In just five years Jordan had been transformed by war, dynastic ambition and succession politics. It had left behind forever its quiet childhood years as a small, colonial possession. It had entered what would prove to be an increasingly turbulent adolescence. The kingdom would be buffeted by the turmoil of regional politics, with the rise of radicalism in the 1950s and the overbearing attentions of Nasser’s Egypt. Simultaneously, it would be convulsed by a range of domestic factors, with the dispossession and destitution of the refugees combining with the new poverty of urban and rural Transjordanians, providing a combustible cocktail against which the machinations of elite politics would be played out. The instability would be compounded by leadership uncertainties that would not be resolved until 1957.