No consensus unites historians regarding Britain's tenure in the Middle East. In Robert Harrison's recent account, this period began in 1619, when Sir Thomas Roe of the East India Company signed England's first official trade agreement with the Persian Safavid Empire; it ended in 1971, when the last of Britain's Persian Gulf protectorates reached independence. Harrison's judgment of Britain's impact is largely approbatory; the alternatives, he writes, could only have been worse. Yet his study of Britain's role, Britain in the Middle East, 1619–1971, spares its officials none of the opprobrium they deserve for misconceived and destructive policies.

Harrison's work is an overview of an extensive topic, examining in only 212 pages the evolution of British dominance, the place of the Middle East in the British Empire, and a decades-long process of decline. Harrison packs all of this into fourteen condensed chapters.

By 1763, on the strength of its East India Company, Britain had established itself as the sole European power in the Persian Gulf. Harrison explains the workings of that company; by the end of the Seven Years' War with France, it had been in operation 150 years, outlasting Britain's Portuguese, Dutch, and French rivals and achieving stunning success in India. Harrison recounts the development of that long-lived company, giving much credit to Roe, who was in 1615 appointed ambassador to the Mughal (Indian) court. The East India Company had come to India and the Persian Gulf “to trade, not to dominate or colonise” (12).

Harrison seems more comfortable when covering this earlier period. His treatment of Britain's entry into, influence upon, and exploitation of Egypt is one of the strongest features of the book. Harrison recounts the role of George Baldwin, merchant and diplomat, who in the 1770s and 1780s demonstrated to his superiors that in the face of French threats in both India and the Gulf, Egypt was the favored route of communication between London and British East India, with the Middle East the center of empire. Harrison also mentions Alexander Dalrymple, an East India Company hydrographer who in 1798 warned of the consequences if France were to cut a channel connecting the Mediterranean and Red seas. By the early nineteenth century, London had signed treaties with the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, reinforcing its presence in the Red Sea. The fundamentals of British Middle East policies for the next 150 years were already in place.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy enforced a Pax Britannica that ensured dominance at sea but no absence of rivals. Harrison's summaries of the rise of Mehmet Ali in Egypt, Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire, the Russian challenge, and the Eastern Question are lucid and succinct. Harrison also provides clear accounts of the First Afghan War (1838–1842), Crimean War (1853–1856), and construction of the Suez Canal (1859–1869), focusing on the policies of Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary (in the 1830s and 1840s) and prime minister (the 1850s and 1860s). Palmerston regarded the Middle East “as a whole for British economic, communication, and strategic benefit … the guiding principle for British hegemony … for the remainder of the nineteenth century and beyond” (53).

Harrison's review of the era of Disraeli and Gladstone, rivals who from 1868 to 1894 served as prime minister six and thirteen years respectively, is one of the strongest features of his work. The anti-expansionist Liberal Gladstone opposed the Conservative Disraeli's staunch imperialism. Yet, against his own principles, Gladstone oversaw the invasion (in 1882) and occupation of Egypt. Chapters eight and nine explain the contradiction in Gladstone's policies and the aftermath of Britain's war against the rebel nationalist Ahmed Urabi. Harrison notes with heavy irony that Gladstone, one-third of whose personal investments were in Egyptian bonds, had “rescued Egypt from the jaws of independence and remained to guarantee [its] ‘liberties' for the next seventy-two years” (101).

Harrison explains the effect of the First World War on Egyptian nationalists and the vast contradictions of British commitments, the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the Balfour Declaration. He includes a few cogent sentences on the Hashemite-Saudi struggle, which reignited the old rivalry between the British and Indian governments. But brevity is both a virtue and principal shortcoming of this book. Harrison devotes only 67 pages to the years 1918–1971, rushing the reader through the critical decades of Britain's demise as a Middle Eastern power in a less careful account that is prone to inaccuracies. Thus, Haj Amin Husseini, “an outspoken enemy of Zionism and the British,” did not simply “assume a position of power” (163). Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner in Palestine, appointed Haj Amin both grand mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Moshe Dayan was never commander of the Haganah (176). Harrison accords Miles Lampson (172–78), ambassador to Egypt and high commissioner of the Sudan, disproportionate attention.

Unfortunate errors and stylistic tics mar both the text and notes. A few examples are Hussein as “sheriff” of Mecca (132) but his son Feisal “sherif” (139), and “British Social Forces” instead of “Special Forces” (250). There are also too many trite expressions, some of which appear repeatedly. Thus (again) in late 1947 “the exasperated British threw in the towel” (195). For Britain, Suez in 1956 was “1882 over again” (205). Ten years later, Aden was “Palestine all over again” (207).

Harrison cites documents from the British archives but almost none after chapter eleven. The bibliography includes much of the relevant secondary literature, but there are anomalies; one of them is frequent reference to William Roger Louis's The British Empire in the Middle East (1984) but no mention of his book Ends of British Imperialism (2006). In the later chapters Harrison relies heavily on classroom textbooks, including those by Charles Smith and Ian Bickerton and Carla Klausner on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Criticism of this work notwithstanding, Harrison is to be commended for making such an important subject highly accessible to students and scholars at all levels. His work is a welcome addition to the literature on both British history and the modern Middle East.