Recent historiography of the 1919 revolution has suggested that the revolution was sparked not just by the material deprivation wrought by the First World War, but by the influx of new political ideas dreamt elsewhere that were transmitted from various metropoles to Egypt. According to these putatively ‘global’ accounts, ideas about emancipation were enthusiastically received from abroad by Egyptians rather than produced at home, in the years prior to and during the momentous uprisings of 1919. In the liberal version, Egyptian nationalists are inflamed by Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about self-determination; in the leftist version, Egypt is inspired by a global Leninism. Yet in charting these two paths, scholars suggest that anti-colonialism belongs to the intellectual genealogy of European enlightenment, granted as yet another gift from the metropole to the colonies. These global histories, I argue, reproduce the historicist thinking that was once central to imperial rule itself. Unwittingly, scholars have rehearsed a colonial logic of deferral, in which every new Egyptian mobilization represented the imitation of a distinctly European past, one that Egyptians were allegedly not yet ready to inhabit. My paper proposes that the question of why thousands of people become willing to die and to kill in defence of abstract ideas like the nation requires a new kind of intellectual history. This question cannot be answered through accounts that assume Western political theory had already identified, and even resolved, the main philosophical problems in politics—and that Egyptians might at best replicate them. I argue that we must move away from Wilson and Lenin and instead study the ephemeral and fragmentary texts of political practice used in the Egyptian revolution itself. Only by doing so can we transcend the racialized claims of the colonial archive that insisted Egyptians were incapable of thinking and behaving politically. Drawing upon revolutionary pamphlets, in my paper I propose a way to move beyond diffusionist models, where intellectuals imagine de-colonial futures and subalterns provide the manpower to realize them, and instead reconstruct the ideational and material conditions that made the choice to protest (or not) inevitable.

It is fashionable to emphasize how the internet has enabled the rapid diffusion of protest. This paper explores to what extent telegraph, postal, railway, and road networks shaped protest diffusion in the early twentieth century. The argument is illustrated with the case of Egypt during the 1919 Revolution, when anti-British protests broke out across the country in just a few days. Matching event data derived from Arabic-language newspapers and colonial security reports with geo-referenced maps, the paper shows how the country's communications infrastructure facilitated the rapid spread of protest in a semi-agrarian context characterized by political disorganization. Protest also diffused faster to areas with more students. These findings point to the enduring role of communications infrastructure in processes of protest diffusion -- and highlight the potential uses of spatial data for historical sociology.

Over the past three decades or so, historical treatments of Egypt’s 1919 Revolt have overwhelmingly taken up subalternist critiques of nationalism as a shared point of departure. From this perspective, urban and rural actors did not take part in the singular “national uprising.” Rather, the outbreak of protests in Cairo released a cascade of more localized struggles expressing the particular grievances and frustrations of distinct social groups. In the case of Egypt’s peasants, the particular targets of rural violence evince not an attachment to the abstract ideal of national independence but rather a sense of outrage about forms of privation experienced under the British regime of wartime labor conscription and requisition. The present paper explores a problem that such revisionist accounts of 1919 have largely ignored. In brief, the origins of an account that distances peasant insurgency from the politics of nationalism and attributes it instead to the mismanagement of wartime supply lie not in the theoretical innovations of subalternist historiography but in the colonial archive itself. To date, most existing Anglophone histories of the Revolt rely, albeit in varying degrees, on the voluminous reportage of the Milner Mission dispatched by the British government to investigate the causes of the uprising. Reading the Milner Mission’s findings in relation to a longer history of colonial discourse about the Egyptian countryside, the paper argues that the Milner Mission’s primary task was precisely to construct a narrative that would explain the magnitude of rural insurgency in 1919 while at the same time affirming the impossibility of genuine peasant politics. From the earliest moments of the British occupation in 1882, colonial rule had been premised on a fundamentally economistic understanding of Egyptian society that judged the country’s peasant majority as capable of no more and no less than a bare recognition of their own material interests. According to this logic, political discontent would vary in inverse proportion to the country’s economic prosperity, and peasants were unable to grasp political concepts that did not pertain directly to their immediate economic experience. From this vantage, the Mission’s emphasis on the bungling of wartime supply attributed the explosion of peasant animus to a set of exceptional circumstances. It thereby helped to ensure that the political order that followed Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922 would reproduce the structural denial of rural politics that had been a defining feature of colonial rule for four decades.

The years after World War One were marked by a crisis in the organization of global capitalism. The breakdown of the international economic order raised questions in different corners of the world about the relationship between capitalism and empire, with several observers—from Lenin, to Wilson, to Schumpeter—contemplating what it would mean for empire to cease being the main political framework for the management of the global economy. At the same time, with anti-colonial rebellions sweeping across key sites of the British Empire, the fate of the colonial world was on the agenda. Nationalist planners, entrepreneurs, and experts began to consider alternative ways of managing economies that were slowly being disarticulated from the world of British political hegemony—in short, how to organize capitalism after empire. This paper explores the history of economic thought in Egypt in the years immediately before and after the 1919 revolution. It examines various strands of economic nationalism— articulated by thinkers like Isma’il Sidki, Tal’at Harb, and Ibrahim Rashad—that aimed to promote a variety of projects from peasant uplift and reform, to agricultural cooperation, to nationally-scaled forms of economic regulation, to ideas about balanced agricultural and industrial development. In following these intellectual currents that developed as the country was gradually securing its nominal independence from the British Empire, this paper pursues two lines of inquiry. First, it seeks to situate these Egyptian thinkers in a wider global intellectual landscape that took shape in the aftermath of World War One, and in which thinkers began to consider how the political management of capitalist economies might look in a post-imperial world. Second, it investigates the changing relationship between the “political” and the “economic” in nationalist discourse as a growing cohort of economic nationalists began to envision and develop institutions to refashion economic life, which they saw as inseparable from any political project of genuine national independence.