The Middle East's road out of empire began with a new legal invention. After the First World War the victorious Allies divided the Arab lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire, along with Germany's colonies, but they did not call them colonies. They became mandates, territories administered by a member of the new League of Nations on the League's behalf. Article 22 of the League's Covenant of 1919 described them as lands "inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world." The Covenant called the well-being and development of such peoples "a sacred trust of civilisation."

A trust or a disguise?

Mandates were ranked. The former Ottoman lands, such as Iraq, Syria and Palestine, were "A" mandates, judged close to independence. Most former German colonies in Africa were "B" mandates, while South West Africa and the Pacific islands were "C" mandates, run almost as parts of the ruling country. Defenders saw the system as a step forward: for the first time, colonial rule had to report to an international body, the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva, and inhabitants could send it petitions. Critics, including many Arabs at the time, saw annexation with better manners. Britain and France had already agreed in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 how to divide the region.

The historian Susan Pedersen has argued that the mandates mattered less for what they changed on the ground than for the forum they created. Pedersen argues that the mandate system made empire a subject of international debate, giving petitioners and critics a platform that later fed into the United Nations.

Uneven exits

Iraq became the first mandate to win independence, joining the League in 1932, though Britain kept air bases and influence under a treaty. Egypt, never formally a mandate, had received a limited independence from Britain in 1922, with Britain keeping control of defense and the Suez Canal. Syria and Lebanon became independent of France during and just after the Second World War, and the last French troops left in 1946, the same year Transjordan (now Jordan) became independent.

Palestine was the hardest case. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917 Britain had promised to support "a national home for the Jewish people" while protecting the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. Rising Jewish immigration and Arab resistance made both promises impossible to keep. Exhausted, Britain handed the problem to the UN, and in November 1947 the General Assembly recommended partition into Jewish and Arab states. The British mandate in Palestine ended in May 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed, and war followed. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, while Israelis remember the same war as their war of independence. Each memory is real to those who hold it, and the conflict remains unresolved.

Oil and informal empire

Formal independence did not end outside influence, especially where oil was at stake. In 1951 Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1953 a coup backed by American and British intelligence overthrew Mosaddegh. The episode convinced many in the region that independence on paper could be undone whenever Western interests were threatened.

Suez

In Egypt, army officers overthrew the king in 1952, and Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as leader. Nasser negotiated the departure of British troops from the canal zone, completed in 1956. When the United States and Britain withdrew their offers to fund the Aswan High Dam, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July 1956, saying its tolls would pay for the dam. Britain and France, the company's main owners, saw a threat to their prestige and their oil supply. They secretly agreed with Israel that Israel would invade Sinai, after which British and French forces would land, claiming to separate the two sides.

The plan unfolded in late October and early November 1956, and it failed. President Eisenhower opposed the invasion and used financial pressure on sterling to force Britain to stop. The Soviet Union made threats, and the UN General Assembly demanded a ceasefire. To supervise the withdrawal, the UN created its first armed peacekeeping force, the UN Emergency Force, proposed by the Canadian diplomat Lester Pearson, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for it.

Worked example: what Suez meant

Britain and France withdrew by December 1956, and Israel left Sinai in early 1957. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, ill and discredited, resigned in January 1957. Nasser, who had lost on the battlefield, won politically: he became the hero of Arab nationalism and a symbol for anticolonial movements everywhere. The canal stayed Egyptian.

Historians often treat Suez as the moment Britain learned it could no longer act as a great power without American consent. The lessons differed by country. Britain concluded that it must stay close to Washington. France concluded that it could not rely on Washington, and it pressed ahead with its own nuclear weapons and with European integration. For colonized peoples the lesson was simpler: the old empires could be humiliated, and the superpowers would not always protect them. Within a few years much of Africa was independent. Suez did not cause that change by itself, but it showed clearly which way events were moving.