Thomas Brassey, 2nd Earl Brassey (1904). " The Egyptian Question: Speech at Boscombe, November 10th, 1898.". Problems of Empire: 233–242. Wikidata Q107160423. {{ cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) An Egyptian Khedival Decree Establishes a European-Controlled Public Debt Administration, May 2, 1876,” in Akram Fouad Khater, Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East, 2nd edition (Wadsworth, 2011), pp. 40-3.

The 1956 Suez Crisis, when Britain along with France and Israel invaded Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal, was arguably one of the most significant episodes in post-1945 British history. Its outcome highlighted Britain’s declining status and confirmed it as a ‘second tier’ world power. The British occupied Egypt in 1882, but they did not annex it: a nominally independent Egyptian government continued to operate. But the country had already been colonized by the European powers whose influence had grown considerably since the mid-nineteenth century. When did Egypt become independent? Empire does not always imply direct rule. Imperial powers have extensive spheres of influence, in which their overwhelming power enables them to coerce or persuade countries to align their policies with the hegemon’s interests. The British occupied Egypt in 1882, but they did not annex it: a nominally independent Egyptian government continued to operate. But the country had already been colonized by the European powers whose influence had grown considerably since the mid-nineteenth century. In Egypt, one of the key vectors for this kind of informal colonialism was debt: the Egyptian government was heavily indebted to European banks and declared bankruptcy in 1875. This was a common pattern both in the nineteenth century and in more recent decades. In Egypt and in most other cases, the rhetoric justifying the situation has the dominant power “assisting” to develop the indebted country’s fiscal practices and its industry.Fahmy, Ziad (2011). Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 138–39. From the French to the British occupation (1798–1882) The French occupation and its consequences (1798–1805) Mowat, R. C. "From Liberalism to Imperialism: The Case of Egypt 1875-1887." Historical Journal 16#1 (1973): 109–24. online. The history of Egypt under the British lasted from 1882, when it was occupied by British forces during the Anglo-Egyptian War, until 1956 after the Suez Crisis, when the last British forces withdrew in accordance with the Anglo-Egyptian agreement of 1954. The first period of British rule (1882–1914) is often called the "veiled protectorate". During this time the Khedivate of Egypt remained an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, and the British occupation had no legal basis but constituted a de facto protectorate over the country. Egypt was thus not part of the British Empire. This state of affairs lasted until 1914 when the Ottoman Empire joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers and Britain declared a protectorate over Egypt. The ruling khedive, Abbas II, was deposed and his successor, Hussein Kamel, compelled to declare himself Sultan of Egypt independent of the Ottomans in December 1914. [1] Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade.

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. M.W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Until the Muslim conquest, great continuity had typified Egyptian rural life. Despite the incongruent ethnicity of successive ruling groups and the cosmopolitan nature of Egypt’s larger urban centres, the language and culture of the rural, agrarian masses—whose lives were largely measured by the annual rise and fall of the Nile River, with its annual inundation—had changed only marginally throughout the centuries. Following the conquests, both urban and rural culture began to adopt elements of Arab culture, and an Arabic vernacular eventually replaced the Egyptian language as the common means of spoken discourse. Moreover, since that time, Egypt’s history has been part of the broader Islamic world, and though Egyptians continued to be ruled by foreign elite—whether Arab, Kurdish, Circassian, or Turkish—the country’s cultural milieu remained predominantly Arab.

a b c d Mak, Lanver (2012). The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises 1882-1922. I.B.Tauris, pp. 87–89. ISBN 1848857098, 9781848857094. Google Books.

The ʻUrabi Revolt, a large military demonstration in September 1881, forced the Khedive Tewfiq to dismiss his Prime Minister and rule by decree. Many of the Europeans retreated to specially designed quarters suited for defense or heavily European-settled cities such as Alexandria. Alexandria in ruins after the British bombardment of 1882. On the whole, the rich and powerful ruling classes in Egypt accepted British rule. They often sent their children to be educated in Britain. They became lawyers and administrators on behalf of the British. The British did not try to interfere with the Islamic beliefs of the vast majority of Egyptians. Who colonized Egypt first? urn:lcp:colonisingegypt0000mitc:epub:ce56b0be-b602-4a7e-a8b5-bb3981a08bcb Foldoutcount 0 Identifier colonisingegypt0000mitc Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2n68x16v Invoice 1652 Isbn 0521334489 The Anglo-Egyptian War lasted from May to August 1882. The Illustrated London News provided sketches every week to keep British audiences updated. This image followed the final conflict at Tell el Kebir which killed 2,000 Egyptians and resulted in the surrender of Colonel Ahmed ‘Urabi’s army. As in iconographic propaganda by the pharaohs showing defeat of their foreign enemies, British forces were represented as victorious on the battlefield to justify their interference.Such a history involves the Western disciplines of political science and ethnography and the Egyptian government-sponsored translation into Arabic of works critical (purportedly for the sake of reform) of an endemic Egyptian “character” complete with exemplary models of European superiority. It raises questions of language and the written bases of the historical record. In “The Machinery of Truth,” Mitchell analyzes the attempts by Egyptian intellectuals both to accommodate and to resist the European linguistic invasion of Egyptian political reality. Husayn al-Marsafi’s Essay on Eight Words, published in October 1881, one month after the Urabi revolution, is the pretext for an interrogation into the controversial political lexicon of European nationalism, “nation, homeland, government, justice, oppression, politics, liberty and education,” (131) and its disputed deployment in new territorial configurations. Marsafi, writes Mitchell, Mitchell's effort at a theoretical construct is brilliant and his details are fascinating (especially the specific examples brought to light from the remoteness of a century ago, such as his descriptions of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the Lancaster method of teaching). But his effort is deeply wrong-headed, even perverse. Take the matter of Egyptians refusing to adopt the printing press until the nineteenth century. Mitchell dismisses the usual explanation, obscurantism and preservation of power. Instead, he recalls the high Muslim practice of text recitation and explication, then argues that this tradition made the prospect of uncontrolled publishing anathema to the scholars. Mitchell's is a brave attempt, but he fails on two counts. First, he has done no more than specify the reasons for obscurantism; second, not every piece of writing is a "text" requiring explanation and not all opposition came from scholars; the opposition to printing had far deeper and wider roots than Mitchell allows.