The End of Empire in the Middle East Britain's Relinquishment of Power in Her Last Three Arab Dependencies by Glen Balfour-Paul. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, xxiii + 198 pp.

Abstract

Living memory has now faded concerning the scattered pieces of
empire that Britain ruled in East Africa and South and East Arabia for up
to a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War. In the nottoo-
distant future, what Elizabeth Monroe once described felicitously as
Britain's "moment" in the Middle East will have passed from personal recollection
into history. Mindful of that inevitability, British diplomat and
quondam scholar Glen Balfour-Paul has undertaken to chronicle the postwar
encounter between Britishers and Arabs in Sudan, Aden, and the Gulf
states from which Britain withdrew in 1956, 1967, and 1971, respectively.
The results of his study should be of particular interest to government officials
requiring perspective for the formulation of policy and to neophyte
foreign service officers about to depart for the regions discussed, as well as
to scholars and advanced students of the contemporary Middle East.
To his subject, Balfour-Paul brings almost unique credentials. After
experience in the Middle East during the Second World War, he became a
member of the Sudan Political Service for nine years and, thereafter, served
as a diplomat until 1977 in various Arab countries, in three of them as
ambassador. The book under review was written largely in the late 1980s
while the author was an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Arab
Gulf Studies at Exeter University. In the meticulousness of its research, the
objectivity demonstrated on contested issues, and above all in the elegance
of its prose, the volume at hand is a model of what diplomatic history (a
craft now rarely practiced by professional historians) should be. Those on
both sides of the British-Arab divide have reason to be grateful that there is ...