This collection documents the political and territorial changes within and between states bordering the Red Sea, or linked with it, including islands and European colonies. Interstate and civil conflict, often, though not invariably, the result of such changes, is also well to the fore, with some attention to port development and oil concessions – except in the Gulf of Suez, there was no exploitation of coastal or seabed oil reserves before 1967, and has been none subsequently. The dates chosen inevitably reflect the British provenance of the records, corresponding as they do with Britain's acquisition of Aden in 1839 and departure from it in 1967, a period that saw the development and then the recession of European influence in the Red Sea. The European presence was not finally extinguished until 1977, when the Afars and Issas, the former French Somaliland, gained independence from France.