More than Officers and Officials: Britons in Occupied Egypt, 1882-1922 Studies of the British in Egypt during the British occupation (1882-1922) have generally focused on the lives and exploits of the upper and middle class Britons who served in the military or in the civil service. Drawing from private papers, census data, court archives and business records, this paper describes the socio-economic space inhabited by non-official upper and middle class Britons as well as those from the lower classes within the hierarchical structure of Egypt’s British community. It discusses the income levels of British upper middle class lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, bankers, businessmen, clergymen and missionaries; lower class clerks, artisans and policemen; and within the lower class, working class tradesmen, railway workers and domestic servants in the context of both their Egyptian and British socio-economic environment. The research also seeks to illuminate some of the hardship, inequality and snobbery that working class Britons encountered in Egypt. Throughout the analysis, comparisons between the income levels for similar occupations of the British in Egypt and their counterparts in Britain are used to discern possible motivations for their working abroad. Since little research has been done regarding the non-elite Britons in Egypt during the occupation and particularly concerning those from the lower classes, this effort aims to be a useful contribution to knowledge of British imperial history and the colonial experience.

In the 1894 annual report to the British government on the administration of Egypt, Lord Cromer, the consul-general, related that many Egyptians had expressed to him repeatedly their great concern that levels of alcohol consumption were on the rise. During the remainder of his tenure in Egypt, Lord Cromer lamented in his annual reports that the increase in alcohol sales and consumption caused considerable discord, particularly in rural areas. Newspapers regularly printed criticism of the spread of alcohol throughout Egypt under British rule, and those Egyptians who wished to take a more active role in bringing about the ban of intoxicants began to organize. The Egyptian Temperance Association was founded in 1905 by Ahmad Ghalwash, and under the royal patronage of Prince Omar Toussoun, the ranks of the Association swelled with members from across the country as branches were founded in the major cities and larger towns. Like their counterparts across the globe, Egyptian social reformers and prohibitionists hailed the ratification of the 18th amendment to the Constitution of the United States in January 1919 as a great victory in the international war on alcohol. In this paper, I will address the following questions: Who were the Egyptian prohibitionists? What was behind the rise in alcohol consumption according to the prohibitionists? What lessons, if any, did Egyptian prohibitionists draw from the American experience in their drive to see the production and consumption of alcohol banned in Egypt? Of particular interest is the way in which the prohibitionists marshaled arguments blending religious and scientific language to show the pernicious social and spiritual effects of alcohol. Egyptian supporters of the temperance movement translated articles and speeches of noted American and British prohibitionists into Arabic in hopes of spreading their message and garnering further support for the legal ban on intoxicating beverages. My work draws upon the popular Arabic language press, reports from the Egyptian Temperance Association, as well as government publications including annual reports from the departments of Health, the Interior, and Consul-General. This paper hopes to contribute to the analysis of Egyptian reactions to and participation in international debates about public morality and health.

This paper will examine the role of external dynamics in the recreation of Dinshway as an Egyptian national myth. These external dynamics include British domestic politics and the Liberal Party’s historic split over the Irish question, which resulted in a fundamental divide over its interpretation of Dinshway. While New Liberals in Parliament argued that the uprising was a sign that the British should help the Egyptians develop self-governing institutions and evacuate as soon as possible, the Liberal Imperialists argued that Dinshway was a reflection of a backward religious sentiment as opposed to a progressive nationalist sentiment. This disagreement fueled heated debates in Parliament over how the British should respond to Dinshway, and these arguments were echoed outside of Parliament by anti-imperialists such as Wilfred Blunt and George Bernard Shaw. This paper will examine these debates which took place in London and their role in the reinterpretation of Dinshway as a nationalist revolt. I argue that the reconstruction of Dinshway was a dialectic involving both the British and the Egyptians, and at the heart of this dialectic was a fundamental disagreement over the British experience with Irish nationalism – an experience which inevitably shaped British perceptions of colonial uprisings in the early twentieth century.

As Fischer Tinè pointed out, “ poor whites or ‘low Europeans’, as they were called in contemporary administrative discourse, generally represented a serious menace to the legitimacy of colonial rule’. […] According to ethnic or ‘civilisational’ criteria, the groups in question were part of the ruling race and yet they figured among the ‘depressed and downtrodden’ in terms of class and hence of economic and political power” ( Fischer Tinè, 2003, p.164-5 ) This was all the more true for sex workers, as sex and gender constituted powerful facets of the bio-political power which became a distinctive feature of late Victorian empire and gender specific bourgeois roles and notions of decorum were adopted as standard of civilization and racial superiority. While professional sex workers were considered as socially dangerous and disruptive in the metropolitan context as well, in the colony their existence was even more problematic, as constantly calling into question notion of race purity and superiority the Imperial enterprise increasingly came to repose on towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. The embarrass felt by imperial authorities and middle class reformers for the presence of such liminal characters, unaccompanied women roaming the world in search of a living, was but the imperial dimension of the veritable social hysteria which originated around the so-called “White-Slave Trade”, the symptom of a more profound social and political crisis. After a brief analysis of the emergence of metropolitan obsession around the so-called “White Slave”, this paper will explore the colonial dimension of social purity, to show how a specific category of subaltern social actors, foreign prostitutes and ‘fallen’ women in Cairo, came to play a very important role in the preservation of besieged category of colonizers’ racial and civilizational superiority, through the creation of a specific apparatus of coercion, control and, possibly, regeneration managed by British social purity and feminist movements – namely the NVA – National Vigilance Association and the AMSH, Association for Moral and Social Hygiene – in Cairo between the I and the II World War.