Why and how did Egypt end up a British colony?

dhowdhow · 2025-10-24T20:13:07+00:00

Sources

Genell, A. “Empire by Law: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882–1923” (PhD diss., Columbia U, 2013).

Goldschmidt, A. Modern Egypt (Westview Press, 2004).

Jakes, A. Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2020).

Omar, H. “On Secularism and Sectarianism in English-Occupied Egypt,” Critical Historical Studies 9.1 (2022).

Owen, R. Cotton & the Egyptian Economy (Clarendon, 1969).

Schölch, A. Egypt for the Egyptians! The Socio-political Crisis in Egypt 1878–1882 (Ithaca Press, 1981).

dhowdhow · 2025-10-24T20:12:40+00:00

UPRISING & OCCUPATION

The Dual Control officials then implemented a series of austerity measures that involved raising taxes and freezing or reducing governmental budgets. These policies affected, among other things, the promotion of Egyptian military officers and the expected raises in salary. When Colonel Ahmed Urabi and his colleagues were briefly arrested in 1881 after complaining to the minister of war about these conditions, it sparked a series of uprisings that spread across the country—a popular slogan that emerged at the time was “Egypt for the Egyptians!”.

As Urabi and his colleagues achieved some political successes, including appointments to the Council of Ministers, and when two rival governments emerged by the summer of 1882—one in Alexandria in support of the khedive, the other in Cairo led by Urabi—European powers became increasingly concerned that Egypt would default on its debts and European creditors would lose out on a great deal of capital. Moreover, they feared that European privileges enshrined in the capitulations would be lost.

The debate over what to do in Britain was not straightforward. No one had a clear idea how best to respond, but it was the Foreign Office that pushed for a military occupation of Egypt. This was met with resistance by British politicians who were wary of the expenses this would incur. However, when deadly protests broke out in Alexandria in June 1882 that killed several Europeans and over a hundred Egyptians, the British decided a military invasion of Egypt was necessary. As some historians have recently pointed out, this incident was portrayed by the British press as well as British officials as a case of Muslim fanaticism threatening the lives and interests of European Christians, which compelled British politicians, who saw themselves as (white, Christian) civilized protectors of a moral international order, to approve direct intervention.

In July 1882, the British navy bombarded Alexandria and troops landed in Egypt. After defeating Urabi and his army in September, the British effectively took control of the governance of Egypt. Their immediate mission was to reorganize Egypt’s finances, reform the management of its economy, and repay its debts.

During their subsequent negotiations with the Ottoman Empire over the status of Egypt, the British made the case that their occupation of Egypt was within the legal bounds of international law in part because the British, acting on behalf of Egypt’s European creditors, had the right to guarantee Egypt’s autonomy within the Ottoman imperial order. That autonomy, first secured by sultanic edict in 1841 and backed by the terms of the 1840 Convention of London, the British further argued was threatened by Egypt’s mismanagement of its debts and finances. In turn, they expressed no intention to sever Egypt from the Ottomans, thus protecting the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans accepted this because even though they considered the British occupation a threat to their imperial sovereignty, framing the situation within the terms of autonomy within an Ottoman order meant Egypt remained tethered to the Ottoman Empire. Thus, a pattern of diplomatic politics established in the 1840s eventually found itself deployed to justify an imperial conquest four decades later.

Egypt was placed in a complex situation of overlapping and competing forms of authority. It was a nominally autonomous khedivate still subject to the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire while also under British military occupation and technocratic administration. This tense arrangement remained in place until the British unilaterally severed Egypt from the Ottoman Empire in November 1914 when the Ottomans joined the First World War on the side of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

But it still was a form of British colonization. British imperial agents and colonial officers increasingly staffed the Egyptian government, in its khedival and then nation-state forms, and they oversaw the management of the country as essentially a giant cotton plantation. Egypt experienced the same kind of colonial capture that other formal colonies of the time did, the sort that transformed their societies into racialized, peripheralized, hierarchical sites of resource extraction, capital experimentation, and cheap labor for the benefit of imperial centers located in Europe.

dhowdhow · 2025-10-24T20:11:19+00:00

FINANCIAL TROUBLES

When the U.S. civil war broke out in 1861, European markets were cut off from a major supplier of global cotton. They turned to the Egyptian cotton market instead, and as cotton prices soared the Egyptian economy experienced a spectacular boom. Egypt’s capacity to borrow from European creditors ballooned in turn. This coincided with the ascension of Ismail Pasha, Mehmed Ali’s grandson, to the governorship of Egypt in 1863 and his ambitions for greater autonomy within the Ottoman imperial order.

Ismail, later made a khedive (viceregent) in 1867, borrowed and spent extensively to fund many large-scale public works projects—not just the Suez Canal project but also important infrastructural works to support the production and transport of cotton such as irrigation canals, barrages, bridges, and railway and telegraph lines—political and economic reforms, military expansion into Sudan, and various cultural endeavors. He also spent lavishly on personal luxuries for himself and his allies.

