ABSTRACT
When Yahya ibn Muhammad Hamid al-Din was recognised as Imam late in 1904 he was little more than a local religious leader and an arbiter of tribal disputes, but he was a man driven by the ambition to unite under his sway all those lands which had once been ruled by his Himyarite and his Zaydi ancestors. Muhammad ibn Saud was uncertain of the attitudes of the two neighbouring great powers, Britain and Italy, and was not prepared to run the risk that they might intervene to save the independence of the Yemen. In the days before the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula the Yemen was one of the few states that was basically self-supporting. In 1960 there was urban unrest and 1961 saw the first strike and the first civil disobedience in the Yemen as the economic realities and political ideas of the outer world started to penetrate through the old walls of isolation.
