The British Occupation of Egypt and the Suez Canal

The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 was supposed to be temporary, and it lasted seventy-four years. The reason for the longevity is not difficult to identify: the Suez Canal was the artery of the British Empire, and Egypt sat on it. The reason for the embarrassment is also not difficult to identify: by 1956, when the occupation finally ended, it had cost Britain more than it could afford and given Egypt more than Britain could control. The gap between British intentions in 1882 and imperial outcomes in 1956 is, in miniature, the story of the empire as a whole.

The Strategic Importance of the Suez Canal

The Suez Canal, opened in November 1869, was the strategic artery of the British Empire. The waterway, which joined the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, was conceived by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps and built largely with French and Egyptian capital. By the 1880s, more than 80 percent of the ships using the canal were British, and the British government had become the largest single shareholder in the Suez Canal Company. The canal was considered so important that the prime minister Benjamin Disraeli purchased the Khedive Ismail’s 44 percent share in 1875 with a £4 million loan from the Rothschilds, securing for Britain a controlling interest. Lord Derby, the foreign secretary, remarked that it was “a very large order” — but he signed.

The defence of the canal was the central reason for the British invasion of 1882. As the naval theorist Sir John Colomb put it in 1884, “the canal became, in effect, a part of the highway between Great Britain and India, and its integrity must be preserved at any cost.” That cost, ultimately, was paid in the humiliation of Suez.

The Egyptian Crisis of 1881–1882

The occupation was precipitated by a financial and political crisis in Egypt. The Khedive Ismail had been forced to abdicate in 1879 in favour of his son Tewfik, and the new ruler was immediately challenged by a nationalist movement under Colonel Ahmed Urabi. The Urabi Revolt, which combined army officers, landowners, and journalists, demanded constitutional government and an end to European financial control. The British and French governments, alarmed by the collapse of Egyptian credit and the possibility of an Egyptian default on its debts, prepared to intervene.

The British naval bombardment of Alexandria on 11 July 1882 was followed by the landing of an expeditionary force under General Garnet Wolseley, which defeated Urabi at the Battle of Tel El Kebir on 13 September 1882. The ease of the victory — fewer than 60 British dead — disguised the political consequences. As Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot has shown in her biography of Urabi, the bombardment of Alexandria was the first modern European assault on an Arab capital, and it set the tone for a generation of British-Egyptian mistrust.

The British Administration under Lord Cromer

The British administration of Egypt was headed by the consul-general, a position dominated for more than two decades by Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer, who served from 1883 to 1907. Cromer’s regime stabilised the Egyptian finances, constructed the Aswan Dam (completed 1902), expanded irrigation, and modernised the legal and administrative systems. It did so without the formal annexation of Egypt, which remained nominally an Ottoman dependency.

Cromer was a remarkable man — and, in the judgment of the historian Roger Owen, an unsentimental one. His private correspondence, much of it later published in the Modern Egypt (1908) papers, was candid about what he saw as the incapacity of Egyptians for self-government. The Khedive Abbas II complained in 1894 that Cromer treated him as “a clerk, not a sovereign.” The complaint was, in short, accurate; Cromer ran Egypt as a personal fief.

The British also extended their control to the Sudan, which had fallen under the rule of the Mahdi, the leader of an Islamic revolt. The 1885 death of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum was the most traumatic single event of Cromer’s early years, and the reconquest of the Sudan was completed only at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898.

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899 established joint British-Egyptian sovereignty over the Sudan, although in practice the territory was governed by the British. The Sudan became an important training ground for officers who would later serve the British Indian Army, and a major producer of cotton, but the long-standing conflict between Egyptian and British interests in the region was never resolved. The 1924 assassination of the governor-general Sir Lee Stack in Cairo led to a unilateral British withdrawal from the Egyptian administration of the Sudan, and the territory remained a British responsibility until it became independent in 1956.

The Move Toward Egyptian Independence

The early twentieth century saw the growth of Egyptian nationalism, organised through the Wafd Party led by Saad Zaghlul. The 1919 Revolution, which followed the British deportation of Zaghlul, paralysed the country and forced London to negotiate. In February 1922, the British government unilaterally recognised Egyptian independence, although it retained control over the canal zone, the Sudan, and the right to defend Egypt against foreign attack. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 confirmed the continuing British military presence in the canal zone until 1956, while allowing for the restoration of the Egyptian constitution.

The arrangement satisfied neither Egyptian nationalists nor British imperial strategists. Zaghlul had been right, in 1919, to insist that nominal independence without sovereignty over the canal was no independence at all. By 1952, when the Free Officers under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew King Farouk, the question had become whether Egypt would pursue real independence by negotiation or by force.

The Suez Crisis of 1956

The 1956 Suez Crisis marked the end of British influence in Egypt. The nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company by President Nasser on 26 July 1956, and the subsequent British and French military intervention, ended in humiliating retreat under American financial pressure. The crisis, which was closely linked to Nasser’s support for Algerian independence and to American anger at the Anglo-French intervention, marked the moment at which Britain ceased to act as a world power.

The British prime minister Anthony Eden, already ill, had convinced himself that Nasser was a second Mussolini. He was not — Nasser was a nationalist of a different kind — and the collusive agreement with France and Israel produced, in the judgment of D. R. Thorpe’s biography of Eden, one of the worst miscalculations in modern British foreign policy. The last British troops left the canal zone in April 1956, before the crisis began, and the episode was a central event in the decline and legacy of the British Empire.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Egypt has three main traditions. The “official” or conservative line, represented by John Marlow’s Anglo-Egyptian Relations (1954) and the older chapters of P. J. Vatikiotis’s The History of Egypt (1969), treated the occupation as a reluctant burden. The nationalist and Marxist tradition, from Jamal Hamdan’s The Political and Social Thought of Ahmad Urabi (1959) to later Egyptian historians, treated it as straightforward colonial domination. The revisionist school, exemplified by Roger Owen’s Cotton and the Egyptian Economy (1969) and Afaf Marsot’s Egypt’s Liberal Experiment (1977), has tried to give a more measured picture, in which British officials were a great deal more competent than the nationalist tradition allowed and a great deal less beneficent than the official tradition suggested.

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