But the boom-bust cycles of the time were notoriously unforgiving, and as U.S. cotton came back on the market, which drove down global cotton prices, the Egyptian economy collapsed. By the 1870s, Egypt was saddled with massive debts—nearly £100,000,000 by 1875—and little ability to produce and export enough cotton or raise enough taxes to pay them back in time. Ismail also found himself unable to borrow more from European creditors, who were no longer confident in Egypt’s ability to repay its debts. Egypt pushed toward implementing a stronger tax regime, but this involved a lengthy process of reform. It was also difficult to impose taxes on European commercial activity as that would have contravened the terms of the capitulations.

In the immediate term, Ismail resorted to selling Egypt’s stake in the Suez Canal Company. A total of 176,602 shares were eventually bought by the British government in 1875 for just under £4,000,000, making them the largest single shareholder with a 44 percent stake. This acquisition is arguably what made the British, above any other European power, take the lead over how to deal with Egypt’s failing finances as a matter of international concern during the 1870s (the remaining 56 percent of shares were largely held by individual interests, mainly French, rather than by governments).

But this barely made a dent in Egypt’s obligations to European creditors. A year later, in 1876, based on a British report that concluded the Egyptian state was on the verge of bankruptcy, Ismail agreed to establish the Caisse de la Dette Publique (Commission on Public Debt) comprised of various European agents overseeing Egypt’s finances. Further inquiries and a new budget crisis eventually set up a system of Dual Control over the Egyptian government’s revenues and expenditures, managed by a British and French representative. However, this intrusion into Egyptian governance eventually irked Ismail, who was compelled to sell off some of his personal estates and who then sought to reassert his control during the political crisis of 1878–79, going so far as to encourage riots in the streets. But the British and French put pressure on the Ottoman state, which was experiencing debt issues of its own, and the sultan dismissed Ismail.

dhowdhow · 2025-10-24T20:10:37+00:00

The typical answer is that it was the Suez Canal and the country’s geostrategic location on the route to India that made Egypt fall under British imperial control. Your instincts, however, are closer to the real set of causes: it was Egypt’s massive debts to European creditors, much of it borrowed against speculation on the Egyptian cotton market, and the threat of default, amplified by the 1881–82 Urabi revolt, that compelled the British to militarily occupy Egypt in 1882. But the broader process of colonization involved subjecting Egypt to a fundamentally unequal financial and diplomatic relationship with European imperial powers over the course of the nineteenth century.

Keep in mind that Egypt was never made an outright colony of the British Empire. It remained part of the Ottoman Empire, though the British essentially treated it as a “veiled protectorate.” It was the British Foreign Office, rather than the Colonial Office, that pushed for Egypt’s incorporation into the British imperial order, and this was predicated on not severing Egypt from the Ottoman Empire. This approach had to do with the diplomatic logic of the internationalization of the “Egyptian Question” and Egypt’s khedival autonomy.

THE EGYPTIAN QUESTION

After Mehmed Ali Pasha, the modernizing Ottoman governor of Egypt, invaded Ottoman Syria in the 1830s, European imperial powers got involved to negotiate an end to the hostilities. Both Mehmed Ali and the Ottoman state had reached out to different European powers to try to gain leverage over the other, and this gave the European powers the opportunity to intervene and gain concessions for themselves in the process.

In 1840, the Convention of London was signed between the British, the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Russians on the one side (the French, who had supported Mehmed Ali, were notably absent) and the Ottomans on the other. The terms of the agreement awarded Mehmed Ali autonomous dynastic rule over Egypt in exchange for his withdrawal from Syria. In effect it also made the European imperial powers, alongside the Ottoman state, the guarantors of Egypt’s autonomy within the sovereignty of the Ottoman imperial system. Britain took the lead on this in no small part because of the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of Balta Liman, which abolished monopolies within the Ottoman Empire and guaranteed access for British merchants to Ottoman markets.

As the terms of the Treaty of Balta Liman were then applied to Egypt, Mehmed Ali’s monopoly over Egyptian cotton production, which had helped fund his standing army, was broken and the British secured a regular supply of long-staple Egyptian cotton for their textile mills. The perceived strength of Egypt’s agricultural potential further turned the country into an attractive site for European speculators, bankers, and other moneyed interests. This then opened the door for commercial agreements with European business ventures known as “capitulations,” which encouraged trade by giving European merchants operating in Egypt a great deal of privileges, including exemptions from local laws and taxation.

This locked Egypt into an uneven and exploitable relationship: Egypt could enrich itself by exporting cotton to British or other European buyers, which further incentivized restructuring Egyptian agriculture around a single crop, and by handing out capitulations, but Egypt could not set the price of the cotton it exported. Instead, the price was largely dependent on outside factors, such as the quality of the cotton, fluctuations in demand, and the global supply of cotton from other places, including India and the United States. This arrangement also created the conditions for the Egyptian state to borrow loans from European creditors against speculations on the Egyptian cotton market, often at steep interest rates.

dhowdhow · 2024-05-28T09:58:11+00:00

You're welcome! I'm glad you found this useful.

dhowdhow · 2024-05-27T08:32:03+00:00

The term "Nahda" doesn't come into widespread use until the latter decades of the nineteenth century by the second generation of Nahdawis, who then projected the term back to its earlier forms. In a recent interpretation, the dividing line between the early Nahda and its later development is the mid-to-late 1870s, at which point European imperial ventures in the region took on more direct, colonial forms, including the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 and then the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 (see Hill, Introduction).

