Britain remains an imperialist power. Although much reduced in financial and military potential, it has played, over recent years, a particularly dangerous role in the Middle East – a role which can only be understood in the context of what went before during Britain’s two centuries of ’regional dominance’, writes John Foster
Through the eighteenth century Britain and the Netherlands together developed a new specifically capitalist world market. Symbolically, this was initiated by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht which decreed that ‘peace’, meaning Anglo-Dutch international market dominance, would be sustained by an ‘equal balance of power’. Britain’s access to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern markets was guaranteed by the handover of Gibraltar.
While the century did see two wars in which the French lost first their Indian and then most of their American colonies, it was primarily marked by Britain’s transformation into the world’s first industrial superpower – part made possible by market dominance, part by the Atlantic slave trade and part by the loot of India. It was this industrial power that then enabled Britain to defeat a resurgent France under Napoleon – including his bid to seize Egypt and Syria in 1800-01.
The following half-century saw Britain’s assertion of more permanent territorial influence within the Middle East. It started with Persia. The ‘Preliminary Treaty’ of 1809 initiated an on-off relationship that began by training Persia’s first professional army. This was followed by treaties with the ‘Gulf States’. The ‘General Treaty’ with Bahrain in 1820 initiated further treaties with the rest of the small sheikdoms down the coast to Oman. In 1839 Aden was added – administered from Bombay.
In all this the control of India remained paramount, an imperative that continued through the second half of the nineteenth century. The joint Anglo-French invasion of Crimea in 1856 marked the first major action to thwart Russia’s advance into the Ottoman empire and onwards to India. The second major intervention was against France. Through the later 1850s and the 1860s France sought to re-assert its power in the Middle East through a commercial alliance with Egypt and the construction of the Suez Canal.
Britain saw this as threatening its interests in India and the far east. Exploiting France’s defeat by Germany in 1870, and the financial debts of both the Canal construction company and the Egyptian government, Britain had by 1882 seized control of both Egypt and the canal.
This period also saw the carve up of Africa at the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. Britain’s new African colonies gave still greater importance to control of the canal and the east Mediterranean. In a bid to maintain British support the Ottomans offered to cede Crete. The Foreign Office replied they would prefer Cyprus. As revealed in Foreign Office papers, Cyprus’s ethnically divided population was seen as easing political control.
The next period began in 1903 and marked a decisive shift. In that year the Navy decided that oil-fuelled turbines would give their battle-fleet significant speed advantages over Germany’s. Anglo-Persian Oil (later BP) was established in 1909. By1913 ‘Persia’s’ Ibadan oil refinery was on-line – soon to become the world’s biggest.
As revealed in the Secret Treaties published by the new Soviet government in 1918, the First World War was largely fought over Middle East oil. The defeat of the Ottomans was brutal. But the subsequent control was more so. During the war Britain and France agreed to divide the Middle East so that France got the north, including Syria, and Britain the south. It was this area that contained most of the oil. Through the 1920s Britain imposed its rule over what is now Iraq by aerial bombing with poison gas and motorised machine gun units.
However, it was an additional and more sinister tool of control that was ultimately even more troubling. Just one day after the first decisive defeat of Ottoman forces in Palestine, on 2 November 1917, the Foreign Secretary Balfour sent Lord Rothschild his declaration about providing a homeland for the Jewish people. For Britain the object was to subdue these largely hostile territories by exploiting the same divide and rule principle as used in Cyprus (and equally in India and many other parts of the empire).
The 1930s saw the height of Britain’s imperial power. Britain was largely protected from the ravages of the economic crisis seen elsewhere by its control of key empire commodities and by the effective exclusion of the United States and other powers from a market that included just over half the world’s population.
In response US used the Second World War to assert access to this empire – particularly the Middle East and its oil. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement created a world currency system based on the dollar that required the dismantling of tariff barriers and the use of the ‘managed dollar’ to sustain world liquidity – effectively enabling an inflation-driven redistribution of income in favour of those countries, principally the US, whose businesses exercised monopoly power.
It was within this environment that Britain emerged from the war. Territorially its empire was at its climax – now including Libya and other formerly Italian territories. But its political and economic foundations had been torn away. Economically subordinate to the United State, the ‘wind of change’ mobilised popular revolt – a wind at least in part resulting from the overthrow of reactionary regimes across Europe in face of Soviet-led liberation.
Across the Middle East Britain lost control: in Iran (1951), (Libya 1951), Egypt (1952), Sudan (1956), Iraq (1958). In some countries, such as Iraq, there were mass-based revolutions in part led by Communist Parties. In others, such as Egypt, movements were led by radical army officers. All at this stage advocated some brand of socialism. While in Iran the newly elected democratic government was overthrown by US intervention, alliances were formed elsewhere that created the United Arab Republic. Based in Egypt, it included at its height Syria, Libya and Iraq. In Palestine, a British UN mandate, the Israeli state was created in 1948 and the original Palestinian population largely expelled.
Today British capitalism remains imperialist but its power is exercised in subsidiary alliance with the US. With its overseas bases, international weapons sales, the City of London and UN security council seat, it has the trappings of a ‘great power’. But its capital is externally owned, overwhelmingly from the US, and its policy assets conflicted. In any Marxist analysis its state power is compromised.
The British response, under the ‘ultra-colonialist’ government of Athony Eden, was, in 1956, to form an alliance with France and Israel to reverse the nationalisation of the Suez canal and overthrow Nasser. Its failure, in face of US intervention, ended independent British power in the Middle East, While Britain sought to maintain its colonial base in Africa, in Hong Kong and parts of the far east, the old ‘empire’ was effectively over. Army numbers were cut from a million in 1959 to less than 150,000 by the 1970s.
Today British capitalism remains imperialist but its power is exercised in subsidiary alliance with the US. Its territorial bases, in Cyprus, the Chagos Islands and Oman continue. It sells weaponry and military expertise to Israel and Arab dictatorships. The City provides a place of deposit for financial assets and luxury consumption, physical, cultural and educational. While Britain maintains its UN Security Council seat and the trappings of a ‘great power’, in any Marxist analysis its state power is compromised. Its capital is externally owned, overwhelmingly from the US, and its policy assets conflicted. Its role in the Middle East, from Blair to Starmer, has too often been to give legitimacy to policies of mass murder.
A final example would be the recent dismemberment of Syria, a long-term US ambition. For over a decade British special forces helped the US detach the rich agricultural and oil-bearing lands of the east. In 2024-25 Britain, with the US, helped train jihadi forces and then, jointly with Israel, secure a coup against a bankrupt government. Britain has the skills to do this – but now only as a mercenary.
John Foster is a historian of the working class movement. His most recent publications are The Great Tradition of Independent Working Class Power Volume IV of the Unite History (Liverpool UP 2022) and Languages of Class Struggle in Britain and Ireland (Praxis 2024).
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation
This article first appeared in Liberation journal.
Photo: UK Special Forces in a military exercise in Denmark in 2021 involving Special Operations Forces from 13 NATO allies and partners/NATO-CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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