It is the rarest thing for a contemporary scholar of modern Arab history to make a remark such as: “[Mehmet ‘Ali's wars of expansion] bore within [them] the seeds of Arab unity until the British intervened to abort it . . .” (p. 5). In making assertions of this sort, Britain and Arab Unity brings to mind the kind of book that could have been published forty or more years ago. Younan Labib Rizk takes as his point of departure the presumption that an Arab nation extending across North Africa and West Asia yearned for unity since the 19th century and strove to achieve it in the 20th century. He argues against the proposition that it was Great Britain that initiated the drive for Arab unity early in World War II but does not tell us who originally made this claim. In opposition to that stance, Rizk sets out to make the case that Great Britain's primary goal in the Arab world prior to 1945 was to thwart the drive for unity and to impose unnatural divisions on the Arab nation. By the book's second chapter though, the author loses sight of his argument, and so does the reader.

The book comprises five chapters supplemented by nine appended Foreign Office documents. In the first chapter, “Britain's Divisive Role Prior to 1919,” Rizk asserts that Great Britain segmented the Arab world in the 19th century by pursuing the “Indianisation of the [Persian] Gulf,” the “Judaisation of Palestine,” and the “Isolation of Egypt.” Describing Great Britain's domination of the Persian Gulf through the India Office and its fostering the growth of an Indian community in the Gulf, the author claims: “the deep impact that the Indian presence has had on the Gulf has helped weaken the region's ties to the rest of the Arab world” (p. 10). Rizk makes no mention of the fact that South Asians were deeply involved in the trade and social life of the Gulf centuries before the Union Jack first flapped over its waters. On Jewish and Zionist colonization of Palestine, the author states that it “constituted one of the most significant coups directed towards Arab aspirations for unity. Britain was not that ever far removed from these developments as far back as the late 1830s” (p. 20). He further claims that well before its occupation of Egypt, Great Britain effected a cultural and economic “reorientation of Egypt towards Europe, and away from the Arab world” (p. 13) and erected “walls of isolation . . . around Egypt . . . throughout the nineteenth century” (p. 20).

The five succeeding chapters amount to summaries of British Foreign Office documents and make little reference to secondary literature or other primary sources. Chapter 2, “The Arab Kingdom 1919–23,” surveys some aspects of British policy during World War I and the postwar settlement. The chapter recounts the well-known Hussein–McMahon correspondence and the Sykes–Picot Agreement as well as a less well-known proposal for an Arab federation drawn up in 1921 by W. H. Deedes of the Palestine government.

The third chapter, “The Arab Conference 1931–3,” briefly treats an Islamic conference held in Jerusalem in 1931 but is primarily devoted to describing British reactions to an initiative by Arab politicians to hold a pan-Arab conference in Baghdad. The chapter documents the unsurprising fact that British officials sought to minimize the political content of both conferences and to infinitely delay the convening of the second.

In Chapter 4, “Between Arab Unity and Pan-Arabism 1936–41,” Rizk undertakes to establish that a 1941 speech by Foreign Minister Anthony Eden expressing British support for closer economic, cultural, and political ties among Arab countries was not primarily a response to wartime exigencies. Although it is not clear what Rizk's alternative explanation is for the speech, he seems to imply that it constituted recognition of a surging demand by the Arab people for unity that was either triggered by, or manifested in, protests and revolts in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in 1936.

Chapter 5, “British Policy Towards Arab Unity During World War II,” summarizes a series of reports, memoranda, telegrams, and letters on Arab unity by British officials and scholars in addition to some by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Saʿid and Saudi King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Saʿud. Rizk draws no conclusions from these documents other than his claim that by late 1943 the British were aware that Iraqi, Saudi, and Egyptian politicians were likely to hold an Arab conference, which he regards as “the beginning of the process to establish the Arab League” (p. 133).

The final chapter, “Britain and the Establishment of the Arab League 1943–5,” describes still more Foreign Office documents produced by British officials who observed contacts among Arab leaders as they organized the Arab League and eventually produced its charter in February 1945. For reasons that he never establishes, Rizk states that the signing of the charter “marked the end of the influential role Britain had played over the previous three decades in regard to Arab unity” (p. 159). The book ends with a section titled “Conclusion” that is one-and-a-half pages long. It scarcely addresses the material of the preceding chapters and primarily reflects on the extent of Great Britain's influence in the Arab world relative to that of France or Italy.

To the limited extent that it makes an argument, Britain and Arab Unity is tendentious and uninformed by recent scholarship on British colonial policy, Arab nationalism, or inter-Arab relations. The book's extended paraphrases of Foreign Office documents and the consequent absence of authorial voice make it an especially unsatisfying example of historical writing. It is not a book that should be assigned to undergraduates. However, specialists in the fields of British imperialism and Arab nationalism could certainly take advantage of its appended documents and the author's discussion of other documents to gain a sense of what they might encounter in the National Archives of the United Kingdom.