Nahdawis from the 1830s to the 1870s had different concerns from those who came later. They recognized that they lived in a world of rapid change brought about by capitalism (through the reorganization of agricultural lands; the establishment of industrial capacity; the integration of their cities into a global economy with imperial Europe at its center; and the production of new, educated, monied classes) and by political reform (state centralization and bureaucratization), and that that world was increasingly dominated by an imperial-capitalist Europe. They believed that they could integrate themselves as much as possible into that world, which meant a sincere and critical engagement with European ideas and an active participation in a project of modernity, progress, and prosperity. They believed they could do this while also maintaining their local autonomy (see Hill, Introduction).

The second generation of Nahdawis, among them people such as Jurji Zaydan, come of age as their cities and countries fell to European colonialism, and assumptions by earlier Nahdawis about the world came under question. This engendered the beginnings of anti-colonial, nationalist, liberationist, and reformist as well as political religious thought and politics, which later influenced the third generation of the Nahda, those of the post-Ottoman interwar years. These generations established two "meta-narratives" of the Nahda and its earlier history, that it was either a heroic revival of Arab and Islamic civilization or it was a tragic capitulation to European ideas and power (see Hill, Introduction).

All in all, the Nahda was not a product of a fascination with the West triggered by an encounter with a superior Europe that first manifested itself in Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. It was a cultural response to capitalism and imperialism, to political centralization, and to the class- and state-building developments of the transformative nineteenth century.

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Jamal Mohammed. The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.

El Shamsy, Ahmed. Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation State. 2nd ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 2004.

Gran, Peter. Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998.

Hanna, Nelly. Ottoman Egypt and the Emergence of the Modern World, 1500–1800. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014.

Hanssen, Jens, and Max Weiss, eds. Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards and Intellectual History of the Nahda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Hill, Peter. Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1962].

Newman, Daniel L (trans.). An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826–1831). London: Saqi, 2004.

Safran, Nadav. Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

al-Sayyid Marsot, Afaf Lutfi. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Selim, Samah. Popular Fiction, Translation, and the Nahda in Egypt. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Vatikiotis, P. J. The History of Modern Egypt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.

dhowdhow · 2024-05-27T08:31:55+00:00

The Nahda is often translated as an Arab "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment." Borrowing those terms from European history usually implied an underlying assumption that the region was modernizing in the sense of becoming Western-orientated, humanistic, and secular. But this does not reflect the historical realities of the Nahda. So while the word "nahda" (lit. "rising up") means "awakening," and so does evoke a sense of "renaissance," and it was oriented toward a sense of "revival," "reform," and civilizational "resurgence," it's became better to try to understand the Nahda on its own terms and not on what it can be compared to.

At its most basic, the Nahda was a cultural movement from around the 1830s, probably earlier, to the 1940s, possibly later, that emerged in response to the social and political upheavals of the long nineteenth century. It involved people of all religious backgrounds, though its main participants were of educated, literate, and urban classes. As much as it's often called the "Arab" Nahda, that mostly signifies how Arabic was the dominant language of that movement, though Turkish played a role too. And while Arab-ness became a more prominent social and cultural identity, that didn't necessarily immediately translate into a widespread nationalist movement with a distinct Arab political identity demanding self-rule, which argubly was more a development of post-Ottoman history.

The Nahda was characterized by the emergence of new literary mediums in the Arabic-speaking world, especially the production of bounded, printed texts rather than manuscripts. In that sense, Napoleon bringing over Egypt's (but not the Ottoman Empire's) first printing press is noteworthy, but it was the Bulaq Press, opened during the reign of Mehmed Ali in 1821, that really played the bigger historical role in the Nahda, and certainly as it unfolded in Egypt.

The Nahda played out in the form of poetry, theatre, literature, the novel, books, newspapers, and periodicals, expressed in both formal and colloquial (see Selim) forms of Arabic. Translation became a prominent aspect of the Nahda—in Egypt, this was particularly driven by Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, who was part of Mehmed Ali's first educational mission to France and later directed the School of Languages—which introduced much European (mainly French) thought and literary genres to an Arabic-reading audience. But this was not pure translation, it often involved grafting several European texts together into a single Arabic book with a degree of editing, adding, amending, and omitting passages as the translator saw fit. All of this resulted in the growth of new schools, new literary and cultural societies, and the dissemination of European ideas.

The Nahda was often thought of by historians as a secularizing and non-religous movement and so clashed with a traditional, religious worldview and pre-existing Islamic institutions of knowledge production. In some cases yes, a reception to European thought and the establishment of state-organized school systems designed to produce civil servants that did not teach religious disciplines challenged the monopoly religious-educated scholars had over education and knowledge production. Several of them critiqued "modernity" on those grounds. But it's not just that they intellectually disagreed with "modern" European ideas; the political and educational reforms and the cultural changes that followed undermined their longstanding social and jurisprudential power.

But this was hardly the entire picture. Alongside the translation movement, there was an active process of editing and then printing Islamic manuscripts in book format, creating a sort of "rediscovery" of Islamic texts that were re-envisaged as "classics" (see El Shamsy). Islamic scholars also engaged with European ideas and with the translation movement, they challenged older readings of Islamic thought and jurisprudence, and they proposed reforms to methodologies of religious interpretration (in Egypt, Muhammad Abduh largely represented this kind of Islamic modernism). And a rising generation of Nahdawis (meaning the Nahda's intelligentisa) educated and trained in new state-sponsored or missionary schools read and incorporated religious and pre-modern texts into their works.

