Empire and federation in South Arabia, 1952-1967

Abstract

This thesis examines the development and failure of the idea of a South Arabian federal state at the end of the British Empire. As an effort to shape a postcolonial future that would protect British imperial agency against the forces of decolonisation, this thesis argues that the federal idea and resulting Federation of South Arabia were undermined by contradictions in British imperial policy, primary amongst these being the effort to fuse the mutually incompatible goals of bringing South Arabia to independence whilst simultaneously denying local agency over, and facilitate British control over, South Arabia’s post-colonial future. With the colony of Aden’s merger into the Federation, the contorted rationalisations of achieving merger without local consent created a precarious entanglement and fuelled the move towards the anti-federal, radical, and violent trajectory of nationalist politics. With federal thinking and its official advocates dominant within the colonial administration, there was little scope for a revaluation of policy as the precarity of the federal project became more exposed and the security situation deteriorated. Whilst the Wilson Government sought to reset collaborative relations in the face of an intractable inheritance, an informal network of British officials and politicians attempted to maintain the Federation’s preferential position and reverse Government policy. Yet both efforts were overtaken by the intractability of the situation, the collapse of the Federation, and escalating violence in Aden as the British prepared for withdrawal. After fighting for dominance against its rivals, the National Liberation Front would instead emerge to take South Arabia to independence as the People’s Republic of South Yemen in November 1967. This thesis demonstrates that the centrality of the federal idea to British policy, powerfully maintained by British officials in South Arabia, drove the conflict with a growing nationalist opposition in Aden, shaped the course of the end of empire, and precluded the chance of a stable postcolonial federal future.

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ORCID for Christopher Prior: orcid.org/0000-0002-1014-0598

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