2. Oil

The American presidential election in November 1956 coincided with two of the greatest crises of the postwar era: Suez and Hungary.

In July of that year, the Suez Canal had been nationalised by Egypt’s President Nasser. It provoked alarm and outrage in Britain and France, and it led to a joint Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt that in turn produced an international outcry.

Meanwhile, in October an uprising in Hungary against Soviet rule prompted an invasion by the Red Army and a brutal campaign of repression.

This series is about the interplay of these three overlapping dramas – the Suez crisis, the Hungarian revolution and the American presidential election – and their consequences for the world. Between them these events shattered the illusions of the postwar world: about British power, about Soviet tolerance of dissent, about American commitment to democracy, about European solidarity, about the future of the Middle East and about the power of international institutions.

Seventy years on David Runciman explores how these events in late 1956 represent a watershed in twentieth-century history.

Today: why the Suez Canal mattered and how President Nasser triggered British and French fears.

On 26th July 1956, almost four years to the day since he seized power in a military coup, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, informed a crowd of 100,000 people in Cairo’s Liberation Square that he was nationalising the Suez Canal.

Nasser’s action prompted a diplomatic, political and ultimately military crisis that would cost a British prime minister his job and his reputation. It also exposed how, in an age increasingly hungry for the oil that was transported through the canal, the old European powers feared the waning of their authority and with it their prosperity. The Suez canal had been acquired by Britain in the course of building its global empire. Would its loss signal the end of Britain’s imperial illusions?