With intellectual rigor and careful attention to recently released papers, Wm. Roger Louis's study asks: Why did Britain's colonial empire begin to collapse in 1945 and how did the post-war Labour government attempt to sustain a vision of the old Empire through imperialism in the Middle East?

Britain emerged from World War II dependent economically and militarily upon the US. Egypt was the hub of Britain's imperial interests in the Middle East, but her inability to maintain a large garrison there was clear to the indigenous peoples. These essays track the decline of the empire.

This book is an important political and economic history of the unravelling of the British Empire and its connection to the decline of sterling as a leading international currency. Analyzing events such as the 1951 Iranian oil nationalization crisis and the 1956 Suez crisis, Steven Galpern provides a new perspective on British imperialism in the Middle East by reframing British policy in the context of the government's postwar efforts to maintain the international prestige of the pound. He reveals the link that British officials made between the Middle Eastern oil trade and the strength of sterling and how this influenced government policy and strained relationships with the Middle East, the United States, and multinational oil firms. In so doing, this book draws revealing parallels between the British experience and that of the United States today and will be essential reading for scholars of the British empire, Middle East studies and economic history.

A wide-ranging study of developments in global French-language cinema

Decolonization is the term commonly used to refer to this transition from a world of colonial empires to a world of nation-states in the years after World War II. This work demonstrates that this process involved considerable violence and instability.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the most intense and intractable international conflicts of modern times. This book is about the historical roots of that conflict. It re-examines the history of 1948, the war in which the newly-born state of Israel defeated the Palestinians and the regular Arab armies of the neighbouring states so decisively. The book includes chapters on all the principal participants, on the reasons for the Palestinian exodus, and on the political and moral consequences of the war. The chapters are written by leading Arab, Israeli and western scholars who draw on primary sources in all relevant languages to offer alternative interpretations and new insights into this defining moment in Middle East history. The result is a major contribution to the literature on the 1948 war. It will command a wide audience from among students and general readers with an interest in the region.

The June 1967 war was a watershed in the history of the modern Middle East. In six days, the Israelis defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, seizing large portions of their territories. Two veteran scholars of the Middle East bring together some of the most knowledgeable experts in their fields to reassess the origins and the legacies of the war. Each chapter takes a different perspective from the vantage point of a different participant, those that actually took part in the war and also the world powers that played important roles behind the scenes. Their conclusions make for sober reading. At the heart of the story was the incompetence of the Egyptian leadership and the rivalry between various Arab players who were deeply suspicious of each other's motives. Israel, on the other side, gained a resounding victory for which, despite previous assessments to the contrary, there was no master plan.