Introduction

Abstract

For Britain, the Suez Crisis remains as divisive as it is no doubt seminal to British post-war history. The received wisdom that it took the calamity at Suez to ‘shatter the illusion of Britain as a great imperial power’¹ has been countered by revisionist interpretations. Those accounts argue for the inevitability of British decline,² and that Suez was merely a notable yet ‘dramatic hiccup’³ in Britain coming to terms with its loss of power. Simply put, Britain would have become a middle ranking power whether or not Suez had happened. What remains in no doubt, however, is that Suez deserves its place in British political history as a key moment. The debates about the manner and timings of British decline notwithstanding, for the casual reader of history Suez provides the convenient marker point demonstrating clearly that British power was not only no longer dominant, but that it was required to bow to the wishes of larger powers, notably America. The crisis provided a genuine conspiracy to unearth, destroyed the political career of then Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and provoked a serious moment of soul-searching on the part of a Britain which, although grappling with the question of diminished status and a changed global order since 1945, realised graphically by 1957 that a serious answer was now required.