The Age of Decolonization: How Colonial Empires Ended After World War II

# The Arab World and the Oil Dimension

Arab decolonization followed a different trajectory from Africa and Asia, shaped by the Ottoman inheritance, the British and French mandates established after the First World War, and — increasingly after 1945 — the strategic weight of petroleum.

The mandate system, formalized at San Remo in 1920, had divided the former Ottoman Arab territories between Britain and France under League of Nations supervision. Syria and Lebanon fell to France; Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan to Britain. These were not colonies in the formal sense — the mandate system obligated the mandatory powers to prepare territories for eventual self-governance — but in practice they operated with most of the characteristics of colonial administration.

Syria and Lebanon achieved independence in 1943–1946, largely because Vichy France's wartime complications had weakened French authority and because Britain pressured France to withdraw. Iraq had achieved nominal independence in 1932 but retained substantial British military presence and treaty relationships. The 1958 revolution that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy and brought the military to power was partly a reaction against that residual British influence.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 marks the decisive moment in British and French withdrawal from the Arab world. Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal Company triggered a British-French-Israeli military operation aimed at reversing the nationalization and, implicitly, at regime change. American opposition — Eisenhower was genuinely furious, and the US used financial leverage to force British withdrawal — ended the operation in humiliation. The lesson was clear: Britain and France could no longer project military force in the Middle East against American opposition.

Oil complicated everything. The petroleum-rich states of the Gulf — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the eventual UAE — negotiated their independence with different leverage than the resource-poor states. Oil revenues provided the economic foundation for state formation and reduced dependence on colonial relationships in ways unavailable elsewhere. The 1973 oil embargo demonstrated that former colonial subjects, organized through OPEC, could impose meaningful economic costs on the industrial world.

The Arab decolonization experience left a different institutional inheritance than sub-Saharan Africa: the structures of the mandate period, the displacement of Palestinian populations, and the strategic entanglement around petroleum all created dynamics that persisted long after formal independence.

The Arab World and the Oil Dimension

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