Colonising Egypt

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In 1914 as a result of the declaration of war with the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was nominally a part, Britain declared a Protectorate over Egypt and deposed the Khedive, replacing him with a family member who was made Sultan of Egypt by the British. A group known as the Wafd Delegation attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to demand Egypt's independence.

Iacolucci, Jared Paul. "Finance and Empire:'Gentlemanly Capitalism'in Britain's Occupation of Egypt." (MA Thesis, CUNY, 2014). online Claire Cookson-Hills, “ The Aswan Dam and Egyptian Water Control Policy, 1882-1902,” Radical History Review, 116 (2013), 59-85.

Chapter 3 of the book, half each of chapters 2 and 4, and certain other sections are based on my doctoral dissertation, supervised by Manfred Halpern and Charles Issawi of Princeton University. To both of them I am grateful for their interest in my work and their support. Part of the research for the dissertation and book was done in Egypt, in the reference room and the periodicals room at Dar al-Kutub, the Egyptian national library, where the staff were always friendly and efficient. My trips to Egypt were funded first by a grant from the Program in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton and on two subsequent occasions by fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt. I want to thank the many individuals at both institutions who gave me help, including James and Susan Allen, Carl Brown, May Trad, and Paul Walker.

Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford University Press, 2005). The exhibition and the congress were not the only examples of this European mischief. Throughout the nineteenth century non-European visitors found themselves being placed on exhibit or made the careful object of European curiosity. The degradation they often suffered, whether intended or not, seemed nevertheless inevitable, as necessary to these spectacles as the scaffolded façades or the curious crowds of onlookers. The façades, the onlookers and the degradation seemed all to belong to the organising of an exhibit, to a particularly European concern with rendering things up to be viewed. I will be taking up this question of the exhibition, examining it through non-European eyes as a practice that exemplifies the nature of the modern European state. But I want to reach it via a detour, which explores a little further the mischief to which the Oxford scholar referred. This mischief is a clue, for it runs right through the Middle Eastern experience of nineteenth-century Europe.

Book contents

Lccn 87018761 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.12 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18603 Openlibrary_edition Landes, David. Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (Harvard UP, 1980). In 1906 the Denshawai Incident provoked questioning of British rule in Egypt. This was exploited in turn by the German Empire which began re-organising, funding, and expanding anti-British revolutionary nationalist movements. For the first quarter of the 20th century, Britain's main goal in Egypt was penetrating these groups, neutralising them, and attempting to form more pro-British nationalist groups with which to hand further control. However, after the end of World War I, British colonial authorities attempted to legitimise their less radical opponents with entrance into the League of Nations including the peace treaty of Versailles. Thus, the Wafd Party was invited and promised full independence in the years ahead. British occupation ended nominally with the UK's 1922 declaration of Egyptian independence, but British military domination of Egypt lasted until 1936. [1]

King Fuad died in 1936 and Farouk inherited the throne at the age of sixteen. Alarmed by Italy's recent invasion of Ethiopia, he signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, requiring Britain to withdraw all troops from Egypt, except at the Suez Canal (agreed to be evacuated by 1949). Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 8: “Egyptian Nationalism.” Most of the nations in the Arab world were only founded in the mid-20 th century, after emerging from decades of primarily British and French control. Before colonization, much of these lands were under Ottoman rule—with the exception of most of the Gulf region. However, when the trajectories of Arab countries are discussed today, this not-so-distant history is often obscured, and analyses of the behaviors of these countries and their leaders are primarily limited to immediate economic or political considerations or to debates about cultural and religious factors. To understand how these countries have developed in just the five or six decades since they achieved independence and self-rule, the region’s recent history of colonialism and the continuation of neocolonial practices must be more comprehensively explored and more widely disseminated. What Are Colonialism and Neocolonialism? Most of this book was written in the spring and summer of 1986 at St. Antony's College, Oxford. Derek Hopwood, Albert Hourani, and Roger Owen facilitated my stay there, and together with the staff and other members of the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's, made it extremely enjoyable. I was supported financially during those months by a Presidential Fellowship from New York University, for which I owe particular thanks to Farhad Kazemi.Of the span of Egypt’s history since the arrival of Islam, no comparably brief period has received more scholarly and popular attention than the years 1798–1801, when the country was conquered and occupied by a French military expedition commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte. Publication – for political, propagandistic, and scholarly motives – of materials pertaining to the expedition began early. Before the end of 1798 London publishers were selling collections of French despatches and correspondence intercepted in transit from Egypt to France. At least one account of the military aspects of the expedition was in print before the French evacuated Egypt in 1801. The first major intellectual product of the civilian intellectuals who accompanied the French army – Denon’s Voyage dans la basse et haute Egypte – was in print in 1802, with English editions appearing the following year in London and New York. The first edition of the vast Description de l’Egypte began to appear in 1810. Further information: History of Egypt under the Muhammad Ali dynasty, Khedivate of Egypt, and Foreign policy of William Ewart Gladstone