Britain's relationship with southern Yemen began in 1799, when a naval force occupied the island of Perim to block French communication with India. By 1839, after a looted Indian ship provided a convenient pretext, the East India Company had seized Aden outright and was paying the Sultan of Lahej 8,700 Maria Theresa thalers annually for the privilege. Over the following century, the British constructed a web of informal protectorate treaties with surrounding sultanates -- cheap insurance against tribal unrest, requiring only about $5,435 a year in subsidies to secure the loyalty of twenty-five rulers. Aden became a Crown Colony in 1937. But by the 1960s, Nasser's Arab nationalism had reached every radio in the territory. The National Liberation Front and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen launched an insurgency in October 1963. Four years of guerrilla warfare -- and a mutiny that cost the British control of Aden's Crater district in what was called "the last battle of the British Empire" -- ended on November 30, 1967, when the last British troops departed eleven hours before midnight and the birth of a nation that had never existed before.

The new state inherited a collapsed economy. Civilian workers and businessmen fled. British aid evaporated. The closure of the Suez Canal in 1967 reduced ship traffic through Aden by 75 percent. President Qahtan al-Shaabi, a moderate nationalist, tried to maintain existing institutions. The Marxist-Leninist faction within the National Liberation Front had other ideas. On June 22, 1969, Abdel Fattah Ismail and Salim Rubai Ali overthrew Qahtan in what they called the "Corrective Move" -- a bloodless coup that put committed ideologues in control. They reorganized the country as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, merged all political parties into the Yemeni Socialist Party, nationalized banks and insurance companies, and implemented central planning. The Soviet Union, Cuba, East Germany, and China became the new allies. East German Stasi officers -- several hundred of them -- arrived to train the secret police and establish arms trafficking routes to Palestinian groups. By 1973, South Yemen's GDP had risen 25 percent. The revolution was eating, even if it was eating borrowed food.

Perhaps the most striking of South Yemen's reforms concerned women. In a region where tribal custom and religious conservatism governed nearly every aspect of female life, the PDRY's Family Law of 1974 was radical: polygamy was banned, child marriage was outlawed, arranged marriages were prohibited, and women were granted equal rights in divorce. The state-backed General Union of Yemeni Women enforced these protections. Education was secularized, and women enrolled in universities in numbers uncommon elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. Sharia was replaced by a state legal code across personal and civil matters. The changes were genuine and far-reaching, though they existed within an authoritarian system that tolerated no political dissent. When reunification came in 1990, and again after the 1994 civil war consolidated northern conservative power, many of these rights eroded. Women in Aden today still reference the PDRY era -- some with nostalgia, some with complicated ambivalence about freedoms that came packaged with one-party rule.

South Yemen's foreign policy was as combative as its domestic agenda was transformative. The PDRY supplied arms and training to the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf in Oman, nearly dragging the two countries into open war in 1975. It supported the Marxist Derg in Ethiopia during the Ogaden War, alienating most of the Arab world. Relations with Saudi Arabia were hostile until 1976; diplomatic ties with the United States, severed in 1969, were not restored until just before reunification. A brief but brutal civil war in 1986 further destabilized the regime. By the late 1980s, with Soviet support evaporating under Gorbachev's perestroika, the ideological foundation was crumbling. In May 1988, North and South Yemen agreed to demilitarize their border and allow free passage. Two years later, they merged. The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen -- Marxist, feminist, authoritarian, Soviet-aligned, improbable -- was folded into the Republic of Yemen. Its laws were overwritten, its institutions dissolved. But in Aden's cafes and women's associations, the memory of what it attempted, and what it cost, persists.