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'Fascinating' Guardian, 'Book of the Day' 'A truly masterly book... A tour de force that will be read for a very long time.' Peter Hennessy Selected by the New Statesman as an essential read for 2022 Britain shaped the modern Middle East through the lines that it drew in the sand after the First World War and through the League of Nations mandates over the fledgling states that followed. Less than forty years later, the Suez crisis dealt a fatal blow to Britain's standing in the Middle East and is often represented as the final throes of British imperialism. However, as this insightful and compelling new book reveals, successive prime ministers have all sought to extend British influence in ...
A towering figure, King Hussein reigned for nearly half a century, from his grandfather's assassination in 1953 to his own death in 1999. In this biography, Nigel Ashton recounts the eventful life of the king who not only survived but flourished amidst crisis after crisis as ruler of a poor desert nation surrounded by powerful and hostile neighbors. Hussein skillfully navigated complicated relationships with the British, his fellow Arab leaders, the new bordering state of Israel, masses of dispossessed Palestinians within his kingdom, every U.S. president from Eisenhower to Clinton, and every British prime minister from Churchill to Blair. This book illuminates the private man, his key relationships, and his achievements and disappointments as a central player in the tough world of Middle Eastern politics.--From publisher description.
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 robus...
This is the first examination of the Israeli and Egyptian peace process between 1967-1973, which highlights the rise and fall of Soviet influence after the Six Day War and explores how the increasing importance of America's political leadership affected the region.
This book examines Britain's decision to leave the Gulf and considers the interaction between British decision-making, and local responses and initiatives, in shaping the modern Gulf.
A history of the attempts to introduce international criminal courts and new international criminal laws after World War I to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide.
This book provides a comprehensive insight into one of the key episodes of the Cold War – the process of reconciliation between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. At the time, this process had shocked the World as much as the violent break-up of their relations did in 1948. This book provides an explanation for the collapse of the process of normalization of Yugoslav-Soviet that occurred at the end of 1956 and the renewal of their ideological confrontation. It also explain the motives that guided the two main protagonists, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and the Soviet leader Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. Based on Yugoslav and Soviet archival documents, this book establishes several innovative...
A new interpretation of the Cold War from the perspective of the smaller and middle powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
This book examines how the rulers in the Persian Gulf responded to the British announcement of military withdrawal from the Gulf in 1968, ending 150 years of military supremacy in the region. The British system in the Gulf was accepted for more than a century not merely because the British were the dominant military power in the region. The balance of power mattered, but so did the framework within which the British exercised their power. The search for a new political framework, which began when the British announced withdrawal, was not simply a matter of which ruler would amass enough military power to fill the void left by the British: it was also a matter of the Gulf rulers – chiefly Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the ruling shaykhs of the lower Gulf – coming to a shared understanding of when and how the exercise of power would be viewed as legitimate. This book explores what shaped the rulers’ ideas and actions in the region as the British system came to an end, providing a much-needed political history of the region in the lead-up to the independence of the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar in 1971.