Abstract
The Suez crisis is often claimed to be a watershed in postwar British history. The operation to retake the Suez Canal was among the most significant British military ventures in the twentieth century, and it was perhaps the most humiliating. The belief, both at home and abroad, that Britain was a world power of the first rank is commonly thought to have been stripped away by failure in this episode. Yet, while the events of late 1956 were a stunning blow to Britain’s international prestige, the significance of the crisis for the east of Suez role is less than one might suspect. In fact, with regard to the country’s overseas military role, the years immediately following the Suez débâcle did not mark a sharp break with the past. The main lines of Britain’s policy east of Suez remained remarkably steady in the late 1950s.
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Notes
M. Beloff, ‘The Crisis and Its Consequences for the British Conservatives’, in W.R. Louis and R. Owen (eds), Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 328.
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See R. N. Rosecrance and A. Stein, Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
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J. L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: a Critical Reappraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 205–14.
D. Goldsworthy, The Conservative Government and the End of Empire, 1951–57 (London: HMSO, 1994), p. 67.
V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky, ‘Introduction’ to V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky, The Age of Affluence: 1951–1964 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 10, 15.
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© 1998 Jeffrey Pickering
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Pickering, J. (1998). Reappraisal: The Suez Crisis and its Aftermath, 1957–60. In: Britain’s Withdrawal from East of Suez. Contemporary History in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333995488_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333995488_5
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