Week 10: The Suez Crisis and its Aftermaths

Mini Lecture

Seminar Readings:

Primary Sources:

RLink opens in a new windowead Nasser's speechLink opens in a new window on the nationalization of the Suez Canal and watch this video.Link opens in a new window

Secondary Readings:

Robert T. Harrison, Chap. 14 ‘End of the road: Exit from Empire, 1945-1971’ Britain in the Middle East, 1619-1971 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 190-208.

G. C. Pedgen, “Suez and Britain’s Decline as a World Power,” The Historical Journal 55, no.4 (2012): 1073-1096.

Richard Aldrich and John Zametica, ‘The Rise and Decline of a Strategic Concept: The Middle East, 1945-51,’ in Richard Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 236-274.

John Darwin, ‘Britain’s Withdrawal from East of Suez,’ in Carl Bridge (ed.), Munich to Vietnam: Australia’s relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1991), pp. 140-158.

Further Readings:

Andrew Arsan, Lebanon: A country in Fragments (London: Hurst, 2020).

Malcolm Hooper Kerr, The Arab cold war: Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and his rivals, 1958-1970 (London: Oxford University Press, for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1971).

Elizabeth Monroe, Britain's moment in the Middle East, 1914-1971 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981).

Gershom Gorenberg, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2021).

Elizabeth F. Thompson, ‘Hasan Al-Banna Of Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Pursuit of Islamic Justice,’ in Justice Interrupted: the Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Robert B. Satloff, Among the righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).

Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria. A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945-1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

Barry Rubin, The Great Powers in the Middle East 1941-1947: The Road to the Cold War (London: Routledge, 1981).

N. Tamkin, Britain, Turkey and the Soviet Union, 1940-45: Strategy, Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981).

Shay Hazkani, Dear Palestine: A Social history of the 1948 War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014).

Rashid Khalidi The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: a History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance (London: Profile Books, 2020).

Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013).

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: the Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

A. I. Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: from Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

James P. Jankowski, Nasser's Blessed Movement: Egypt's Free Officers and the July Revolution (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001).

Joel Gordon, Nasser: Hero of the Arab Nation (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006)

I. Gershoni; James P. Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Weldon C. Matthews, Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalists and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinski, The Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East: Britain’s Responses to Nationalist Movements (London: Routledge, 1998).