In his 1976 book, "In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914–1939", Kedourie disputed what he considered the myth of "the Great Betrayal" that British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon had promised in 1914–15 the Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali an empire in the Middle East and that the British betrayed the Sharif by signing the Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French in 1916, followed by the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Kedourie argued that British decision-makers in the interwar period, motivated in equal measure by a lack of cultural confidence and a desire to renege on their written promises to the French and Zionists had accepted the Arab nationalist claim that the Sharif Hussein had been promised an empire in the Near East, instead arguing that McMahon had made no such promise and the British claim of "defaulting" on their commitments to the Hashemites were entirely a myth created by British themselves.