Robert McNamara

Meer

A multi-archival documentary history of British policy towards Nasser's Egypt under the Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home and Wilson governments. The primary focus of the study is an enquiry into the causes of the Anglo-Egyptian Cold War from 1952 to 1967. Meer

Shows how the British cultivated the Hashemite Sherifs of Mecca more as an alternative focus during the First World War for Muslim loyalty from the Ottoman Sultan, who as Caliph had declared a jihad against the Allies when the Turks joined the Central Powers, than a leader of an independent and united Arabia. Meer

In 1914 the Middle East was still dominated, as it had been for some four centuries, by the Ottoman Empire; by 1923, its political shape had changed beyond recognition as the result of the insistent claims of Arab and Turkish nationalism and of Zionism. Meer