The close of the Second World War marked a triumph of the victorious Allied powers in a global contest against the forces of fascism. But victory presented immediate challenges: effective postwar cooperation to prevent the recurrence of a total war with its massive human costs, and assorted political, economic, and territorial questions prompted by the end of hostilities. In a series of war time conferences, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had discussed the need for international cooperation to address postwar concerns. Those discussions led in 1945 to the creation of the United Nations Organization, which the...

The first Arab-Israeli War was the climax of a decades-long struggle between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. For Britain, the war was a catastrophe. Arab unrest fueled by continued Jewish immigration into Palestine, accelerated by both Nazi persecution and Soviet pogroms, coupled with the postwar costs of overseas military deployments and manpower shortages throughout the British Empire, had pushed to the limit British forces in the mandated territory and in the region as a whole. Meanwhile U.S. support for the continued immigration of Jewish settlers into Palestine and the eventual recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 raised the...

By the summer of 1946, British and American officials alike found themselves running out of ideas for a lasting solution to the problem of Palestine. As the cold war took hold and Soviet military presences encroached from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the stakes for securing the energy-rich Middle East rose ever higher. Pressure mounted at the Foreign Office and the State Department to generate constructive ideas that could break the deadlock. But the course of Anglo-American diplomacy to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute that began with the 1946–1947 London Conference and ended with the creation of the State of...

One of geographer Ellsworth Huntington’s first observations about Kashmir in his 1906 survey concerned the region’s physical isolation and the attendant effects on the history of the Kashmiri people. “Kashmir presents one of the best opportunities for the study of the relation of man to his surroundings,” he noted, “for from the earliest-known times the basin has been occupied by a single race. The people are Aryans allied to those of northern India in blood and language, but far less subject to outside influences because of the high mountain barrier, which has not only made invasion a rare occurrence but...

When violence gripped Kashmir in the winter of 1947, the first task at hand for the Foreign Office was to determine precisely the situation on the ground. Shortly after the disturbances began to spread, the deputy high commissioner in Lahore traveled to the city of Abbottabad, in the Orash Valley, surrounded by the Sarban hills, which bestrode areas that saw some of the most intense unrest. He painted a picture of a complex insurgency comprising three largely distinct groups of approximately two thousand tribesmen in total. They spanned a wide range of clans, including Pashtun Mehsuds, Waziris, and smaller bands...

Framed in terms of Bevin’s imperial strategy, the British withdrawals from mandatory Palestine and the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir were domestic policy responses to a changed world order—decisions taken by the British government to cede power where the war had exhausted British capacity to exercise it. Palestine’s abandonment before the United Nations and the hastily drafted plan to quit India amounted to an acquiescence to geopolitical pressures to curtail forward imperial defenses after the war.¹ As the empire contracted under those military and economic pressures, reliance on cooperation with British dominions and treaty relationships with newly independent...

Joint British and American diplomatic initiatives on Palestine and Kashmir in the late 1940s belied two fundamentally distinct lenses of analysis focused on the Middle East and Southwest Asia that underlay the respective policy-strategy processes in Washington and London. It was a distinction evident in the Anglo-American diplomacy that helped dislodge the French from the Levant and hastened the end of Dutch rule in the Netherlands East Indies. The American vision for a global national security policy predicated on a global military basing presence, the United Nations Security Council, and civil aviation routes contrasted with the more regionally delimited British...

In a sense the UN system represented a reconciliation of the American and British geographical conceptions of postwar order. More problematically there were civilian and military versions of American globalism that first had to be reconciled withone another. While the Allied compromise on the Security Council and its voting mechanisms represented a huge triumph of internationalism—and certainly, to a considerable extent, a reconciliation of American and British blueprints—there remained the quandary of the future of dependent territories, a separate issue that resolved itself on a parallel track between early Allied postwar planning in 1942 and the Yalta...

Independence movements from the Arab world to South and Southeast Asia sensed a watershed moment as the Second World War ended. While much of Europe’s industrial core lay smoldering in ruins, economic and physical devastation compelled colonial powers like Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands to consider the costs of imperial overstretch and the prospect of withdrawals from dependent territories in regions like the Indian subcontinent, the Levant, and the Indonesian archipelago. Meanwhile the creation of the new United Nations organization and its Security and Trusteeship Councils held out the promise of a new deal for emergent nation-states of the...

Decolonization occurred at the contact points between nationalist struggle and great power diplomacy. Once specific nationalist ideologies like Zionism and the drive for Pakistan came to motivate and legitimize the struggles of groups like the Jewish Agency and the All-India Muslim League, having squelched competitor ideologies, they became the principal vehicles through which their supporters sought to deliver the goal of statehood. Those struggles for sovereignty (and the attendant international recognition that it conferred, once achieved) were soon buffeted by the pressures of the diplomatic involvement of powers like Great Britain and the United States. Neither the nascent nationalist struggles...

This book has examined how perceptions of geography shaped British decolonization as it occurred on the opposite ends of the greater Middle East. In so doing, it has drawn comparisons between American and British strategies and policies, the corresponding ways of viewing the territorial geography and underlying demographics of specific regions that accompanied them, and the ideologies and goals driving various anticolonial nationalist struggles. Importantly it has shown how key (often implicit) assumptions laden within certain perceptions of the Levant, South Asia, and other regions likely drove foreign policies in Washington and London.

However, the argument presented here acknowledges that...