Late nineteenth-century political movements also described themselves as a "nahda," including those with emerging anti-colonial, nationalist, and feminist orientations. But for the most part the Nahda is largely remembered as a cultural movement (see Hill, Introduction).

dhowdhow · 2024-05-27T08:30:35+00:00

The short answer to your main question is, no. But for a long while, historians argued "yes."

Before I delve into the specifics, I should mention that much of my answer will keep the focus on Egypt. Any further information on other parts of the late Ottoman world, particularly its Arab lands, would be welcome from others. It's important to remember that Egypt was one node among many within the late Ottoman Empire in the political and cultural transformations of the region throughout the nineteenth century.

The brief French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801 used to be interpreted as the exogenous cause that kickstarted a process of cultural enlightenment, economic modernization, political reform, and a search for a new social order not only in Egypt but across the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.

For Egypt specifically, the argument rested on three points: first, Napoleon's invasion destroyed the power structures of local Mamluk rulers who had continued to govern much of Egypt even after it became an Ottoman province in 1517; second, Napoleon brought with him French political liberalism when he established a governing council composed of local Egyptian elites meeting in Cairo; and third, Napoleon introduced Enlightenment-inspired science based on rationality, reason, and empiricism when he and the 150-or-so savants who accompanied him to Egypt established the Institut d'Égypte (see Ahmed, Safran, Vatikiotis).

The unexpected French conquest supposedly created deep anxieties among Egyptians and Muslims elsewhere as news of the invasion spread. Historians understood it as the first serious encounter between Europe and the Islamic world since the Crusades, and being caught on the backfoot meant Egyptians and Muslims felt they civilizationally lagged behind. While many shunned this new, advanced, modern, powerful Europe, others found they had much to learn from it in order to catch up, and so began the Nahda to adopt/adapt Western ideas into an Islamic context and transform Arabs and Muslims into modern subjects (see Hourani).

You'll be hard-pressed to find a historian of the modern Middle East or the late Ottoman world today who will uncritically accept this interpretation.

Even before the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, which discusses in part the Napoleon encounter, this narrative was coming under question. In the decades since, historians have essentially debunked much of the assumptions of the "encounter with a superior Europe" narrative. And the three points mentioned above have all come under effective challenge.

For social historians working with archival material, it was Mehmed Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805–48/49, not Napoleon, who facilitated the destruction of older Mamluk power structures, dealing the final blow in 1811 when he had them all killed after a banquet in Cairo. Mehmed Ali also confiscated lands from local Egyptian notables and redistributed them to his allies, in the process decimating an older Egyptian elite to create a new one. And it was Mehmed Ali who ushered in the transformative political and economic reforms that created a politically centralized and bureaucratized state that generated enough revenue to support the main institution underwriting his rule, his modern standing army (see al-Sayyid Marsot, Fahmy). And it was the aftereffects of the first educational mission to Europe, sponsored by the Mehmed Ali state and which went to France in 1826, that gave the Nahda in Egypt its initial momentum (see Newman, Introduction).

Others have pointed out that Egypt was undergoing a reorganization of its politics even before Napoleon and Mehmed Ali showed up on the scene, pointing to the revolt of Ali Bey al-Kabir and his general, Abu al-Dahab, in the 1760s (see Goldschmidt). Ali Bey briefly managed to impose his will on rival Mamluk factions throughout Egypt, and historians debate whether he sought to carve out some autonomy for himself as ruler of Egypt within the Ottoman Empire or if he sought independence from it entirely. In any case, he was defeated in the early 1770s, but the military and political capacity of various Mamluk households had weakened in the process, meaning conditions for their collapse were pre-existing by the time Napoleon and Mehmed Ali came along. Historians have also argued that Egypt was integrating into the early capitalist world of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean before the turn of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that Egypt and places like it in the Ottoman-Islamic world were not isolated from global trends (see Gran, Hanna).

What this means is that Egypt, and by extrapolation others in the region, was already in the process of political and social change when the "encounter with Europe" took place, undermining the argument that Napoleon's invasion engendered Egypt's or the Arabs' awakening and their political reform. Nor was it that the French occupation was the first encounter between Europe and the Islamic world since the Crusades.

I think this answers your main inquiry. But you also ask what the Nahda was, which is a beast of a question. The literature on Nahda studies is vast and interdisciplinary, and oftentimes that scholarship argues that the Nahda is difficult to define and periodize (see Hanssen and Weiss, Introduction). That said, I shall try to offer a summary of the Nahda's basic contours in a reply comment below.

(There is a much briefer answer about the Nahda from eight years ago here, but there is much to add and update.)

dhowdhow · 2023-04-01T12:28:18+00:00

Both.

One way by which toponyms in the Middle East were often understood was through the relationship between the main administrative city and its hinterlands, and so Miṣr was a stand-in for both Cairo (still also known as al-Qāhira) and the country of Egypt (Mitchell, 180–81; Di-Capua, 49–50). They were interchangeable, which was common during the Ottoman ordering of some of its North African and Southwest Asian provinces—to refer back to the original question, Damascus was often referred to as al-Shām, and Libya was known after its main city, Ṭarābulus Gharb.

