ABSTRACT
The political borders of the Yemen were delineated through external power struggles, waged between the British Empire from the eighteenth century and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth. Had the Yemen had a well developed road and railway network it might have become an imperial colony, with a similar history to other countries in Asia and Africa. But in the absence of a modern transport infrastructure and in light of the harsh topography of the Yemen plateau, not one of the empires which struggled for supremacy in the Red Sea area succeeded in bringing the Yemen under its complete control. Thus, each of these empires nibbled away at various regions of the Yemen, with the aim of consolidating imperialist interests in the Red Sea Basin and on the trade routes to the Far East. 1 The political borders of the Yemen were fixed in the following fashion:
