Egypt and British Influence in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Britain’s occupation of Egypt was an imperial act that nobody in Whitehall quite intended and that no Egyptian ever forgave. The conventional view, that the British reluctantly assumed control of Egypt in 1882 to protect the Suez Canal, holds up to scrutiny only in a thin sense: they were protecting the canal, certainly, but the protection lasted three times as long as anyone planned for, cost several times as much as anyone budgeted for, and produced a series of crises — Khartoum, the 1919 Revolution, Suez — that shook the British Empire. The more interesting question is not why Britain occupied Egypt, but why it stayed.

The Opening of the Suez Canal

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the strategic importance of Egypt. The canal, constructed by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps with the support of the Egyptian Khedive Ismail, dramatically reduced the sailing time between Britain and India. Within a decade, the canal carried more than 80 percent of British shipping to the East, and the British government purchased the Khedive’s 44 percent share in 1875 for £4 million, financed by a loan from Lionel de Rothschild. The transaction was decisive, and the British knew it: Lord Derby, the foreign secretary, wrote that the canal was “the most important event of the century in the commercial history of the world.”

The canal made Egypt the strategic pivot of the British Empire, and the defence of the canal route dominated British military planning until 1956. As the strategic writer Halford Mackinder observed in 1904, “the British Isles lie off the shore of the Eurasian landmass, and the fate of the Nile valley and the routes to India is the fate of the empire.”

The British Occupation of Egypt

The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 was precipitated by the political and financial crisis of the Egyptian government. The Khedive Tewfik, who had succeeded his father Ismail, faced a nationalist revolt led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi. The British government, concerned about the security of the Suez Canal and the stability of the Egyptian government, dispatched a military expedition that defeated Urabi’s forces at the Battle of Tel El Kebir on 13 September 1882.

The British occupation was at first declared a temporary measure, but the British refused to leave even after a Liberal government came to office in 1880. The consul-general Lord Cromer, who served from 1883 to 1907, presided over a long period of reform and modernisation that built the foundations of the modern Egyptian state. Cromer was, in his own mind, a benevolent autocrat; in the judgment of his Egyptian subjects, he was a foreigner who had reduced the Khedive to a cipher. As Cromer’s private correspondence, much of it published in Modern Egypt (1908), reveals, he regarded Egyptian self-government as a project for a generation or two hence. The Egyptians had other views.

The Anglo-Egyptian Conquest of the Sudan

The British occupation of Egypt led directly to the conquest of the Sudan, which had been in revolt against Egyptian rule since 1881 under the leadership of Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi. The death of General Charles Gordon at the fall of Khartoum on 26 January 1885 was the most traumatic single event of late-Victorian imperialism. As Queen Victoria wrote in her journal, “to fall into the hands of these horrible Mahdists is too dreadful.” Gladstone’s refusal to relieve Gordon remains the canonical example of a Liberal government failing to commit to a military adventure it had not planned.

The reconquest of the Sudan, completed at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, brought the territory under joint Anglo-Egyptian control. The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement of 1899 formalised the arrangement, although in practice the Sudan was governed by the British. The Sudan remained under joint sovereignty until it became independent on 1 January 1956, three months before the end of the British occupation of Egypt itself.

The Egyptian Independence Movement

The Egyptian independence movement of the early twentieth century challenged British rule. The 1919 Revolution, led by Saad Zaghlul and the Wafd Party, was a major turning point. The British government recognised Egyptian independence in February 1922, but retained significant control over the Suez Canal and the Sudan. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 regularised the British military presence in the canal zone, and the 1923 Egyptian Constitution established a parliamentary system dominated by the Wafd. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, led by the Free Officers under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, brought the question of the British presence in the canal zone to a head.

Zaghlul had been correct, in 1919, to insist that nominal independence without sovereignty over the canal was no independence at all. The Wafd, and the broader nationalist movement it represented, made the canal a symbol; the British, in turn, treated it as a fact of imperial geography. The 1936 treaty was an attempt to bracket the disagreement; it was always going to fail.

The Suez Crisis of 1956

The Suez Crisis was the most dramatic event in the British presence 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, in which the British prime minister Anthony Eden colluded with France and Israel against Egypt, marked the moment at which Britain ceased to act as an independent world power. The 1956 crisis also accelerated the decolonisation of the wider Middle East, encouraging the British government to accept the loss of the canal zone, the Sudan, and eventually the Gulf.

Keith Kyle’s Suez (1991) is the indispensable narrative, and his judgment — that Eden “lost his nerve and then his country” — has held up. Wm. Roger Louis’s The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951 (1984) showed how thoroughly the British had lost the region before 1956; Suez was the symptom rather than the cause.

The End of British Influence

The British withdrawal from Egypt was completed by the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1954, which set a timetable for the evacuation of the canal zone. The last British troops left the canal zone in April 1956, before the crisis began, and the aftermath of the Suez Crisis only confirmed the end of British influence. The British government’s actions in 1956 are now widely seen as a pivotal moment in the decline of the British Empire, and the episode is regularly cited as a case study in imperial overreach. Egypt turned increasingly to the Soviet Union for support, and the country became a central actor in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Egypt has shifted decisively. The early “official” accounts of Lord Cromer himself, and the apologetic histories of the 1950s, have been displaced by the work of Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Roger Owen, and Juan Cole, who took the Egyptian side seriously as a political movement. The debates now concern less whether the occupation was benevolent and more how much the British modernised the Egyptian state — Owen’s Cotton and the Egyptian Economy (1969) is the standard answer — and how far Egyptian nationalism was a reaction to British rule rather than a force in its own right.

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