One of the most significant sources of Anglo-Gaullist tension throughout this period was the future independence of the French mandated Levant territories (Syria and Lebanon). Operation Exporter (June-July 1941) was the first protracted battle fought by Anglo-Free French forces to secure French territory loyal to Vichy. It also marked a resurgence of imperial rivalry that escalated over the next four years.

This chapter introduces another complicating factor into the Anglo-Free French relationship: anti-imperial nationalist movements and their demands for independence. It explores Britain’s policy of pressuring de Gaulle to endorse full independence for both states. British policy-makers attempted to manage the rhetoric of Arab nationalism in order to preserve Britain’s regional influence. They removed references to an inherent Franco-Levantine bond from official Free French statements. They also directed the British press to avoid any mention of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty due to its broad unpopularity. The Free French, reliant upon British monetary and military support, had to acquiesce to British demands to preserve their outward legitimacy.

The third chapter examines how the incumbents in Iraq and Sudan reacted to the uprisings in their peripheries. It begins by establishing that the future post-colonial elites had been exposed to colonial practices of control, through their constant interaction with the colonial authorities. It then moves to demonstrate how these practices resurfaced when these governments faced dissent in their peripheries.

In this chapter, the author argues that despite the invention of the region as a single geographical unit, it is characterized by fissures born out of the very process of colonial invention. The author discusses three of them: the problem of borders, especially the thorny problem of the western Sahara; the problem of racial formations of population, especially the racial division of Arab versus Berber; and the linguistic problems that too oppose Arabic to Berber and not in a binary way, but in a trinary way, since French is a hegemonic language that governs both. These three major problems of the region, the author argues, cannot be properly debated, much less solved, without taking into account the colonial invention of the region.

This chapter focuses on The Rape, Sa’dallah Wannous’ 1989 play in which he broke his literal silence after almost a decade of not writing plays. It reads Wannous’ work in tandem with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of violence in postcolonial societies in The Wretched of the Earth--which appears in Arabic translation among the books in Wannous’ personal library housed at the American University of Beirut--as a means of assessing Wannous’ significance now, after the uprisings that began in 2011 in a number of Arab countries that led to violent state repression and war. The chapter argues that, like Fanon, Wannous warned that authoritarianism and “blind nationalism” would severely undermine the development of a self-critical and realistic national consciousness as a basis for a democratic postcolonial future.

This chapter traces the formation of Middle Eastern regional order from the end of the First World War until the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. It first analyses the role of external powers and forces in shaping the political orders and foreign policies of the Middle East’s emergent pivotal powers. The chapter then discusses the pro-Western foreign policy orientation of Turkey, a relatively ‘hegemonic’ and strategically located state. It examines the role of Arab nationalism in the hegemonic strategies of Britain’s Arab client states, before analysing the more isolationist regional policy of Saudi Arabia – which counterintuitively had much in common with Turkey during this period. The final section of the chapter discusses Iran’s seldom remarked-upon embrace of Arab nationalism during the 1940s and early 1950s.

In the late 1960s and 1970s a confluence of anticolonial politics and publishing revitalized the Cairo–Beirut link, itself emblematic of the turn of the century Arab nahda. This connection saw a reverse flow, which advantaged Beirut by way of Cairo’s amassed expertise in the publishing industry. Emerging Arab nationalist Beirut-based publishers relied on expertise in the production of illustrated books and periodicals developed in Cairo. Chapter 4 examines the subsequent Cairo–Beirut circuit of graphic design modernism, while probing the political relations and cultures of the visual carried through the influx of this expertise. The analysis brings to light a visual culture that embodies a modernist double claim of aesthetic authenticity, articulating Arab socialist politics with processes of artistic decolonization in and through printed mass media. The analysis is focused on Helmi el-Touni’s move from Cairo to Beirut in 1974 and his settling there for a decade, tracing the aesthetic and political relations articulated in his graphic design practice, while analysing in particular two sustained consultancies he undertook with Beirut-based Arab nationalist institutions: Beirut’s Arabic Book Fair and the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing.