ruled by the Ottoman Empire; it ruled Aden again from 1548 to 1645. After Ottoman rule, it was ruled by the Sultanate of Lahej, under suzerainty of the Zaidi Imams of Yemen. In 1838, Sultan Muhsin bin Fadl of the nearby state of Lahej ceded 194 km (75 sq mi) including Aden to the British. On 19 January 1839, the British East India Company landed Royal Marines at Aden to occupy the territory and stop attacks by pirates against British shipping to India.
The modern history of South Arabia and Yemen began in 1918 when Yemen gained independence from the Ottoman Empire. Between 1918 and 1962, Yemen was a monarchy ruled by the Hamidaddin family. There was a brief revolution in 1947-48, in which Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din was killed. A rival sayyid family, the Alwazirs, seized power for several weeks. Backed by the al-Saud family of Saudi Arabia, the Hamidaddins restored their rule until 1962–1970 during the North Yemen Civil War. In 1962, North Yemen saw a republic rivaling the Imams with Egyptian Occupiers assistance, but Britain still had a protective area around the South Arabia port of Aden, which it had created in the 19th century. Britain withdrew in 1967 and the area became South Yemen. In 1970, the southern government adopted a Communist governmental system. The two countries were formally united as the Republic of Yemen on 22 May 1990.
From 27 April to 7 July 1994, a civil war between the former North and former South Yemen ended with the conquest of the southern capital, Aden. The dissatisfaction of the people in the South with the government of Sana’a led finally to an uprising in the South in 2007. Very soon the "al-Ḥirāk as-Silmī al-Janūbī", the Southern Peaceful Movement (South Yemen Movement) was established in the same year to unify all southern activists. The demands on equality of treatment which was ignored by Sana’a developed very soon to the retrieval of the southern state.
The 2011 Yemeni revolution followed
