In the spring and summer of 1942 the German military forces in north Africa and southern Russia made significant advances. In June the German army reached EI Alamein, only seventy miles west of Alexandria, while in August the German army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. As a result of these German advances, Britain, which was the allied country with primary responsibility for defending the Middle East against the Axis powers, became concerned about the possibility that the German air force might attempt to bomb the oilfields and oil refineries in the Middle East in order to deny the oil in that area to the allied governments. Britain was also alarmed about the possibility that, instead of bombing the oil installations, the Germans might attempt to capture them intact in order to utilize the oil for their war machine. In 1942 total Middle Eastern oil production constituted only about six per cent of total world oil production. However, all Middle Eastern oil was refined locally - about two-thirds at Abadan in Iran - and played a vital role in the conduct of British military operations in the Middle East and southeast Asia.1 In 1942 Britain had troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain, the four main Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, and thus was well placed to defend and, if necessary, to destroy the oil facilities in those countries. However, at this time Sa'udi Arabia, the remaining Middle Eastern oil producing nation, was a neutral power with no British or American troops stationed on its territory. As a result of Sa'udi neutrality it was difficult for Britain to defend the Sa'udi oilfields against German air attack. It was also difficult for Britain to make the necessary preparations to destroy the Sa'udi oilfields in the event that the German army advanced into the Arabian peninsula. The purpose of this communication will be to discuss the manner in which the British government attempted to deal with these problems. It will also discuss the reaction of the United States government and the American-owned oil company in Sa'udi Arabia to this situation.

The effects of the Second World War on British colonial Africa were far-reaching and unexpected. Colonial governments, hitherto concerned with establishing and preserving law and order, with administration, the collection of taxation, and with slow economic development, had perforce to divert their energies into more varied and unorthodox channels. Troops were recruited from the colonies and in addition local Home Guards were formed. African colonies acquired a new strategic importance and became the scene for new intelligence and counter-espionage activities: this was especially so after the French government signed the armistice with Germany on 22 June 1940. On the following day the British government promised that if French overseas territories continued the war against the Nazis Britain would guarantee their integrity and economic stability, as well as providing funds to pay the salaries and pensions of French colonial officials. The governor of Nigeria, Sir Bernard Bourdillon, did much to encourage the rallitmcnt of neighbouring Vichy colonies to the Free French cause of General de Gaulle. It was part of French propaganda to exaggerate British involvement in the French colonies and to paint de Gaulle as simply a tool of British imperialism; and it was part of Britain's propaganda to minimize her own role and to stress that the British were simply supporting the initiatives of the Free French. As a result we have not yet been presented with a balanced and scholarly assessment of the contribution which the British in Nigeria made to the ralliement of French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons in August 1940.

‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ Peter Laslett's remark of 1956 is well known. His lament was echoed in 1962 in Bernard Crick's extended plea In defence of politics. They surveyed a wasteland laid bare by a sociology which announced the exhaustion of political ideals, and a philosophy, logical positivism, which declared that nothing significant could be said about ethics or politics. According to Laslett, one of the original culprits of the former kind was Karl Mannheim, because he had taught that all thinking and all knowing were sociologically determined.

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.

In the last fifteen years military history in Britain has gained considerably in respectability, both in the country at large and in academic circles specifically. But it still has problems of identity. On the one hand, military history can at last find itself judged as part of ‘total history’. But, on the other, its origins as the staple fodder of nineteenth-century military academies have bequeathed it a strong didactic flavour which has proved hard to shed. Military history and strategic theory do not yet stand in the same relationship to each other as, say, political history and political theory. Perhaps because in Britain there is still too little independent informed analysis of defence, military history can be employed in a dual role. The ‘lessons of history’ are stronger here than in any other area. However impeccable the motives of military historians, their work is too often used as a prescription for the future rather than as a study of the past.