Hello, you're very welcome to Longreads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn and the features editor here at Jacobin and I'll be presenting the show.

Over the past few years Yemen has featured on the international news agenda as one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

The hopes of the protest movement in 2011 gave way to civil war and a brutal Saudi-led invasion.

But the people of Yemen aren't just the victims of a political tragedy.

In its modern history, Yemen has inflicted a humiliating defeat upon the British Empire.

One part of the country even became the only Arab state to adopt Soviet-style Marxist-Leninism as its ideology.

The song we're listening to dates back to that period of Yemeni politics.

Our guest today is Helen Lackner.

Helen is one of the leading experts on modern Yemen.

She spent several years living in the country and has written numerous books and articles about it, including her recent work Yemen in Crisis.

For the last 30 years, Yemen has been formally united into a single state, although the conflict of the last decade has broken up that political unity in practice.

But previously, Yemen had been divided into two states.

What were the origins of that divide?

The first point to realize is that Yemen within its current official borders has never existed in the past.

In way back, you had a number of different states that covered different parts of the country.

More recently, in the 19th century, you had what was largely in the late borders of the Yemen-Arab Republic, Ottoman rule.

And then after the bridge arrived in 1839, they gradually took control to launch extent and not necessarily, particularly closely, of what later became the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.

So Yemen in its current borders has never actually existed previously.

And I think that's possibly worth remembering when trying to analyze the current situation.

I mean, the Ottoman period in what led to became the Yemen-Arab Republic was ruled primarily by a Zadi imam.

And that person was a Sayid, which is a member of a social group that considers itself descendants from the Prophet.

...