ABSTRACT
Since its capture by Haines in 1839 the purpose which Aden served within the British imperial system had been ill defined. Its future rarely concerned British imperial strategists. On those rare occasions when it did there was usually a conflict between the men on the spot and those at the centre of metropolitan affairs. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century lines of authority ran from Aden to Bombay to Calcutta and then back to the India Office in London and these administrative arrangements tended to accentuate differences over policy. By 1959 the twisted bureaucratic position of the Colony within the British administrative system had become less tangled. The Governor ran the Colony and offered advice to the rulers of the protected states through political officers in situ while liaising with the Colonial Office in London. The latter then reported issues of wider concern to other Whitehall departments. However, the significance of the Aden base to British Middle East strategy gave the issue of its future greater prominence in ministerial thinking during the 1950s and generated a degree of scepticism about the plans being made by the men on the spot. Trevaskis’s vision of an independent southwest Arabian state required the merger of Aden with the Protectorates and the suppression of both the urban nationalists and tribal dissidents in the Protectorates. In the longer term he was confident that a set of institutions could be constructed which would tie southwest Arabia into Britain’s informal empire after independence. William Luce and his successor as Governor, Charles Johnston, were persuaded of the merits of this approach, as were the Colonial Office. It took rather more time to convince Conservative ministers who were sceptical of the ability of the Aden authorities to construct a state sufficiently robust to resist the rise of Arab nationalism. Conservative imperialists favoured the continuation of formal empire through the permanent retention of British sovereignty as the best means of retaining British influence in Arabia and the Middle East. These attitudes frustrated the Aden authorities, who were anxious to expedite the merger of Aden Colony with the federation while conditions remained propitious. It will be useful to first describe the bureaucratic obstacles to the switch to informal empire before examining the still more formidable local impediments in the way of the forward policy.
