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The Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the United Kingdom's population compared with the United States, the European Economic Community, and the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The First Sea Lord's offer to resign as an Anglo-French taskforce sailed to seize the Suez Canal in November 1956 became known following his retirement in 1965. Mountbatten oversaw naval preparations with consummate professionalism, although his praise for British forces' seizure of Port Said was tempered by admiration of the French, and not shared by all Combined Operations veterans. David Astor of the Observer actually opposed the invasion, and was passed information by a dissenting Mountbatten. An ageing Mountbatten's criticism of British–French–Israeli collusion led to his advancing an alternative version of events highly favourable to himself, which protagonists such as Lord Hailsham publicly contested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stories of the mummy's curse persist, despite efforts of the enlightened museum to dismiss these tales as superstition. This article follows the story of one particular “cursed” artefact in the British Museum, using archives and other resources to reconstruct the “true” story behind the circulated rumour. The paper concludes that the mummy's curse is a displaced account of the violence of colonial and museal appropriation of objects, a counter-narrative of historical things that resist dispossession by the process of artefaction undertaken by museums. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses efforts by the British Cabinet to conduct a confidential re-assessment of plans presented in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 regarding the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. According to the author, the Cabinet persisted in its promotion of the plans despite concluding that it could not adequately protect the region's Arab population nor help them move towards independence. It is suggested that had the British Cabinet made the League of Nations aware of its findings, the international organization may have been able to prevent the Arab-Israeli conflict. Details related to British governance in Palestine are presented. Other topics include Zionism, the Suez Canal, and the so-called McMahon pledges concerning Arab independence.

This article deals with the temporary but striking breakdown of the Anglo-American "special relations " in 1956. It examines the growth of an anti-American sentiment both in the British Cabinet and in a major segment of the Conservative Party. It also demonstrates that France, initially a minor partner in a circumstantial entente, successfully look advantage of this development to eventually shape British decision making in the Suez crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Harold Macmillan's role as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the Suez crisis in light of information now available. It argues that, contrary to present historiography, the Treasury was consistent in warning Macmillan of the dangers of the use of force, but that this advice was not accepted by Macmillan. He did not adequately pass on these warnings to his Cabinet and Egypt Committee colleagues. Though he did not lie to his colleagues about the state of the reserves when the decision to call a ceasefire was taken, the reasons that he gave for his abrupt change of mind were specious. The article concludes that American hostility was primarily responsible for the failure of the operation and that Macmillan showed a lack of judgement in not recognizing this until it was too late. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]