This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The English are irrepressible and incompetent imperialists. In the 12th century, they acquired a dynastic empire, which they lost in the 13th. In the 14th century they conquered another and lost it in the 15th. The empire they seized in continental North America in the 17th century collapsed in the 18th. In the 19th, with Scots and Irish help, they built up worldwide power, which they lost in the 20th. God knows what they will do next.
Until the Second World War, dismantlement of the British Empire went well — except in Ireland. Dignified dominions and parliamentary regimes clustered around the mother-country’s apron-strings. Then violence, partition and rejection of the British legacy rent Palestine and the Raj.
Even so, it was possible to be optimistic about a future in which grateful colonies might remain associated in meaningful harmony. British resurgence, which had happened so often before, might recur. My father, who was a foreign correspondent in London during the Blitz, believed in Britons’ endurance and resilience. He thought Churchill’s fancy that the Empire and Commonwealth might last for a thousand years was only a mild and pardonable over-statement. In retrospect, decline and fall came to look inevitable. It did not seem so at the time. The Empire tottered but did not topple.
Utter debacle only began in the 1950s in the Middle East, where the aftershock of Britain’s failure continues to inflict misery in terror-states and despotisms, authoritarianism and anarchy. Horrific and apparently irresoluble wars are wrecking Palestine and Yemen. Two old Oxford friends of mine — an expert and an exile — provide contrasting perspectives, which between them explain what has happened.
William Roger Louis, doyen of historians of the subject, who edited The Oxford History of the British Empire and was my colleague at St Antony’s, has produced, at the age of 88, a magnum opus on Britain’s misfortunes in the Middle East from the fifties to the seventies. Ghalib al-Quaiti, who was an undergraduate with me at Magdalen, is the Sultan of the Hadhramaut, on the shore of what was once Felix Arabia, now immersed in the madness of the Yemeni conflict. He had to flee his homeland and has written an extraordinarily even-tempered narrative of what befell him when empire ebbed.
The region mattered to imperial Britain. The Gulf supplied the UK’s oil. Suez, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were amongst the half-dozen straits, vital for global commerce, that Britain had to patrol in peace and control in war. Communications with British territories beyond the Indian Ocean and with India, even after independence, were abiding imperial interests. Cold-war surrogates abounded in an oil-rich, economically alluring yet maddeningly contentious swathe of the world.
Louis’ book shows liberal faith in the responsibility of individuals for making history happen
For the Empire, the problems were intractable. The region was a fraying, ill-knotted network of unmanageable British responsibilities and obligations, already stretched and bulging to near-breaking point, from Libya and the Sudan to Persia and the Gulf. A coherent approach was impossible. Britons’ status, as guardians and garrisons, was different in every patch of contested territory: exercising tutelage here, a protectorate there, with here a crown colony, there a condominium, occupying one place, whilst enforcing business imperialism in another.
The range of possible policies was bewildering in direct proportion to the diversity of the Empire: decision-makers could rarely make up their collective minds between federations and partitions, strongholds and soft power, coercion and concession.
The Balfour Declaration was a fatal inheritance. Israelis’ successes in self-defence or outward encroachment made it increasingly hard to reconcile enemies. There was insufficient money to bear costs and pay bribes: the French, Roger Louis suggests, were better worldwide in creating a French Union than the British in maintaining a meaningful Commonwealth because they could scrape the cash with which to buy meretricious friendships. Amongst the British public, the Empire retained sympathy and sentiment but lost support. There were few votes for politicians who wanted to keep it going.
Meanwhile, United States policy shifted ominously. Americans found empires embarrassing — so much so that they never alluded to their own as such — but, in the early years of the Cold War, backed Britain’s as a barrier against Soviet power. Suez was the culmination of events that made Britain seem unreliable — under-funded, inconsistent, communist-infiltrated, easily bored, addicted to risk and prone to pratfalls. Thereafter, US indifference or hostility replaced sympathy in a relationship only speciously special. The global context worsened as revulsion from empires accelerated — at least, from those founded by dead white men.
Except in what became the United Arab Emirates, British policy-makers were astonishingly consistent in applying the wrong decisions. Roger Louis became their scrutineer and Ghalib al-Quaiti their sacrifice. Louis knew a lot of the people concerned, many of whom washed up in Oxford as the tide of empire receded.
As a scholarship-boy from Oklahoma, he arrived at the university, which still retained in the sixties the feel and flavour — if no longer the function — of a seminary for an imperial master class. He studied the Empire with unique privileges: the outsider’s objectivity, the insider’s insights.
