Britain's hasty departure from Aden and South Arabia after 128 years has often been presented as a humiliation at best and a disaster at worst. London's hopes of handing power and sovereignty over to a friendly federal regime collapsed in the face of a nationalist uprising backed that enjoyed the support of Egypt.

Five decades after the final British troops left Aden, academic experts and former British officials directly involved in the events that unfolded critically reflect on British withdrawal from South Arabia, the post-colonial problems in South Yemen that still resonate today, and how the United Kingdom learnt from its experience in stabilising Oman while overseeing the formation of the United Arab Emirates.

Quasi-alliance refers to the ideation, mechanism and behavior of policy-makers to carry out security cooperation through informal political and security arrangements. As a 'gray zone' between alliance and neutrality, quasi-alliance is a hidden national security statecraft.

Based on declassified archives and secondary sources, this book probes the theory and practice of quasi-alliances in the Middle East. Four cases are chosen to test the hypotheses of quasi-alliance: Anglo-French-Israeli quasi-alliance during the Suez Canal War of 1956; US-Saudi quasi-alliance during the Johnson administration; Soviet-Egypt quasi-alliance during the Sadat administration; and Iran-Syria quasi-alliance since 1979.

The research finds that alliance is a hard balancing based on legally binding treaties, while quasi-alliance is a soft balance based on a politically binding agreement. The task-oriented quasi-alliance features diversity of functions, flexibility of cooperative means, intangibility of targeting, and limitation of sovereignty transfer.

It has been more a decade since people across the Arab world rose up in revolt against their governments, demanding political empowerment, social reform and economic improvement. Pro-democracy protests, as they were called in common parlance, which spread rapidly through the mobilisation of social media calls, ended up overthrowing long-standing authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya.

That gave rise to hope for a more representative future, as well as economic reforms, after decades of mismanagement and stagnation. However, such hopes were quickly dispelled, as the political vacuum created by the elimination of regional dictatorships deepened fractures in many of these societies along ethnic, religious and tribal fault lines.

As Islamists and secularists jockeyed for power, Egypt's brief alliance with democracy was halted by a neo-militarist, counter-revolutionary takeover. Tunisia is a notable exception, where both factions in political society have resolved to settle their differences through dialogue and set the tone for democratic politics, while the country is struggling with economic growth and transformation.

Very little, if anything, has changed in Yemen, Libya and Syria, where long-drawn and bloody civil wars are raging. The monarchies of the Gulf have not been untouched, but remain markedly unchanged.

This unique volume explores the role that Grand Strategy has played in the shaping of the Middle East and why, conceptually, its core principles still have traction in explaining the shifting alliances and dispensation of power across the region.

When so much of the spatial as well as the geo-political boundaries of the Middle East are in flux, it is now time to revisit the very ideas that inform Grand Strategy that once again, are enjoying a wider intellectual renaissance in world affairs.

Through a longitudinal method that embraces international history, regional security, and international relations, leading scholars from Europe, North America and the Middle East offer original and timely insights into how Grand Strategy has shaped not only Great Power involvement, but the designs of regional actors in their perennial search for security.

Subaltern studies' refers to the importance of 'subordinate' groups in the making of history. The latter are usually defined as encompassing the urban and rural underclasses, the majority in any society, although generally the term is said to refer to all non-elites, including women. Most often the discourse concentrates on instances of social protest as points whereat the 'subalterns' make their 'voices' heard in response to, or even independent of, manipulations by the elite.

The book draws on wide-ranging sources to be explored for direct and indirect access to these voices, and include elite Persian diplomatic and political-economic (court-level) materials but also those drawn from such a broad range of 'cultural' spheres as, for example, art and architecture (including cinema, for the modern period), prose, poetry and other media and religious materials (Sunni, Shi`i and Sufi) of all genres in all relevant languages.

The overall project seeks also to explore attitudes toward the subaltern by the authors of these sources. Finally, the project aims also to identify problems in accessing/using the sources and questions/avenues for further research across Persianate history and, in the process, to establish an on-going network to chart pathways for further associated research projects and support for these.

This is the first translation of three accounts by Pierre Loti (1850-1923) of his visits to Constantinople: a description of his brief visit in 1890; of his stay in 1910 in order to visit the tomb of his lover; and the account of his visit in 1913, invited as he then was by the Turkish authorities as their thank-you for all his support of their cause on the international scene after the Balkan Wars.

Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was born Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud into a Protestant family in Rochefort in Saintonge, South-West France (now Charente Maritime). He was an officer of the French Navy and a prolific author of considerable note in 19th-/early-20th-century France, publishing many novels and numerous accounts of his travels around the world. He was a member of the French Academy.

Loti's volume was published in 1921, by which time he was ill and unable to continue. Publication was completed by his son, Samuel Viaud (1889-1969), who appears on the title page.

Loti was a photographer of note and the volume is greatly enhanced by the reproduction of some of his photographs taken in and around Constantinople at the time of his visits.