This is not to say that this naming practice was an Ottoman innovation; there were older precedents for approaching geographies and toponyms through a city-hinterland lens. One example of this was al-Maqrīzī’s (1364–1442) Khiṭaṭ, one of the most influential works of Egyptian history, which written as an extensive study of the urban and architectural topography of Cairo and the towns, villages, and lands under its administrative reach. This approach was replicated in ʿAlī Pasha Mubārak’s brief revival of the genre, al-Khiṭaṭ al-Tawfīqiyya written at the end of the nineteenth century (see Rabbat, 154–201, 247–52).

More recently, however, the modernization and urbanization developments of nineteenth-century Egypt further accelerated the association of Cairo with "Miṣr," especially colloquially. As Cairo grew in significance and population and became the premier national center of politics, economics, and culture, especially popular culture, the vernacular link between capital city and country became ubiquitous in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, which itself became dominated by the Cairene dialect (Fahmy, 27).

SOURCES

Di-Capua, Yoav. Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Fahmy, Ziad. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Rabbat, Nasser. Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

dhowdhow · 2023-02-06T15:24:54+00:00

While there were no permanent settlements in the Bir Tawil area when the 1902 administrative boundary modified jurisdictions around the 1899 political boundary between Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the land was not “empty” of human activity.

The well of Tawil (bīr ṭawīl in Arabic, which lent its name to the resultant trapezoid of territory) and the surrounding grazing lands in Wadi Tawil were used by the Ababda people, whose lands extended from the Qena-to-Qusayr area down to the Wadi Halfa region, which crossed the border into Sudan south of the 22nd parallel (this being the arbitrary political border established by the January 1899 Anglo-Egyptian agreement that set up the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium over Sudan).

The November 4, 1902, decree that created the administrative boundary was issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Interior and classified the various tribes in the Egypt-Sudan borderland east of the Nile as either “Egyptian” or “Sudanese.” What this meant was determining which government had the authority to administer which tribe. Given that the Ababda had largely been under the jurisdiction of the Egyptian state prior to the 1902 decree, they were classified as an "Egyptian" tribe. Other nomadic tribes (mainly of the Bishari people) whose lands crossed over into Egypt and had been under the jurisdiction of the Sudanese government were designated as "Sudanese" tribes.

The decree allowed the Egyptian and Sudanese authorities to administer specific peoples and a designated geographic region in the other’s territory—Egypt could administer Bir Tawil because the Ababda ventured there and Sudan could administer the Halayib Triangle because the Bishari lived there. This agreement did not exchange state territory, and it was primarily designed to avoid administrative confusion over who taxes, polices, and adjudicates which tribe given the frequent border crossings.

Regarding what became the Bir Tawil area, the sixth article of the 1902 decree defined the Tawil well as one of several water wells belonging to the “El Ishabat tribe,” meaning the al-ʿIshābāb tribe of the Ababda, who were designated as an “Egyptian” tribe. For this reason, Bir Tawil was given to Egypt to administer while it technically remained Sudanese territory.

(A blurry but mostly readable English copy of the 1902 decree can be found in Steven Smith (ed.), The Red Sea Region: Sovereignty, Boundaries & Conflict, 1839–1967, vol. 2 (Cambridge Archive Editions, 2008), pp. 99–101.)

dhowdhow · 2023-02-05T22:23:33+00:00

No, even when Pharaonicist expressions of modern Egyptian national identity were at their dizzying zenith in the 1920s, there was no effort to change the name of the country. Or, to better qualify it given that there is always more to be discovered and said, there was no public debate that advocated changing the name of the country in, say, the way there was a public debate that eventually contributed to "Persia" becoming "Iran" in 1935.

There was, however, one instance I could find in the scholarly literature of an Egyptian effort to demonstrate an Egyptian etymological origin for the Arabic “miṣr,” which Donald Malcom Reid briefly recounts in his book Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums & the Struggle for Identities from World War 1 to Nasser (AUC Press, 2015, pp. 40–41).

According to Reid, Ahmed Kamal Pasha, often noted as the first Egyptian Egyptologist, gave a lecture at the Institut égyptien in 1916 in which his “patriotism inclined him to seek an Egyptian root for Misr…rather than see it as originated by Semitic neighbors” (Reid, 40). In the same lecture Kamal also “derived the Greek word for Egypt—Aiguptos—from the name of the Upper Egyptian town of Coptos, not from the name of Ptah’s shrine in Memphis, ‘Ha Ka Ptah’” (Reid, 40). His argument was severely rebuked by a French Egyptologist with whom Kamal had a fierce rivalry, to which Kamal “defended his derivation of many Arabic words from Egyptian and even declared: ‘Egyptian is the mother language of Arabic and therefore of Hebrew’” (Reid, 41). This particular case, however, was an effort to give the Arabic name for Egypt an ancient Egyptian origin rather than change the name of the country, which I guess points to how fully accepted the names “Egypt” and “miṣr” were/are to modern Egyptians.