He has an unrivalled record as an historian, but his latest book is his best. The prose crackles with aphorisms, anecdotes and devastating ironies; pen-portraits are acute and amusing, mordant and merciless — recalling the Oxford of my day, where love and loathing could alight with equal ease. As “an Oxford bon vivant”, for instance, “transmogrified into a British intelligence officer”, Robin Zaehner “relished the lighter side of his duties”. Sir Gerald Templer, whose attempt to get King Hussein to join the Arab League “proved to be a disastrous assignment”, was “brilliant but also brash, obscene and short of patience”.
Despite the author’s heroism in learning Arabic to write it, Roger Louis’ is a work of British history. He shows that the Empire was lost in London, rather than in the Levant, amongst statesmen and officials surprised and subverted by the pace of change. The work proclaims the author’s liberal faith in the responsibility of individuals for making history happen. Louis’ philosophy of the past amounts to this: no matter how fierce the grinding, material forces of impersonal change, the individual remains free to make matters even worse. In The End of the British Empire in the Middle East, we see the mistakes accumulate, like peripeties in a half-comic tragedy or cracks in the spine of an ill-bound book.
To understand how the wrong choice always prevailed, a chat with Ghalib al-Quaiti, or a perusal of his Fair Play or Poisoned Chalice? The Last Years of Britain’s Presence and Policy in Southern Arabia, helps. It’s an attempt at record-straightening and gap-filling — worthwhile because Yemen is strangely undervalued, especially by the world’s media in comparison with attention-grabbing Gaza, whilst the Hadhramaut is hardly known even by otherwise well-educated people in England.
The al-Quaiti dynasty’s alliance with Britain went back at least to the 1870s and was formally inscribed from 1882. The British treated the country as a protectorate or possession, yet the alliance held. After humiliation at Suez, British policy focused on creating an anti-Nasserist, anti-communist federation in southern Arabia whilst retaining the strategically over-esteemed port of Aden. Harold Macmillan saw South Arabian sultanates as critical to Britain’s prospects of holding on to power. Sultan Ghalib, when he inherited the throne as a teenager in 1966, saw no reason to forfeit the independence of his “ancient kingdom” but trusted British promises “to uphold and strengthen the Sultan’s authority and dignity”.
In reality, the Labour government, elected in 1964, was resigned to cutting and running. For George Brown, the Foreign Secretary, old treaties avowedly “did not matter”. Empire was untenable. The sultans were part of an order doomed by history. Faisal of Saudi Arabia would not countenance any regime that did not pay him subservience. Post-imperial Yemen had a choice between Nasserists and “Nationalists”.
The Sultan intervened under fire, ripping guns from over-excited soldiers
British impatience deepened in June 1967, when Hadhrami troops opened fire on the Residency, apparently believing that Nasserists had seized it. The Sultan had to intervene under fire, ripping bren guns from the hands of over-excited soldiers and epaulettes from the shoulders of their commanding officer. In September, he found himself excluded from his capital by British-backed insurgents, whilst the RAF bombed his loyal subjects. He was, according to British reports, a “popular leader” who had to be stopped from frustrating nationalism. He is now, in effect, stateless in Saudi Arabia, with no useful passport. In Britain, where his wife and children belong, the authorities have refused him citizenship.
His plight shows what went wrong. All empires need indigenous collaborators. The successful ones choose the right allies. Pragmatism and practicality were euphemisms for indifference to principle in perfide Albion. Instead of respecting historic treaties and maintaining relations with traditional elites, the British followed Churchill’s doctrine: “We never desert our friends — unless we have to.” They preferred to hand power to glib, trend-sensitive, whippersnapper nationalists who resembled, in Macmillan’s words, the ideologically liberal denizens of “agreeable, educated, North Oxford”.
Post-colonialist critics have traduced British imperialism, misrepresenting failures as evils and cock-ups as crimes, whilst suppressing reports of whatever was benign or, at least, well-intentioned. But they have missed the real grounds for indictment of the Empire: nothing so ill became the British as the leaving of it.
Its merit recalls what Dr Johnson said of a woman preaching a sermon: one should not demand that it be well done. What was remarkable was to see it done at all. Roger Louis records Sir Richard Turnbull’s slightly exaggerated summation. “Our only lasting legacy,” he predicted pithily, would be, “Fuck off.”
