The Suez crisis is a hardy perennial in British studies. Not a year has gone by since 1956 without an article or a book published promising new revelations about some previously obscured aspect of the affair. Every decade, without fail, there are commemorative conferences, usually in Britain, which reexamine every root and branch of the crisis. Why this continuing fascination with Suez? Tony Stockwell, in his contribution to this latest volume, Reassessing Suez (based on a conference in Hull, England, in 2006), may have put his finger on it when he says “It is readily claimed that the Suez crisis marked the end of the British Empire. … It exposed Britain's weakness in the world, ended its freedom of action in international affairs and unleashed such moral outrage that, in its aftermath, the British government had no option but to withdraw from historical imperial commitments” (227). This is a neat summary of the prevailing political/historical consensus on Suez that has held sway for some sixty years and has had such a powerful, and some might say warping, influence on the self-perception of the British governing elite in their attempt “to manage British decline.”

It is the strength of this study, from seventeen “Suezologists,” that some of them are no longer satisfied with the ritual flagellation of Eden and the Tories that passes for historical analysis, and they seek more convincing explanations of the complexities and contradictions of the crisis and its causes and consequences. As Stockwell points out, Suez did not end the British Empire or even imperial fervor, despite the widespread condemnation at home and abroad. He believes it was Britain's economic predicament from 1945–70 that determined “the speed and manner” of the end of the empire (328). Tore Petersen takes this further by stressing the carefully concealed anticolonial motivations of the Labour governments of the 1960s who took the fateful decision to withdraw from east of Suez, the baleful consequences of which we are still living with today in the Persian Gulf. Petersen is also convincing in his observation that Suez was something of “a blessing in disguise” in that it allowed Britain to act unilaterally in the Middle East, especially in Arabia and the Gulf in the 1960s, without fear of American sanction. The reason for this was that successive governments in London took advantage of the guilt felt by their counterparts in Washington about how they had treated their main transatlantic allies, Britain and France, at Suez and their anxiety to make amends.

What emerges strongly from the chapters on aspects of U.S. policy over Suez and the Middle East from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, by Petersen, Richard Damms, and Clea Lutz Bunch, is how subject it was to sudden changes of direction—one year in favor of Arab nationalism, the next against it; opposing British and French imperialism at Suez and supporting it a few years later over Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The answers to the warp and woof of U.S. policy must lie with the changing constellations of power in Washington, between the Arabists of the Near Eastern Bureau of the State Department, their oil company masters, the generals at the Pentagon, and the idealism and cold war perceptions of successive presidents and secretaries of state as they sought to deal with one crisis after the other in the Middle East and to safeguard U.S. interests. They were constantly frustrated in their desire to find a pro-Western regional leader among the Arabs, the result of both American and British illusions about the unity of the region. It is one of the drawbacks of this and other studies on Suez that not enough attention is paid to the fissiparous nature of Arab national and interstate politics. This is no doubt due to the lack of readily available government records in the capitals of the Middle East (with the exception of Israel and Turkey), where the Arab nationalist regimes still hold sway and are reluctant to allow any chipping away of the national narrative on Suez. This may be due also to a desire to spare their blushes since, as Laura James makes clear in her chapter, Nasser's unpreparedness for war severely detracts from his popularized image of the cleverly calculating revolutionary leader. He appears more like a hapless character out of one of those awful British “carry-on” films from the 1960s, perhaps entitled “Carry-On up the Canal”!

Until we have more analysis of the reactions of Arab governments to Suez, and at least there is plenty of available material in British archives on this, we are not going to be able to acquire the true perspective on Suez that historians like Scott Lucas and Peter Hennessy have called for. This should act as a corrective to those national histories, usually written by Britons or Americans, which overly concentrate on the effects of Suez on domestic politics and try to project its lessons onto British foreign policy from Suez to Iraq in 2003. Historians of Suez need to move away from the increasingly sterile and tedious debate about “the lessons of Suez” for Britain and the United States and to examine Suez in its regional context. That will cast more light on the interconnections with the international and even national contexts of Suez, which Simon Smith seeks in this volume. But his book, as Scott Lucas points out in the conclusion, makes a start.