This paper examines the establishment of the British protectorate in Egypt in December 1914 and its international repercussions through the British unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922. The Protectorate formally incorporated Egypt into the British Empire and unilaterally severed the legal relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt – ending almost 400 years of Ottoman rule in Egypt. “Independence” in 1922 paradoxically removed Egypt from the sphere of international politics and legal contest and publicity and brought Egypt under more direct British control. By 1922 British imperial practices were remarkably consistent across the Middle East after World War I, despite the variation of political forms through which Britain exercised influence. Throughout the Middle East, British imperial control was distinguished by a client-state relationship, where formal sovereignty existed outside of the British imperial system, but at the time British advisors administered critical state affairs. This paper argues that British imperial practices in the Middle East were not worked out after World War I. Instead they were the result of a sustained debate between the British and Ottoman Empires from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War I. Ottoman and British administrators debated and exchanged theories of imperial governance throughout the nineteenth century. The British occupation of Ottoman-Egypt (1882-1914) was decisive in this exchange. The occupation of Egypt was an experiment in administration, where legal justifications for the occupation demanded the retention of Ottoman political and legal institutions. At the same time, Britain’s occupation policies allowed the Ottoman Empire to preserve political control of Egypt, satisfying the chief foreign policy goal of the Hamidian regime (1876-1908/9) and that of the Committee of Union and Progress (1908-1918): preservation of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. This paper argues that end result of this experiment in hybrid sovereignty was a new model of imperial rule that the British exported into former Ottoman territories in the Middle East after the First World War, but one that rather critically retained Ottoman features.