanoglou makes a bold contribution to our understanding of the complex interplay between internationalism and imperialism at the end of the British empire and reveals the legacies of British partitionist thinking in the broader history of decolonization in the modern Middle East.

At the end of the First World War Britain and to a much lesser extent France created the modern Middle East. The possessions of the former Ottoman Empire were carved up with scant regard for the wishes of those who lived there. Frontiers were devised and alien dynasties imposed on the populations as arbitrarily as in medieval times. From the outset the project was destined to failure. Conflicting and ambiguous promises had been made to the Arabs during the war but were not honoured. Brief hopes for Arab unity were dashed, and a harsh belief in western perfidy persists to the present day. Britain was quick to see the riches promised by the black pools of oil that lay on the ground around Baghdad. When France too grasped their importance, bitter differences opened up and the area became the focus of a return to traditional enmity. The war-time allies came close to blows and then drifted apart, leaving a vacuum of which Hitler took advantage. Working from both primary and secondary sources, Walter Reid explores Britain's role in the creation of the modern Middle East and the rise of Zionism from the early years of the twentieth century to 1948, when Britain handed over Palestine to UN control. From the decisions that Britain made has flowed much of the instability of the region and of the world-wide tensions that threaten the twenty-first century. How far was Britain to blame?

This is a penetrating account of Anglo-Iraqi relations from 1929, when Britain decided to grant independence to Iraq, to 1941, when hostilities between the two nations came to an end. Showing how Britain tried--and failed--to maintain its political influence, economic ascendancy, and strategic position in Iraq after independence, Silverfarb presents a suggestive analysis of the possibilities and limitations of indirect rule by imperial powers in the Third World. The book also tells of the rapid disintegration of Britain's dominance in the Middle East after World War I and portrays the struggle of a recently independent Arab nation to free itself from the lingering grip of a major European power.