Divide et impera. So much of Western imperial behaviour reflected a wilful policy of ‘divide and rule’ in order first to establish and then to perpetuate control over subject peoples in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Accordingly the administration of foreign rule often amounted to artfully manipulating, emphasizing and exploiting local divergencies, whether tribal, sectional, ethnic or economic, and playing off one group or state against another. As a shorthand summary and epigram for imperialism divide et impera may be satisfactory. But it suggests merely one stage of the process: for in asserting its mastery over others the imperial power often opened itself to internal cleavages on the more technical question of exactly how to rule, or, during the decline of empire, whether or not to yield control. This was certainly the British experience. And one of the more dramatic manifestations of ‘divide and rule’ in reverse (‘rule and be divided’) came in 1937 in the instance of partition for Palestine.