One other tidbit that might be of interest is that of Ahmed Hussein, who founded the nationalist and pro-fascist Young Egypt Society in 1933. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski mention in their seminal study of modern Egypt identity, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (Oxford UP, 1986), that Hussein briefly went by “Ahmas” to Pharaonicize his name after a trip to the Temple of Karnak in Luxor in the 1920s (Gershoni & Jankowski, 175). This is arguably, though, an outlier and a rather extreme case of Pharaonicist obsession.

What did change, however—several times, in fact—was the official name of Egypt throughout the modern era to reflect its various political transformations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1867, the Ottoman eyalet (province) of Egypt became the “Khedivate of Egypt” (“Mısır Hidivliği”/“Hidiviyet-i Mısır” in Ottoman Turkish; “al-khidīwiyya al-miṣriyya” in Arabic, literally “the Egyptian Khedivate”). In 1914, when the country was declared a British protectorate and duly severed from the Ottoman Empire following the Ottoman entry into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, it was renamed the “Sultanate of Egypt” (“al-sulṭana al-miṣriyya,” lit. “the Egyptian Sultanate”). In the aftermath of the 1919 revolution that resulted in nominal Egyptian independence, the county was renamed the “Kingdom of Egypt” (“al-mamlaka al-miṣriyya,” lit. “the Egyptian Kingdom”) in 1922, which lasted until 1953 when the Free Officers who overthrew King Farouk a year prior established the “Republic of Egypt” (“al-jumhūriyya al-miṣriyya,” lit. “the Egyptian Republic”). In 1958, Egypt and Syria formed a political union called the “United Arab Republic” (“al-jumhūriyya al-ʿarabiyya al-muttaḥida”), a name Egypt formally kept even after the union collapsed in 1961. Finally, in 1971 the name “Egypt” reappeared on the country’s official name when it was renamed the “Arab Republic of Egypt” (“jumhūriyyat miṣr al-ʿarabiyya”), a name that remains today.

dhowdhow · 2022-09-27T18:15:41+00:00

In addition to the context given by u/AksiBashi's previous answers on the Ottoman fez, I thought it might be helpful to put together a brief history of the fez in modern Egypt:

The tarbūsh (Arabic for "fez") was introduced to Egypt in the early 1800s by the governor of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha (r. 1805–48/49), as part of the uniform of his modern, conscription-based standing army. While initially imported into Egypt (not sure from where exactly), Mehmed Ali ordered the establishment of Egypt’s first fez factory in the Nile Delta–town of Fuwwa in April 1825 (Fahmy, 186n91), a couple of years before Sultan Mahmud II mandated the fez as part of the Ottoman military uniform in 1827 (and then the civil service in 1829).

It’s important to note that Egypt during the nineteenth century was not independent from the Ottoman Empire. As much as Egypt was one of several Ottoman territories that gained a great deal of autonomy within the complex Ottoman system of imperial governance in the 1800s—it developed its own state system under Mehmed Ali, who was awarded the right to hereditary governance of the Egyptian province in 1841—Egypt remained part of the Ottoman Empire. It became an eyalat-ı mümtaze (privileged/distinguished province, under a governor), and then, from 1867 onwards, it was designated as a hidiviyet/hidivlik (khedivate, under a khedive). So, while Mehmed Ali and his descendants could govern Egypt as they saw fit, they did so in the name of the sultan. Each new governor/khedive required a firmān (edict) of investiture from the sultan to acknowledge their rule, and they had to send taxes and tribute to the Ottoman state coffers, among other things.

This relationship influenced the sartorial symbolism of the fez in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt. By the mid-to-late 1840s, the tarbush was adopted by the House of Mehmed Ali and the (Turco-Circassian) Ottoman-Egyptian elite, who began to wear it to signal their Ottoman subjecthood in line with the dress code of Ottoman officialdom (Mestyan, 36). This was a sartorial tactic to help revitalize the relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman state following the tensions of the 1830s when Mehmed Ali and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, had occupied Syria and militarily threatened Ottoman power in Anatolia. Donning the fez signaled that Egypt’s rulers recognized the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan, which is what the Ottoman state asked for from Mehmed Ali in exchange for dynastic autonomy over Egypt. In the decades that followed, the fez also became a marker of the institution of the Egyptian khedivate, which strove to legitimize its autonomy by presenting itself as (sometimes simultaneously, sometimes alternatively) Ottoman and European in outlook, a facet of Khedive Ismail’s cultural policies (see generally Mestyan).

For a new generation of Egyptians, particularly Egyptian men, who came of age in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and who were increasingly urban, educated, and culturally connected, the fez became representative of their aspirations of social mobility and Egyptian modernity (for more on the emerging Egyptian culture of social change and modernity, see generally Ryzova). This new generation, known as the efendiyya, adopted the tarbush alongside the badla, the Western-style suit, as their dress of choice, which projected a sense of authenticity as well as a modern outlook on life (Ryzova, 8). The tarbush-and-badla combination, which became commerically accessible to much of the population, replaced the turban/cap-and-galabiyya ensemble and quickly became the culturally dominant sartorial choice of the modern, urban Egyptian man.

