Aden, Yemen and the Middle East

Abstract

In the Middle East, as in Africa and elsewhere, Britain faced the growing challenge of nationalism in the post-war period. The strength of this challenge was such that, as Richard Aldrich notes, ‘The most remarkable aspect of the British Empire in the Middle East by the 1950s was its absence of real colonies’.¹ For the Douglas-Home government, the threat came into particularly sharp focus in Aden. The British first established a settlement in Aden in 1838, though it did not become a colony in its own right until 1937 when its administration was transferred from the government of India. In January 1963, Aden was merged with British protectorates (covering about 120,000 square miles) in the surrounding area to create the Federation of South Arabia. Like Malaysia, and other ill-fated experiments in Central Africa and the West Indies, this was designed to create a more viable state that could survive eventual independence and remain friendly to Britain afterwards, though it was still not completely clear exactly when independence would finally arrive.