The promulgation in 1960 of a new industrial relations ordinance in Aden was a singular event in the history of British decolonisation because it made many forms of strike action illegal. Earlier ...initiatives to liberalise trade union law in the colonies were intended to channel and manage the discontent of workers; but for nationalist movements, the new order in industrial relations provided an opportunity to mobilise workers in the cause of independence. Aden, which was the location of a significant British base, a major oil refinery and a key commercial port, became the site of a bitter confrontation between the nascent trade union movement and the colonial administration. Three aspects of the conflict were of particular significance. First, Aden's unique political status as a British colony in the Arab world and its strategic and economic value, contributed to the fractious industrial relations environment. Secondly, conflicts between workers and the colonial government demonstrate continuity with wider British efforts to suppress anti-colonial dissent and demonstrate that charges of appeasement in the last years of empire are not well founded. Lastly, the exceptional nature of the new legislation attracted the critical attention of the ILO and the major international trade union confederations, which internationalised the dispute over the IRO. An examination of the manner in which the British Government sought to regulate its relations with various labour organisations, including the British TUC, the colonial ATUC and the two rival international labour confederations of the WFTU and ICFTU, demonstrates that the conduct of industrial relations in Aden was significant in the context of both the cold war and decolonisation.
The Labour Party's ambivalent attitude to anticolonial nationalism is well known but its place in the conflicts between the party's revisionists and the left has been less fully elaborated, while the ...influence of British trade unions in the formation of party policy on decolonization has been cast to the margins of the historiography. Events in British Guiana are representative of this tendency because, while the activities of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations have been detailed by a number of historians, including Stephen Rabe, Robert Waters, Gary Daniels and Lily Ramcharan, the impact of the British TUC has been largely ignored. The Labour Party's support for the suspension of the Guianese constitution by the Churchill government in 1953 and their willingness to implement Conservative plans for constitutional reform in 1964 demonstrate that the party's liberationist faction were unable to overturn the Cold War agenda espoused by the right wing of the parliamentary party and anti-communists in the trade union movement. A study of the international labour politics of the 1950s and 1960s suggests both that the fate of the Guianese left was inextricably tied to conflicts in the British Labour party and that trade union leaders in the metropolis offered powerful support to revisionists in making the case for prioritizing Atlanticism over colonial liberation.
The relationship between decolonisation and the Cold War strategies of the imperial powers is an area of study which requires further research. Events in the Anglophone Caribbean during the early ...1950s illustrate this complex relationship by revealing both the extent and limitation of British Cold War campaigning in the imperial periphery. In particular, contacts between the Jamaican communist Ferdinand Smith and the World Federation of Trade Unions in Vienna prompted the British to conuduct a vigorous anti-communist campaign in the Anglophone Caribbean. However, British counter-action was restrained by fears that non-communist nationalist politicians would exploit the Cold War for their own ends.
Historical writing on the end of the British empire has been dominated by two traditions: diplomatic history and post-colonial theory. The critique of Orientalism provided by Edward Said has ...generated a markedly different approach from the older tradition of diplomatic history and there are theoretical obstacles to any reconciliation. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify historiographical precedents for applying some Orientalist ideas to diplomatic source material in the study of the end of the British empire. One territory to which this approach has not been applied is Britain's only formal colony in the Middle East, Aden. The last twenty years of British rule in Aden provide evidence of intelligence being interpreted in a way which underestimated the potency of local agents and exaggerated the influence of external manipulation. There is also corroboration for the notion that British military strategy at the end of empire was characterized by a punitive policy designed to discipline the subject population. Lastly, British political strategy was predicated on a series of stereotypes about the role of leadership in Arab society and the overestimation of the effectiveness of the local rulers as agents of British influence. This evidence suggests that a study of the diplomatic record can substantiate many of the propositions presented in Said's original work.
The crises which accompanied the rise and decline of the European empires have not been the object of systematic study in the manner of superpower crises of the Cold War period. Many of the ...techniques used to study Cold War crises have broader scope, including the models of governmental politics and organisational process developed by Graham Allison. The application of the Allison models to the events surrounding the delimitation of the Aden frontier between 1901 and 1905 illuminates significant aspects of the Anglo-Ottoman confrontation: they explain the manner in which non-rational elements in the policy-making process transformed a relatively insignificant issue into a crisis situation. Such insights also require a detailed examination of the documentary record which in this instance reveals the discord amongst British policy-makers and the organisational imperfections of the bureaucracy. The frontier Commissioners, the Aden Resident, the Government of India, the metropolitan government in London and the embassy in Constantinople were involved in a series of factional squabbles over the Aden frontier, the resolution of which often required the coercion of the Ottomans by the deployment of warships along the Yemen coast. Coordination amongst these different elements in the bureaucracy also played a role in generating tensions between London and Constantinople. The case of the Anglo-Ottoman dispute over the Aden frontier suggests that the analysis of internal governmental politics and organisational processes can be applied successfully to crises of empire which predate the Cold War era.
This article examines the British government's first attempt to promote East-West détente through the abandonment of the policy of West German rearmament in return for concessions from the Soviet ...Union on other, largely unspecified, issues. It describes the Attlee administration's initial plans for a German defence contribution and the backlash against this policy which occurred after the outbreak of the war in Korea. This is followed by an account of the failure of the 1951 Paris agenda talks which Attlee and his ministers hoped would lead to a four power Council of Foreign Ministers and a relaxation in Cold War tensions. It concludes by suggesting that though the attempt to promote détente floundered because of Cabinet divisions and superpower intransigence the episode marked a significant new departure in British diplomacy.
This article provides an account of the special operations in Yemen authorized by successive Conservative governments in the 1950s and early 1960s. It suggests that these were undertaken in response ...to a perceived threat from Yemeni irredentism and Arab nationalism. The secrecy surrounding the operations was regarded as a useful means of avoiding the international condemnation which overt military action would attract. It is argued that the case of British involvement in Yemen provides further evidence of the continued commitment of post-war British governments to the defence of empire, and that the policy of clinging on to the remains of empire in this region was based on an over-optimistic analysis of the likely impact of Arab nationalism.
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