Abstract
In 1942, the American journalist and social reformer Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, warned that World War II could be lost in the colonial empires, where the Allies faced the peril “that this struggle would degenerate into a war of the colored races against the white.” Just as slavery had become unfashionable in the nineteenth century, the British writer Julian Huxley added, colonialism would meet a similar fate in the twentieth century, and for many of the same reasons: “The world’s conscience is beginning to grow a little uneasy over the fact of one country possessing another country as a colony, just as it grew uneasy a century or so ago over the fact of one human being possessing another as a slave.”2
Lord Balfour had hardly been aware of the existence of the Arabs, but … he suddenly became acutely conscious of their existence when he went to Damascus in 1922 and they stoned him in the streets!
Sir Maurice Peterson, speaking to a State Department Delegation, April 1944.1
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Notes
“Summary of Opinion and Ideas on International Postwar Problems,” September 9, 1942, Postwar Foreign Policy Files, Welles Papers, folder 1, box 190, Sumner Welles Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter referred to as FDRL). Although this book makes extensive use of primary sources, it also utilizes the last quarter century of historiography as well as new historiographical methodologies such as decolonization. It has been three decades since the appearance of the two standard accounts of the origins of the United States in the Middle East: Phillip J. Baram’s The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919–1945 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978)
and Thomas Bryson’s Seeds of Middle East Crisis: The United States Diplomatic Role in the Middle East during World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1981) and The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919–1945 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975). Both accounts relied almost exclusively on the State Department’s series Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) without the benefit of the many collections at the US National Archives, FDRL, or archival materials in Britain and the Middle East. Nor did earlier accounts approach the subject of the United States in the Middle East from the perspective of empire and decolonization.
Hans Georg von Mackensen, Ambassador to Rome, to Foreign Ministry Berlin, September 14, 1940, Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, 1940–1941, Vol. XI (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1960), 75–76.
See also Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Two excellent biographies of Cromer and Curzon have recently appeared, exploring the Middle East in detail. See Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman, 1859–1925 (London: John Murray, 2005).
Keith Jeffery, “The Second World War,” in Judith Brown and William Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 306–307.
Thomas A. Bryson, American Diplomatic Relations with the Middle East, 1784–1975 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975).
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© 2012 Christopher D. O’Sullivan
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O’Sullivan, C.D. (2012). Introduction. In: FDR and the End of Empire. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025258_1
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