The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

This chapter examines ‘collective security’ during the first half of the 1930s as it informed government decision-making and shaped public debate. Rather than retrofitting it into a particular International Relations (IR) theory, it draws attention to the contingency and fluidity of ‘collective security’. First, it recounts the evolution of ‘collective security’ as a political idea and as a policy instrument from the First World War to the 1930s. The next section explains how an institutional apparatus emerged under the League of Nations and how sanctions were supposed to be employed. The third section shows how the crises in Asia, Africa, and Europe tested the concept of ‘collective security’ and questioned the logic of IR scholarship. The final section examines how the architects of IR dealt with these challenges, and it discusses whether the failure of ‘collective security’ caused a ‘great debate’ between so-called ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ IR authors.

Chapter 4 moves westward, to the French settlement in the Gulf of Tadjoura, recounting the career of the French merchant Henry de Monfreid, which spanned the early decades of the twentieth century. Henry de Monfreid is most widely recognised for his writing. He told the stories of some of the southern Red Sea’s most memorable and archetypal characters: the old men who manufactured pearls on remote uninhabited islands, where the poor and wretched fished sea snails, where blind Somali captains navigated treacherous reefs and rocky shores, and where pirates preyed on the unwitting. But as we see in this chapter, beneath the surface de Monfreid was a protagonist of the same destabilising geopolitical forces unleashed by colonial conquest we saw at work in earlier chapters. De Monfreid sought to further his own and France’s interests in the region by perpetrating violence at sea and adding parts of the Arabian Peninsula to the French empire. He helped transform international politics and diplomacy in the region into an anarchic scramble for influence and power. His example shows the extent to which the culture of international relations was transformed, with private individuals vying for influence and recognition in the colonial system of sovereignty.

The Abyssinian Campaign was unique for its time in that it was not fought over territory. The Ethiopian king, Theodore, believed that British power could not reach him high in his mountain fortress. He was wrong. Under the organization and leadership of Lieutenant-General Robert Napier, a first-rate engineer who was able to address the operation as a series of technical engineering challenges, the British successfully overcame the many obstacles in their way. Through negotiation with the Egyptians and Ottomans, a stretch of coast line on the Red Sea littoral was obtained for a landing. Storage sheds, logistical offices, pumping stations, roads, and even a small railway were constructed. At the same time, the latest technology, such as desalinization engines that turned sea water into drinking water, were used. There was only one major battle of the campaign, and then an assault on the fortress at Magdala. Once the British got to within fighting distance of the Abyssinians, in good shape and sufficiently supplied, the result was inevitable. What makes the campaign worth examining is the fact they were able to surmount the problems of communication, transportation, climate, and topography.