Reassessing Suez 1956

Fifty years on, the Anglo-French diplomatic and military reactions in 1956 to the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal remain the subject of fresh research and debate. This collection, however, is not simply a summary of various recent perspectives. Nor do the events of late 1956 always take centre stage. The attempted military re-occupation of the Canal Zone and accompanying Israeli collusion have led to this Crisis bulking particularly large in British consciousness because of the political furore provoked, the association with imperial decline and the sharp, if brief, rift it brought about in Anglo-American relations. Yet this focus can be misleading. As the opening chapters remind us, the Suez Crisis marked an end more than a beginning of a peculiarly fraught phase of Anglo-Egyptian relations as Victorian entanglements of the two countries unravelled. Their complexity after 1945 is here if anything understated by undue neglect of one of these problems, that of Sudan. There the British, not least to spite Nasser, were able to frustrate Egyptian territorial designs. The fact that Sudan was thus able to proceed to independence early in 1956 probably explains its relative absence from the Suez story as a ‘successfully’ resolved Anglo-Egyptian difference of these years. Yet, even that success has to be qualified, given the long-term consequences—as Macmillan presciently observed in 1953—of the result that ‘The only people who may be sacrificed are the Southern Sudanese’

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