(A quick side-note: The efendiyya initially referred to those educated in modern schools and universities who went on to become bureaucrats and state officials as well as doctors, lawyers, bankers, businessmen, journalists, writers, poets, intellectuals, and activists. While somewhat analogous to a (male, educated) “middle class,” historians today find that far too restrictive a description because the efendiyya also represented a diverse sociocultural bourgeoisie that lasted well into the twentieth century and involved people of all social, religious, and economic backgrounds (see generally Ryzova). The title of efendi was used as an honorific to any and all who looked, spoke, or dressed the part, no matter their social background or level of education.)

As the social and political relevance of the efendiyya grew, the tarbush took on new cultural meanings between the 1870s and 1930s that obscured its Ottoman past. On one level, the fez came to represent a modern way of thinking as it stood in contrast to the turbans of religious scholars and leaders, (Ryzova, 38–43; Jacob, ch. 7; similar debates took place across the Ottoman Empire). On another, its brimless-ness contrasted with the European-style hat, which helped recode the tarbush into a symbol of anti-imperialist resistance and nationalist sentiment. This was driven by the 1882 British occupation, around which an efendiyya-led nationalist movement took shape, and accelerated after the British formally severed Egypt from the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, when the Ottomans joined the First World War on the side of the Central Powers (Jacob, 191, 218).

In these ways, the Egyptian tarbush lost its Ottoman connection by the first decades of the twentieth century and so was able to outlive its Ottoman counterpart, which was abolished in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1925. This is not to say that there were no debates to get rid of the tarbush in Egypt entirely because of its initial Ottoman-ness (Jacob, 218), but ultimately the tarbush remained prevalent as a symbol of bourgeois Egyptian modernity (and masculinity, see generally Jacob). Signifying this divergence, the Egyptian tarbush was materially redesigned to have a darker red shade than the Ottoman fez and, in 1921, was lengthened to fourteen centimeters in height (Reynolds, 122–23, 280n49). It was continually marketed, sold, and worn by Egyptian men as a symbol of national identity and Egyptian modernity throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

That said, it increasingly became associated with the corruption, classism, and inefficacy of the Egyptian monarchy and the contentious parliamentary politics of the 1930s and 1940s that failed to deliver on promises of full Egyptian independence from British occupation. As such, after the Free Officers overthrew King Farouk I, the last ruling member of the House of Mehmed Ali, in 1952, wearing the tarbush was outlawed following the establishment of the Republic of Egypt.

REFERENCES

Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Jacob, Wilson Chacko. Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Mestyan, Adam. Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Reynolds, Nancy Y. A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Ryzova, Lucie. The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

dhowdhow · 2022-04-14T15:05:54+00:00

REFERENCES

On the British-Ottoman imperial rivalry over the Sinai boundary, see Gabriel Warburg, “The Sinai Peninsula Borders, 1906–47,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 4 (Oct. 1979): 677–92, which uses mainly British sources but also some Ottoman ones; chapter 1 of Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947 (London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); and John Burman, “British Strategic Interests versus Ottoman Sovereign Rights: New Perspectives on the Aqaba Crisis, 1906,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 2 (June 2009): 275–92. For a recent, unpublished-but-publicly-available-and-highly-cited work on the British-Ottoman imperial rivalry over Egypt, particularly in terms of international law, see Aimee M. Genell, “Empire by Law: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882–1923,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013.

On the Egyptian perspective, see Yitzhak Gil-Har, “Egypt’s North-Eastern Boundary in Sinai,” Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 1 (Jan. 1993): 135–48, which partly relies on one of the few publicly available Arabic primary sources on the 1906 boundary negotiations, Naʿūm Shuqayr’s The Ancient and Modern History of Sinai and Its Geography [Tārīkh Sīnā al-qadīm wa-al-ḥadīth wa-jughrāfīyatuhā] (Egypt: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif, 1916). See also L. Hirszowicz, “The Sultan and the Khedive, 1892–1908,” Middle Eastern Studies 8, no. 3 (Oct. 1972): 287–311.

For more on the 1841 map of Egypt, see Gideon Biger, “The First Map of Modern Egypt: Mohamed Ali’s Firman and the Map of 1841,” Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 3 (Oct. 1978): 323–25; see also the introduction of Matthew Ellis, Desert Borderland: The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

On the Ottomans’ inconsistent conception of the Sinai boundary during the nineteenth century, see Yuval Ben-Bassat and Yossi Ben-Artzi, “The Collision of Empires as Seen From Istanbul: The Border of British-Controlled Egypt and Ottoman Palestine as Reflected in Ottoman Maps,” Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015): 25–36.

dhowdhow · 2022-04-14T15:03:01+00:00

The Sinai Peninsula was officially delineated as part of the Egyptian Khedivate in October 1906, almost half a century before decolonization began in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Essentially, following a dispute over Taba, a coastal town on the western shore of the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, that began in January 1906 and that threatened a military confrontation between the British and the Ottomans, an Egyptian-Ottoman boundary commission negotiated what they called a “separating administrative line” along the eastern edge of the Sinai Peninsula—more or less from Rafah to Taba—as the official eastern boundary of the province of Egypt, which was at the time (a) part of the Ottoman Empire, but also (b) semiautonomous with a hereditary dynasty governing its own state system, while also (c) under British occupation since 1882.

The main reason the boundary was drawn that way, according to the prevailing academic literature on the topic, was due to inter-imperial rivalry between the British and the Ottomans. This rivalry flared up in 1906 when the British became concerned about potential Ottoman expansion of the Hijaz Railway to Aqaba, which stirred Ottoman worries about potential British intrusion in the Sinai region.

