The British Empire in the Suez Canal and the Middle East

Britain’s Middle Eastern empire was, in the end, an empire of routes. The Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf oilfields, and the imperial communications that ran through Egypt and Palestine were more important to Whitehall than the millions of Arabs who lived along them. That, at any rate, is the argument that historians of the region have increasingly accepted since the 1990s, and it explains both why Britain held the Middle East so long and why the holding came to grief so quickly after 1956.

The Strategic Importance of the Suez Canal

The opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 transformed the strategic map of the British Empire. Built by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps with Egyptian forced labour and finance, the canal cut the sea journey from Britain to India from several months to a few weeks. By 1900, some 80 percent of British trade with India passed through it. The canal was the principal reason for the British invasion of Egypt in 1882, and it remained the principal object of British policy in the region until the Suez Crisis of 1956. As the naval historian Jonathan Sims has written, “the defence of the canal route dominated British military planning in two world wars and in the long period of imperial retrenchment between them.”

The British government became the largest single shareholder in the Suez Canal Company in 1875, when Benjamin Disraeli purchased the Khedive Ismail’s 44 percent stake with a £4 million loan from the Rothschilds. The transaction is sometimes presented as an act of imperial foresight; in fact, as D. A. Farnie showed in his study of the canal, it was a piece of financial opportunism, and it locked Britain into the defence of a waterway that ran through someone else’s country.

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

The British occupation of Egypt led directly to the conquest of the Sudan, which had been in revolt against Egyptian rule since 1881 under the leadership of Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi. The death of General Charles Gordon at the fall of Khartoum on 26 January 1885 — “the most traumatic single event of late-Victorian imperialism,” as D. K. Fieldhouse put it — produced a generation of British politicians committed to a return. The reconquest, completed at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898 and consolidated by the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899, brought an enormous African territory under joint British-Egyptian control.

The Sudan was governed as a condominium until 1956, and the long-running question of its political status shaped Egyptian-British relations for the next half century. The 1924 assassination of the governor-general Sir Lee Stack in Cairo led to a unilateral British withdrawal from the Egyptian administration of the Sudan, and the territory remained a British responsibility until it became independent on 1 January 1956.

The Mandates of Palestine and Iraq

After the First World War, the League of Nations assigned Britain mandates over Palestine and Iraq, both carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised support for a Jewish national home, committed Britain to a Zionist programme that the Arab population and the wider Arab national movement rejected. In Iraq, the 1920 Revolt — suppressed, at one estimate, with the loss of 6,000 Iraqi lives and 500 British — demonstrated the depth of local resistance. Britain ultimately admitted the country to the League of Nations as an independent state in 1932.

The two mandates produced very different legacies. Iraq became a monarchy and then a republic; the Palestine mandate collapsed into the creation of Israel in 1948 and the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Elizabeth Monroe’s The Mediterranean in Politics (1938) and Albert Hourani’s Syria and Lebanon (1946) remain excellent older accounts.

The British Presence in the Persian Gulf

The British presence in the Persian Gulf was older than that in Egypt and far more durable. The East India Company had signed treaties with the rulers of the Trucial States (the future United Arab Emirates) from the 1820s, and the British government continued to guarantee the security of the sheikhdoms through a network of resident officials. The 1820 General Treaty of Peace and the 1853 Perpetual Maritime Truce gave the British a naval monopoly in the Gulf in exchange for protection from Ottoman and Persian encroachment.

The discovery of oil in Persia in 1908, and the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP) in the same year, transformed the economic importance of the region. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, secured a 51 percent government stake in the company in 1914 on the grounds, as he put it to the cabinet, that “we should become the owners of a source of oil supply which would be a very valuable asset for the Admiralty.” It was, in Cold War terms, the first time Britain had bought an oil company to win a war.

The Withdrawal from East of Suez

The 1956 Suez Crisis marked the decisive end of British primacy in the Middle East. The 1967 war and the closure of the canal deepened Britain’s strategic difficulties. In January 1968, Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced the withdrawal of British forces from the regions “east of Suez” by the end of 1971. The last British troops left the Gulf in November 1971, only days before the formation of the United Arab Emirates.

The withdrawal was a response to economic pressures and to the ending of the East of Suez defence role agreed with the United States, but it was also, as the historian Saki Dockrill has argued, an admission that the strategic logic of the nineteenth century no longer worked. The legacy of British rule remains, in the borders, the monarchies, and the institutions of the modern Middle East.

Historiographical Note

The standard accounts were long dominated by the work of Elizabeth Monroe, Albert Hourani, and the more conservative tradition of John Marlow. The revisionist literature of the last thirty years — exemplified by Wm. Roger Louis’s The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951 (1984) and Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall (2000) — has rewritten the period from a perspective that takes Arab nationalism seriously. Keith Kyle’s Suez (1991) is the indispensable narrative of the 1956 crisis. For the Gulf, the work of Nelida Fuccaro has done most to historicise the British presence in the sheikhdoms.

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