Egyptian demands for independence in 1919 fitted the ‘liberal moment’: the post-war vision of an international order founded on self-determination, representative government, and the end of empires. Nevertheless, Egypt remained bounded by a British legal geography, which in a positive sense meant liberal imperialists imagined Egypt following a path laid out by the ‘white’ settler colonies, including liberal-constitutional self-government. But there was also a negative application of liberal theory in colonial locations like Egypt, India, or Ireland, where nationalism was regarded not as liberal, but as an ethnic or religious extremism incapable of sustaining a pluralistic and thus representative form of government. This type of British response fractured the nationalists into republican, liberal, and conservative factions; as a result, even a ‘liberal’ constitution could deliver a government acceptable to conservative imperialists. The research focuses on the 1919 revolution and the subsequent processes that led to the formation of authoritarianism in the interwar period. I am bringing together sources from British and Egyptian archives, showing the relationship between the two, including a West-oriented liberal constitutionalism, but other conceptions of sovereignty at this important historical juncture, some according to the geopolitical model of the nation-state, but also references to medieval Islamic or Ottoman political ideology. I will introduce several research items and inspect them from these different perspectives. The research fits the panel theme by indicating the differing views on sovereignty held by Egyptian liberal, democratic nationalists, Egyptian liberal-constitutionalists, Egyptian conservative monarchists, and the British Foreign Office officials responsible for bringing these various groups into some sort of neo-colonial arrangement.