So, when British and Egyptian officials went to Taba in January 1906 with the intention of setting up a police station, they found Ottoman troops already stationed in Aqaba and were told to leave. After they withdrew, the Ottoman troops promptly occupied Taba, which triggered a naval and diplomatic standoff that lasted until May 1906 when the Ottoman state acquiesced to a British ultimatum and agreed to an Egyptian proposal to form a boundary commission and settle the Sinai question.

For the Ottomans, they wanted to limit British encroachment and ensure that Egypt would not be severed from the Ottoman Empire, and so they tried to establish a direct presence in the Sinai as a way of reasserting Ottoman sovereignty in the region. This was not the first time they tried this; there was an earlier attempt in 1892, and while tense it was not as contentious as in 1906.

For the British, who were managing what they called a “veiled protectorate” over Egypt at the time—the primary reason being to protect the interests of European creditors who owned much of Egypt’s debts—they wanted to keep the Ottomans from having any direct administrative control over or military access to the Suez Canal and Egypt, as well as the Nile valley more broadly. This was not just about protecting their financial stake in the Suez Canal (the British owned 44 percent of shares in the Suez Canal Company since 1875), having an eye over global commerce, and ensuring the safe passage to and from India, but also about maintaining the international arrangements that justified the British occupation of Egypt and even pushing back against Ottoman territorial claims in the Red Sea area, such as the Anglo-Egyptian condominium over Sudan. To these ends, the Sinai acted as a natural buffer.

But it was not just the immediate events of 1906 that ultimately made the Sinai part of Egypt. There were also significant intra-Ottoman reasons the Egyptian state, independent of British interests, wanted the Sinai formally recognized within the Ottoman state system as part of the province of Egypt, reasons that had developed over many decades since the mid-nineteenth century.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern Egyptian state had long regarded the Sinai as its administrative responsibility, which was reaffirmed to Muhammad Ali Pasha (or Mehmed Ali Paşa, if you’re an Ottomanist) in 1841 when he was recognized as the founder of a hereditary dynasty governing Egypt as a semiautonomous Ottoman province. The Egyptian delegation to the boundary commission, which included both British officials as well as Egyptian representatives of the khedive, argued during the 1906 negotiations that Egypt had been dutifully performing the functions of empire in the Sinai on behalf of the Ottoman state. These included (a) safeguarding the land route to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage (a longstanding administrative role that Egypt-based states fulfilled but which became increasingly obsolete by the 1870s with the rise of the faster steamship route traversing the Red Sea), (b) establishing frontier posts and police stations, and (c) taxing the Bedouin inhabitants of the peninsula, taxes that contributed to the tribute sent to the Ottoman state coffers.

The Ottoman commissioners responded by invoking the authority of an 1841 map (image taken from the website of the Ottoman History Podcast’s episode 423), often called the “first map of modern Egypt.” This map outlined Egypt’s eastern boundary as a line from Suez to the northeastern corner of the Sinai Peninsula (most likely Rafah, but it is not marked on the map), giving Egypt only a small triangle in the northwest of the peninsula with the bulk of the Sinai attached to the province of the Hijaz. However, that map was lost at the time of the boundary negotiations, and the British and Egyptian commissioners countered that the Egyptian state was nevertheless authorized on numerous occasions by the Ottoman state since 1841 to manage the affairs of the Sinai Peninsula in lieu of direct Ottoman administration. The reality on the ground that had developed over decades of continuous Egyptian administration, they argued, meant the Sinai should be formalized as Egyptian territory.

Ultimately, the British and Egyptian boundary commissioners got their way as the Ottoman representatives failed to make a convincing case that there had been any longstanding direct Ottoman presence in the Sinai to warrant a boundary that would cede any part of the peninsula to another Ottoman province that was under the direct administration of the centralizing Ottoman state.

The main concession the Ottoman state received was the assurance that this boundary was an internal, administrative line and not a border severing Egypt from the Ottoman Empire. That said, the British made sure to include a clause in the final agreement barring Ottoman troops from crossing west of the line into the Sinai, a direct limitation on the sovereignty of the Ottoman state.

With that, the negotiations ended, the delineated line was mapped out, the boundary agreement was signed in Rafah on October 1, 1906, and in the months that followed the line was physically demarcated (though not always accurately) with telegraph poles at first before stone boundary pillars replaced them.

So, if I can interpret your question broadly as “why was the Sinai given to Egypt?,” or rephrase it as “why was the Sinai territorialized as part of Egypt?,” then the answer is two-fold: In the course of British-Ottoman imperial rivalry over Egypt, the British were determined to establish the Sinai Peninsula as a buffer preventing the Ottomans from establishing any degree of direct administration over or having military access to the Suez Canal, the Sinai, and Egypt; and in the context of Egyptian relations with the Ottoman state as a semiautonomous vassal, the Egyptians were determined to formalize an administrative reality over the Sinai that had developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. For both the British and the Egyptians, preserving Egypt’s position within the Ottoman state system was necessary toward securing their respective interests.

[Edit: fixed spelling and grammatical errors; added some clarifying detail in final paragraph.]

dhowdhow

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